Re: [libreplanet-discuss] Minetest server [was: Gaming Collective: Hosted server]

[Mark Holmquist]

> The FSF admins would like some metrics on your experience hosting a
> minetest server. How much disk space, memory, etc has it used, how much do
> you expect to need?

Well, let's see. My current server has:

* 1GB total RAM
* 1-core AMD processor of roughly 2GHz power
* About 171MB taken up by the entire minetest directory, including the 
world files

I've run the server on it for quite some time, with very little downtime 
that can't be attributed to network issues unrelated to the server 
itself. At least one person has said that it's less slow than other 
servers they've tried, which is interesting because A) it's such a 
simple machine and B) I'm running it behind a DSL connection.

However, this server has very few mods, and the ones I've loaded were 
vetted pretty heavily. It also has very few connections, almost always 
fewer than 5 connections at a time.

If I were to put together an ideal, but still-affordable server for 
this, I would probably choose

* 4GB RAM
* Dual-core processor of at least 2.5 GHz power
* 500GB of disk space available for backups, world maps and archives, 
and so on
* Probably safe to make it headless, avoid the overhead of a graphical 
environment

With that setup, I would feel pretty confident in ~20 connections at a 
time, possibly more.

There were some more interesting stress test results relatively 
recently, and I think their discovery was that the CPU power was the 
most limiting factor. So if you splurge on anything, splurge on a lot of 
processing power. The rest should be manageable.

Link to stress test results: http://minetest.ru/plot_final.png

IIRC, that server has 16GB of memory, and some rather nice CPU. You can 
see that the RAM was never an issue, but the CPU was problematic even 
with a relatively low number of users.

Hope that's helpful!

--
Mark Holmquist
Contractor, Wikimedia Foundation
mtraceur@member.fsf.org
http://marktraceur.info