How should I set this up...

Dual Quad Harpertown L5420
8GB DDR2 Memory
500GB SATAII HDD
10TB Premium BW
100Mbps Port
1 Usable IP Addresses

I have a new dedicated server with the above specs. How many slots should I open up and how should I divide my resources? Any ideas?

 

How many slots is totally dependent on what plugins you use.
one server could do 75 people, while another with different plugins could do 30 tops.

Like ours is a 100 man server (by standard average specs) but limit it to 40 because we got more plugins than we should rationally have by most standards

 

Woot, another DediDirect customer!

Personally, I just threw 5GB of RAM at it (Minecraft) and set it to 50 slots, but I'm fairly sure that I could do 75+ if I set it up with a ramdisk and allocated 6-7GB RAM. Just decide what you want to use it for, and you can always set it up with less now and change it later.

Running Minecraft, Apache, MySQL, Teamspeak and a few other things on mine, although I'm not really getting many players right now. The hardware is killer though! I'm thinking of splitting it up into multiple smaller servers on diff ports, but I like my single Survival-PvP blend server, so I'll hold off on my other ideas (Hardcore PvP + Factions and/or Creative).

If you need any help with setup feel free to ask.

BTW, you should setup vnstat to track bandwidth usage, htop to monitor per-cpu utilization, and iftop to monitor the network interface.

 

Ill look up the bandwidth monitoring. I have 8 gigs of ram, so should I split it into like a 3G RAMDISK or should I just not bother? Will I be able to handle. More player with a RAMDISK or with just more RAM and a regular disk?

 

Don't bother with a ramdisk until you start seeing lag from disk IO, or you start hitting over 50 players online.

 

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I plan to host over 50 players. What would you recommend for a player cap of 75-100

 

Well, here's the catch— do you have those many players NOW, or are you *hoping for* those many players?

If you have them *now*, then give Minecraft 6-7GB of RAM, set the cap to 75, and put your map files in a ramdisk (assuming that they aren't too big). If you are *hoping for* those many players, then just give Minecraft 4-5GB of RAM, set the cap to 50 or so, and move to a ramdisk when you actually need it. Personally speaking, I see no reason to move to a ramdisk until you actually need to.

 

I hit around 30 players or so NOW.

However, should I just make multiple worlds and NOT use a ramdisk? Or do I have an improper understanding of this

 

A ramdisk helps because it increases read/write IO, speeding up loading of chunks and the like at high player densities. However, it uses up valuable RAM, and it'll need to be written to the disk every few minutes, which can cause lag.

 

So what are my options if I want to eventually host 75-100 people? Will I need to upgrade my hardware?

 

Past 75 people, I'd recommend finding a Sandy Bridge CPU and a SSD to rent, although if you're using CB++ and careful on the plugins, then you should be able to use a slower CPU.

 

I see. I guess I'll stay between 50-75 then. Thanks for the help! (btw, could you pm me more info on CB++? I tried to look it up but I think I'm retarded. I know it's apparently against rules to discuss in here so pm please )