Time For An Upgrade

Jefe · May 2003

<div class="IPBDescription">The soon-to-be up [CotM]Duct-Tape Server</div> I have an old computer that is about 5 years old. It is now a celeron 486 with some old sound and hard drive stuff. I was thinking about upgrading it to run a server off it, so I have a few questions. It will run Windows XP because I lost all my drivers moving, but otherwise I'd Linux it. 16 players.

1.) What would be a good processor speed to run an ns server? I was thinking somewhere around 1.5 ghz because ns is a resource hog, even though half-life is a low-resource game.

2.) Are there any other upgrades I should get, such as faster hard drive or vid card?

3.) Anyone know the prices on a new IP address off of sbc DSL?

4.) Other comments?

Thanks for all the help you may or may not offer me.

Roobubba · May 2003

RAM, CPU, RAM RAM RAM oh and more CPU <img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/smile.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='smile.gif'>

I run 1.4 athlon and it's just about OK with 16 players late game on hera (moderate to high pings on that map at the end), but usually people get sweet pings and minimal lag.

In 1.1 I hope to up the player limit to 20 (maybe 18) but I'm not actually sure if I will still be able to host the server by the time 1.1 comes out unfortunately <img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/sad.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='sad.gif'>

Anyways, I have 512 of DDR266, I'd suggest that as a minimum of RAM. Apart from that you'll find few problems. As you're looking for a dedicated server you won't need any specific graphics/sound stuff in it, I'd recommend keeping everything to a minimum but pump in as much cpu and ram as you can (I'm assuming it's on a phat connection...)

Hope this helps,

Roo

Jefe · May 2003

Hm...I'll have to upgrade my mobo then. And what exactly did you mean by fat connection?

Roobubba · May 2003

well there's lots and lots of threads in this forum about how much bandwidth a server needs. I will dig out a couple for you, but to point you in the right direction, search at the bottom for "server bandwidth"

If the most your mobo can do is a 1.5GHz, that will be easily sufficient for a 16 player server, even in 1.04. When 1.1 comes out it will be more than enough for a 16 player server.

Roobubba · May 2003

OK scratch that just search for bandwidth, but here's a calculation by Verbose based on 3300bytes/s per player for a 16 player server full all day and all night:
</span><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> (Verbose)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'>
Taking a wild stab at the rate:

(3300 Bps / player) * (kilobyte / 1024 bytes ) * (megabyte / 1024 kilobytes) * (16 players) * (60 seconds / minute) * (60 minutes / hour) = 181.274 megabytes / hour
(4.25 gigabytes per day)

I figured the 3300 Bps from Zdrone's graphs. </td></tr></table><span class='postcolor'>

to go the other way, to run a 16 player server constantly, the minimum upload speed of your connection, in kiloBYTES per second is: (3300/1024)*16 kB/s = 51.6

IE you must be able to upload faster than that to be able to run a server for 16 people and still have a usable connection.

In my experience, however, you don't need to allow more than 2kB/s per player if you're really tight on bandwidth. Most clients only use typically 1.5kB/s mid game (more on map changes but hey ho), hence the absolute concrete minumum upload speed is approximately 25kB/s, but you'll find that horribly laggy.

To put that into marketing language, you need a 512kb upload speed (eg synchronous DSL 512/512) to run a server comfortably.

Hope this helps.

Roo

Roobubba · May 2003

I haven't talked about bandwidth CAPS here either, if your connection is capped at:
4.3 GB/day
or
~130GB/month (or 1548GB/year lol)
then you'll be fine for 100% usage on the server (which is unrealistically high anyway). If the server is full for half the day and empty for the other half, obviously the network transfer caps are halved, so you could host if there is a cap of 65gigabytes per month or more.

PM if you're still confused <img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/smile.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='smile.gif'>

Jefe · May 2003

Thank you very much Roob, you are my little server running God thing. I'll PM you if I need more help with bandiwth and such. But now I have another question that someone can take a stab at.

If I upgrade my motherboard (to get more ram) will my hard drive still keep all the drivers? I would assume yes but I'm just making sure. I also wanted to get linux onto it but, again, I don't have the drivers. Is there any way I can still put linux on it?

Edit: I checked my DSL speed, and my provider only goes up to 384kbs upload with the waste-of-money package. <img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/sad.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='sad.gif'>

Roobubba · May 2003

you can put a harddisk on another mobo, but it's better practice to re-install (sometimes it isn't necessary is what I'm saying).

I'd say go ahead and try. Any drivers you have on there (for any particular hardware) will stay there unless you delete them.

384kbps upload means regardless of cap you can only host: 14 players based on 3300Bytes/s transfer each, so you could probably get away with a 16 players server, but I'd do 14/15 and have one or two reserved slots to be on the safe side.

As for Linux, sorry I can't help you out there but there's plenty of much more useful people on this forum who I'm sure will do!

Roob

Time For An Upgrade

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