Need some advice. Build a server dedicated to NS2
sacmo2
Join Date: 2004-07-09 Member: 29824Members
Join Date: 2004-07-09 Member: 29824Members
<div class="IPBDescription">Server help</div>Hello, Ive been a old member of the old ns, and so excited about ns2 that I am dedicating my gaming community www.skggaming.com to NS2
Just gotta ask some of u if u were to GUESS, I know the specs for this game are not out yet, but what would u GUESS a server like this can run and how many servers I might be able to get out of NS2?
Again I know no one knows for sure, But I am just trying to get a guess on what u all think.
Ill be running a 1u server
Intel Xeon E5520 Nehalem 2.26GHz 4 x 256KB L2 Cache 8MB L3 Cache LGA 1366 80W Quad-Core Server Processor
G.SKILL 6GB (3 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333
SUPERMICRO SYS-1016T-M3FB 1U Barebone Server Intel X58 LGA 1366 Intel Core i7
1 TB of HDD space
10 IPs
I am going to be collocating this in the Washington DC area on a T1 connection.
I am just trying to get some help here, Please keep flaming down if possible please, just trying to get some friendly advice if possible. Thanks!
Just gotta ask some of u if u were to GUESS, I know the specs for this game are not out yet, but what would u GUESS a server like this can run and how many servers I might be able to get out of NS2?
Again I know no one knows for sure, But I am just trying to get a guess on what u all think.
Ill be running a 1u server
Intel Xeon E5520 Nehalem 2.26GHz 4 x 256KB L2 Cache 8MB L3 Cache LGA 1366 80W Quad-Core Server Processor
G.SKILL 6GB (3 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333
SUPERMICRO SYS-1016T-M3FB 1U Barebone Server Intel X58 LGA 1366 Intel Core i7
1 TB of HDD space
10 IPs
I am going to be collocating this in the Washington DC area on a T1 connection.
I am just trying to get some help here, Please keep flaming down if possible please, just trying to get some friendly advice if possible. Thanks!
Comments
Maybe... 3/4 32 player servers?
Remember that the alpha haven't started yet, so there is probably still things that needs to be nailed down before server performance and server requirements can be quantified.
Just trying to plan ahead so once this game goes live, i can bring as many servers online as possible for this awesome game.
Look for specs similar to games such as Battlefield 2 and Counter-Strike - while they have nothing to do with NS, those are the typical ranges of servers performance wise.
Again its just speculation, we don't know anything about NS2.
HDD space is a bit excessive if all you need it for is game servers, fyi.
I think your main problem would be the T1 connection (regardless of games, really) - that's only 1.5Mbps or so from memory, you may start to hit a bandwidth limit after a few servers before you max out your CPU.
And the only reason im going so big on the HDD is because there is a good deal going on, and if i wanna use it for storage or something later on, I cam always do that, or run our website of this server.
But I can see where ur coming from, the server company told me these I7 xeons one of there customers are running 6 32 man tf2 servers on them and it runs them without any probs. But then again NS2 might be more resource hungry then TF2.
This( <a href="http://www.cstrike-planet.com/tutorial/1" target="_blank">http://www.cstrike-planet.com/tutorial/1</a> ) guide for CS, suggest a t1 line just for 32 players, granted I think that is for more safely then anything, but you don't want to pulll the bandwidth that much as it will choke. The line of interest to me in this guide is this "In general, a good rule-of-thumb is roughly 6KB (Kilo-Bytes) upstream (upload) per player slot"
You want about 8 servers, with 32 players each, comes to 15360kps (that is kilobits) ( assuming that netcode works like CS does ). A T1 line is 1554 kps. A T2 line is 6000 kps.
Now I don't know for sure just what you will need, but for 8 servers, I think you might want at least a T2 line. That should cover 4 or so servers at full load. Again this depends on what the devs have cooked up for net code.
As for the rest of your specs. If you where going into a data server, you might need that much hard drive space. For a game server, I think you get by with just a 50GB hard drive ( you want it fast though so it will server the maps fast ).
The processor you got ( 4 cores ) should be fine for 8 servers, I don't think one server will go over 50% on one core, and I don't think the servers are mulitcore compatible, but you need to ask the devs on that.
Likewise the Ram should be fine.
If you're eager to grab that server now, I'd say go for it.
For the time being you could run a few other game servers to get the hang of things in time for NS2!
I agree with Tankefugl, it is a tough question to answer without specific specs.
That being said, I would that the hardware is more than sufficient to run a few servers. The bottle neck would be the T1 line, as that could probably only allow for 1 32 ma, else all the bandwidth would be taken up. I would Definitely want to upgrade that to a T3 at least to get the most out of your hardware.
Ken
The hardware would bog down long before you could hope to use that line to the max. I don't think that you will have that because an OC-768 line, that makes up the backbone of AT&T, runs at 39,813.12 Mbit/s, or as you gave your figure, 4.97 Gigabytes per second. I think you might have the server owner running a OC-192 which is 1244.16 Megabits per second, common in major isps, where I would definaly want to host a server that is going to be running 8 or 9 game servers at once.