Game server hosting - CPU and the RAM?

[Zaian]

Hey, I was wondering if this would be a good server to sell game servers on... I don't know if it got an unnecessary amount of RAM for the CPU, it got the following specifications:

CPU: Intel Core i7 920 4*2,66 GHz

RAM: 12GB DDR2 RAM

HD: 2TB (1TB x 2)

Connection: 100mbit/s (Unmetered bandwidth)

OS: Either Linux or Windows.

Would the CPU limit the amount of possible game servers and leave unused RAM on the server?

Thanks,
Zaian

[BehaartesEtwas]

depends - as always - on the quality you want to achieve. a server usually takes like ~300MB at most (depending on the plugins of course), this is kind of a "hard" limit. if your server runs out of ram, it will swap. that completely kills your performance.

on the other hand, for high quality servers you don't want to run more then on server per core, or maybe two. 3 servers per core would already degrade performance very notably. you can do the math yourself... ;-)

HD is oversized, but...

[Zaian]

Well, the HDD is included the package so I can't really do much about it. :p

But one game server per core seems a bit much unless it has 32 slots or above?
Do you know if SRCDS based games are more CPU intensive than on RAM?

[BehaartesEtwas]

(09-18-2009, 06:34 PM)Zaian Wrote:  But one game server per core seems a bit much unless it has 32 slots or above?

no. especially in wars one will notice small deficits much better than on big public servers (where always ppl with bad connections are running around). so 1 server per core is for high quality war servers. 2 will be good for high quality publics (unless they have large slot numbers).

Quote:Do you know if SRCDS based games are more CPU intensive than on RAM?

my statement was: you can't compare CPU and RAM. RAM is a quantity that simply has to be present. calculate 300 MB per server plus some extra for the system and you will be fine. more RAM won't do any good, too few RAM will lead to some catastrophe ;-)

CPU is mainly a question of quality. more CPU gives you more quality. this is not linear, so at a certain number of servers per core (btw more important than slots per core) you will have a "dramatic" drop in quality.

Unless of course you want to go for low-quality hosting, then you should calculate in number of slots per core, limit server fps, and test the limits of your machine. but don't expect happy customers then ;-)

[Mooga]

The most important part of a server is the CPU. People have been known for running several servers with as little as 512MB of ram. As for the i7s, I really don't know how they perform with SRCDS and whether they are worth the upgrade from a Core 2 Quad.

[BehaartesEtwas]

btw: chipset is also important. but it's hard to make any predictions there...

[Zaian]

Well, I recently read on some forums that their connection is a bit jumpy... So I don't know if it is the best choice in this case.
But I might be wrong... Do you know anything about http://www.serverloft.de?

[pengy]

I swear that i7's are only capable of DDR3 ram...

[St1flus]

LOL PENGY
And i7's seem to have a bit of a difference from core 2 quad from my experience, they run a bit faster, duh