Hosting a server at home with 50 people.

[Marsruben]

Im working on hosting a server at home, I got a machine with over 32gb RAM and 2 very good processors.

What Im wondering, is if I can host it at my home. My internet line is 20/10 mbps

Would this be good to host a FTB Monster with 50 people on at times? Would this affect my own computer while I play other games, while I do will it affect the server?

 

[Wagon153]

It depends. As far as your internet goes, you're good. As far as having the client going on the same computer as the server, I'm not sure. There's been people who have complained of super lag from doing this, either FPS or server lag. But others have not had a single problem. But from what it looks like, you shouldn't have too many problems doing this.

 

[Marsruben]

No, I got another machine to host the server. Just wondering if I play on my own computer if it will affect the internet. Since I do tend to do other things and other people is on the internet.

 

[amunao]

Your internet connection
20MBPS Download and
10MBPS Upload
With 32GB of ram should be able to run 50 Players on the server. Though if you have 50 players on the server you may have some connection issues on your line by that i mean your upload speed will be slow when you have a lot of players on your server. This will affect other people in your house.

Remember to use a Ethernet cable and not Wireless!

 

[Hambeau]

The only problem I see may be your ISP... Be sure they don't throttle your speed as bandwidth usage goes up, or charge you fees beyond a certain threshold.

Just because you have good UL/DL speeds doesn't mean that your consumer plan guarantees those speeds as a constant rate like they would for a commercial enterprise (at a far greater monthly charge).

 

[Marsruben]

The rate is pretty stable while I've been testint it. It lies between 18-21 Down and 8-11 Up.

 

[Staxed]

The rate is pretty stable while I've been testint it. It lies between 18-21 Down and 8-11 Up.

your testing isn't equivalent to having 50 players on it all the time though. Before you start this adventure...I would highly recommend checking with your ISP to see if they have throttling/caps on your bandwidth.

 

[namiasdf]

Hmmm.

I would have a dedicated machine to run your server off of. That way you can take out all the unnecessary things and have a leaner set-up.

My friend usually throws his old hardware onto his server computer. It's a good way to use your old stuff, that is of course, if you have any.

 

[Staxed]

Hmmm.

I would have a dedicated machine to run your server off of. That way you can take out all the unnecessary things and have a leaner set-up.

My friend usually throws his old hardware onto his server computer. It's a good way to use your old stuff, that is of course, if you have any.

He already said he has a dedicated machine

 

[DZCreeper]

2 good processors won't do shit, Minecraft is limited to 1 core of one processor. Also, your going to have problems if people start doing a lot of Rotary/ReactorCraft, the bandwidth usage is significant. You should consider colocation services offered by many smaller ISP's and datacenters.

 

[trajano080]

2 good processors won't do shit, Minecraft is limited to 1 core of one processor. Also, your going to have problems if people start doing a lot of Rotary/ReactorCraft, the bandwidth usage is significant. You should consider colocation services offered by many smaller ISP's and datacenters.

With Optifine, (which, contrary to popular belief, DOES work with FTB) you can make use of the other cores.

 

[Staxed]

With Optifine, (which, contrary to popular belief, DOES work with FTB) you can make use of the other cores.

He's talking about a server, which doesn't process graphics...so optifine will be less than useless in this instance.

 

[ThatOneSlowking]

2 good processors won't do shit, Minecraft is limited to 1 core of one processor. Also, your going to have problems if people start doing a lot of Rotary/ReactorCraft, the bandwidth usage is significant. You should consider colocation services offered by many smaller ISP's and datacenters.

Actually servers use multi-core

 

[GoldenGamerUK]

Actually servers use multi-core

true, from as far as I know the better the processor the better the server self lag will be (there won't be a shit tonne of server lag when there are entities everywhere) if a graphics card is used the memory and speed of the memory will help with generation, I was just saying information what has been given to me by various sources, do not quote me on any of this...

 

[Rrett]

Assume each person uses 2Mbps.

You're net connection will not support 50 people. Sorry.

What you can do though is contact a data center(s) and ask if you can host your box on their grounds. Some Data centers do offer deals like that, where your hardware, their connections/power.

I recommend doing that as your internet connection is no where near as much as what's needed

 

[DZCreeper]

Actually servers use multi-core

No, a Minecraft server uses 1 core. Only time that multiple cores are used is during garbage collection which is not terribly often. 2 Haswell cores running at 4Ghz is much better than 4 or 6 running at 3Ghz.[DOUBLEPOST=1397612189][/DOUBLEPOST]

true, from as far as I know the better the processor the better the server self lag will be (there won't be a shit tonne of server lag when there are entities everywhere) if a graphics card is used the memory and speed of the memory will help with generation, I was just saying information what has been given to me by various sources, do not quote me on any of this...

Your various sources are wrong, having a graphics card will not affect the server at all. The only function a graphics card serves is rendering things on a screen, the client handles 100% of that in Minecraft.

 

[PsionicArchon]

I like to comment on these threads because, well, it's one area I have quite a bit of experience in.

While Minecraft isn't optimized as a multicore program, and neither is the vanilla server it does scale across multiple cores. Most people get confused as far as multicore support is concerned. Minecraft's multicore support is purely symmetrical scaling, it will not lock specific threads to individual cores. MCPC+ (based on Spigot which is based on Bukkit) is reasonably well optimized, and offloads the networking thread to its own core. I wouldn't use the vanilla server if you're aiming for fifty players.

In other words, you will definitely benefit from having multiple cores/multiple processors. Here's an example screenshot I posted on these forums a few months ago: https://i.imgur.com/iwgKt57.png Since this is an i7 chip, only four of those cores are physical cores. I was surprised at just how well Minecraft, and its server distrbuted its load across multiple cores.

If you're going to be handicapped by anything here it's that ten up line. Vanilla Minecraft uses around 256-650kbps per user. Even if I'm being lenient, and assuming each user will use a max of 256kbps, you're going to need around 128mbps if you intend on sustaining fifty concurrent users. Modded Minecraft is a beast in a league of its own (no pun intended). It's not uncommon for an average server to build up thousands upon thousands of ticking tile entities, these all transmit data to the client twenty times per second every second. I've locked players out of my own private server before by deploying a massive MFFS field around my base. My connection wasn't able to send data to their clients fast enough. When they would view the shield they'd be kicked from the server with a generic socket error message. Simply standing in my own base uses near 2mbps.

 

[GreenZombie]

As I understand it, the Minecraft game loop is single threaded. There is not a thread per user or anything like that. Additional threads might be used for supplementary tasks by the OS, but increasing the number of CPU cores will not help your ability to process more players, more ticking entities, or anything like that.
The CPU graphs presented actually seem to show a rather inefficient situation of a single thread being scheduled across multiple cores - ideally you would get better overall performance if a single core was dedicated to the minecraft principal gameloop thread, and was running at 100%.

Everything else stands however. The bytes/persecond coupled with the data requirements of mods are what is going to make scaling hard. Vanilla is one thing, but data hungry mods are difficult to account for especially, as with MFFS, they scale per usage.

 

[DZCreeper]

I like to comment on these threads because, well, it's one area I have quite a bit of experience in.

While Minecraft isn't optimized as a multicore program, and neither is the vanilla server it does scale across multiple cores. Most people get confused as far as multicore support is concerned. Minecraft's multicore support is purely symmetrical scaling, it will not lock specific threads to individual cores. MCPC+ (based on Spigot which is based on Bukkit) is reasonably well optimized, and offloads the networking thread to its own core. I wouldn't use the vanilla server if you're aiming for fifty players.

In other words, you will definitely benefit from having multiple cores/multiple processors. Here's an example screenshot I posted on these forums a few months ago: https://i.imgur.com/iwgKt57.png Since this is an i7 chip, only four of those cores are physical cores. I was surprised at just how well Minecraft, and its server distrbuted its load across multiple cores.

If you're going to be handicapped by anything here it's that ten up line. Vanilla Minecraft uses around 256-650kbps per user. Even if I'm being lenient, and assuming each user will use a max of 256kbps, you're going to need around 128mbps if you intend on sustaining fifty concurrent users. Modded Minecraft is a beast in a league of its own (no pun intended). It's not uncommon for an average server to build up thousands upon thousands of ticking tile entities, these all transmit data to the client twenty times per second every second. I've locked players out of my own private server before by deploying a massive MFFS field around my base. My connection wasn't able to send data to their clients fast enough. When they would view the shield they'd be kicked from the server with a generic socket error message. Simply standing in my own base uses near 2mbps.

I should have been more clear now that I reflect on what I wrote. The thread that the game uses for all in world logic is single threaded. Tasks like networking, audio, and rendering can be split into different threads but that can introduce issues. So for the most part, Minecraft is single threaded. Having a second core to offload networking and other lightweight tasks to can be beneficial and even necessary on larger server. Beyond 2 cores though, I would expect to see little difference in performance with each additional core.

 

[Hambeau]

@Chris Becke, @DZCreeper...

Not to derail or anything, but one of the improvements being experimented with in MC 1.8 is a separate thread for each dimension, I.E. Overworld in it's own thread, the Nether in a separate one, and the End in a third.

I don't know how that will scale to mods such as Mystcraft since there are no 1.8 mods yet, but it'll be interesting.