zane Wrote:Well I plan to host around 300-350 slots(varying games, fps, tickrate) maximum with the likelihood that no more than 150 or so would be full simultaneously. Does anyone agree that 8 gigs might be overkill for that many slots considering CPU's get overloaded before ram does?
Usually everybody runs out of CPU power much earlier than memory. I've never heard anyone complaining that the servers would not work because they're short of memory.
Idea: Create a shared "content directory" (eg. maps, textures, sounds, ...) from the srcds stuff to a memory partition. Imagine how fast maps would load. That way you'll find some good use for the excess memory you've got.
In linux you can use "tmpfs":
Code:
mkdir -p /usr/local/srcds-shared/
mount -t tmpfs -o size=2G,mode=755 tmpfs /usr/local/srcds-shared/
Then copy all srcds content to that directory:
Code:
cp -R srcds/* /usr/local/srcds-shared/
Then prepare a "customer" instance:
Code:
rm -f /home/customer/srcds/cstrike/maps/*
ln -s /usr/local/srcds-shared/cstrike/maps/* /home/customer/srcds-shared/cstrike/maps/
Now all maps content is linked to the memory partition. Map changes should be extremely fast because the server's got them in memory all the time. Customers can still install their own maps, because they have write access to their own maps directory. Nobody can mess the memory table, because it's mounted with mode 755 (root = rwx, rest = rx). Safe and fast.
Note that on every reboot the memory partition is emptied (because RAM loses all information), and it should be initialized in some startup script.
I haven't tested this on my server because I don't have that much spare RAM. I hope you've got technical skills to try this out. It should be possible to have all srcds content linked like this to a memory partition, but still have the log files and auto-recorded demos written on a HDD (which happens pretty much automatically).
Let me know if you're going forward with this. Others who also have kick-ass RAM servers can also PM me. I can then fill in the details if there are problems.
PS. I'll also try this myself, although I can probably spare only about 200MB RAM partition.