On 5 July 2012 19:50, Mark Holmquist
<marktraceur@riseup.net> wrote:
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?
* 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!