[HELP] Recommended Server Settings

Discussion in 'Bukkit Help' started by Sayshal, Dec 31, 2011.

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  1. Offline

    Sayshal

    Hello, I run a server and I'm hoping to expand a lot in the upcoming new year. Before I indulge into the main post I want to give you some background knowledge of myself and my server. I am a teenager, currently completing my High School years in Canada. I am talking Computer Sciences courses, so I am not completely computer-illiterate. I do not know how to program java, but I do understand a tad here and there.

    My server has been running since April 2011, and it's most ever online is 21. This is shameful in my eyes, as I want to make a popular gaming computer for my city/area. I am working up to get better server specs. Currently I host myself at home on a dedicated machine.

    Computer Specifics
    Complete over-detailed computer information can be found here.
    According to http://www.speedtest.net/
    Now that you have my server specs, lets get into detail about server-side. I run 29 plugins, with 7 worlds total.

    Plugin List:
    World Break-Down:
    LogBlock Information:
    MySQL is hosted on server computer.
    'world' and 'creative' are only worlds logged, logs are kept for 10 days.



    With the information supplied above, how many people should be able to connect, virtually lag-free at any given time. If you think I need a change (I dont want any 'Linux' stuff please, I'm sticking with Windows 7) then please comment!

    Question:
    How many people should be able to connect at any given time on my server?
     
  2. Offline

    TerrorBite

    The limiting factor is probably going to be your upload bandwidth. 2.5Mbps isn't bad, but with a number of active players you might find that activities like players logging in/out and teleporting cause lag spikes as many chunks are sent at once. Other things which are likely to bottleneck are RAM and hard disk performance, though these are probably not going to be so bad with your setup.
     
  3. Offline

    Sayshal

    I plan on doubling ram to 16GB before January 15th.
    As for my upload, not much I can do there at all. =/
     
  4. Offline

    Andreas Brisner

    "(I dont want any 'Linux' stuff please, I'm sticking with Windows 7)"
    Windows 7 isnt really a server OS. Windows generally uses alot of ram, you really should consider changing to a linux distro.

    You say we should tell you if we think you need a change, then you state that you dont want changes, thats pretty... contradicting.
     
  5. Offline

    Sayshal

    I meant changes as in plugins + server specs.

    My main issue with linux is, I tried linux and for the life of my couldnt set it up with my Airport Extreme properly (port forwarding etc)

    Before you bag on my Airport Extreme, it's my fathers and its out of my control. It works fine on Windows, but if you can honestly help me setup a linux distro such as CentOS, I'd gladly do it.

    Another concern for me, is how much my off-site admins love RDC. They use firefox/notepad++ to do all the stuff on the server-side instead of having to (assuming FTP)
    1. Download file you want to change
    2. Edit it
    3. Re-Upload (Sometimes needing restarts)
    4. Hope it works

    I am, as my post says in High School. I feel I know a few things about computers, but when it comes to linux-based systems I'm blind. That's why I prefer Windows.
     
  6. Offline

    Andreas Brisner

    I cant see why this would be different from linux to windows, port forwarding usually is port forwarding.

    I personally would recommend debian or ubuntu server.

    This is not how you need to do it. I can surely see the upside of connecting with RDP, since you get firefox and stuff.
    However, this also uses alot of ram.

    For editing files I basicly use nano (text editing) and SFTP. For download of plugins I normally use wget, though this isnt possible in all situations.

    Theres always a first. As I said before I can see the upside of windows, but theres really a downside too. Windows is primarily for desktop environments imho, I do use windows server for some stuff myself. My email server is exchange, and my DNS server is windows 2008 R2.

    I would also imagine windows using more cpu than linux.
     
  7. Offline

    Bertware

    My hardware advice:

    Speed up things for free:

    Overclock you CPU, it's made for that purpose. you should be able to get at least 4.5GHz with decent cooling. (If you daon't have expierience with this - don't do it. But in that case I would question myself why you bought a K CPU)

    These 2 drives, are they in RAID?
    When I see the temperatures, it seems one disk is just sitting there and the other disk is doing al the work
    Minecraft Servers are quite disk-intensive, so RAID 0 would improve performance (you already have 2 disks, and your motherboard supports this feature)

    Your computer is 64bit. Use Java 64 bit (I assume you are already using this)
    You might consider using multi-threaded garbage collection and so on.
    (There is a thread about startup arguments somewhere, I can't remember where I saw it)


    These things cost money -.-

    If you upgrade your RAM: Get faster RAM. 16GB 1600Mhz 8-8-8-24 RAM should do the work (example: Corsair Vengeance)

    You might consider Co-location. Your server gets a place in a datacenter, with an internet connection of 100MBps(up/Down) or higher (1GBps/10GBps)
    However, you have to pay for this (starting from $20/month, depending on provider and what you get)


    Note: I would censor your Windows Product key. It's in the computer specs...
     
  8. Offline

    mindless728

    actually i would advise not to go for a high overclock but a mild one, especially since below you are saying that he should look into co-location. The server rack environment will be much different that a tower environment, and many of those data centers doing co-location do not take towers or make it prohibitively expensive not to mention they may even have rules about the amount of thermal output your server is allowed to have

    umm no, he should use 1 disk for the OS, 1 for the backups, and make a ram disk with some ram, RAID-0 will give you more performance, but there is no ability to make backups, and conventional HDD's, even in RAID-0, will not have the IOPS for the random read/writes that minecraft makes to make a difference

    this is ok, just don't go overboard with the flags as the JVM will now what to set better than you, just change the GC to a parallel garbage collector the JVM will take care of the configuration of that GC

    Minecraft is hardly memory intensive in terms of speed, it is bottlenecked by the CPU so thist really won't help all that much (maybe 1% which is within the margin of error)

    any decent co-location is going to cost more than $20, also if you do OC make sure that they don't have a rule against that and/or make sure you don't go over any heat dissipation rules they may have
     
  9. Offline

    Bertware

    For colocation you will have to decide yourself how much you overclock. I don't know about the heat rules, but you might want to pay attention to the energy bills.

    RAMDisk would be faster indeed.
    Online backups maybe? I don't know the file size of the maps, but if they aren't too big dropbox could do it for you (2GB free) or SkyDrive (25GB free)
    Dropbox integrates with windows.
    You can add your skydrive folder to windows explorer,So you can use backup scripts. I just can't remember how (something with add network location)

    Depending on the manufacturer/shop, there is only a slight difference in price. It's worth it, if you can double the speed of your RAM. Especially if you use a RAMdisk. (like Mindless said)
     
  10. Offline

    mindless728


    you would want on site and offsite backups. on site would be as easy as using rsync, offline you could use ftp or do a rsync over ssh

    not likely to actually help tbh, as i said this will be a cpu bound server, i run on DDR3-1333 and its still the cpu that lets out on me, though if you get it for a good deal why not, though i usually go with G.Skill now
     
  11. Offline

    Sayshal

    A) I have no idea how to RAID.
    B) McMyAdmin has support for this but I dont know how to set it up.
     
  12. Offline

    Bertware

    Hmm, if your not expierienced with computer Hardware I'd might be better to stay away from the RAID and overclock. Just to prevent you have to get a new CPU or have to reinstall Windows.

    However, try out RAMdisk. I think there are some for free (google)
     
  13. Offline

    Andreas Brisner

    Ramdisk is "automatic" on debian/ubuntu. /dev/shm or /run/shm :)
     
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