Building server hows this hardware?

[Rhodan]

Here's the important parts of the hardware:

Intel Core 2 quad Q6600 (2.4ghz)
4 gig ram PC2-6400 800mhz (can go to 8gig)
160gig SATA HD
XP Pro 64 bit (to use >3gig ram).

I have 10 mbps download (to my server) and 1mbps upload (from server) currently but thinking of upgrading my service since the TOS doesn't allow me to run a server of any kind with the current package.

Disk space is cheap and I have a lot of space for more drives if required.

I currently have 65 zones loaded and thats using about 400-450 MB of ram (empty of players of course). All 287 zones would require (at least) 2 gig ram. Webserver/mysql and system take up about 500 megs (make it 1 gig for worst case) so 4 gig can hold all that with room to spare. What I don't know is how much ram each online character adds to the equation or how much more ram a large zone with 30 characters in it uses compared to when its empty. But, another 4 gigs of ram is fairly cheap!

If I need to I can cobble together a second comp and offload the webserver/database server to that.

Any idea what a system like this could handle?

oh... And is EQEmu able to take advantage of the quad processor?

[paaco]

It does not take advantage of quad core. With your current system you will have no problem hosting a server. Your 1MB up bandwidth is gonna limit you more than anything. Even with that though you can get a fair amount of players in. If I remember correctly Storm Haven server has a 1MBit up connection and I have seen 100 players on it before. I would say 100 is about the best your gonna do with 1mbit up and that's a stretch. Trevius much have a very good connection.

[Derision]

Originally Posted by paaco

It does not take advantage of quad core.

I would have thought it would, since each zone.exe is a separate process, so if you had four or more zones with players in, the main thread of up to four zones should be dispatched on each core simultaneously, providing they weren't waiting for DB access. I run my private server on on an old single core Hyperthreading CPU (ShuttleX) , so I've never actually looked into how it utilises multi-cores.

[Rhodan]

Looking at my XP Pro box running 60+ zones the processors both see activity when I do things with the game so I'm thinking that the OS is load balancing across the CPUs.

I don't think that's the same as the program taking advantage of the CPUs. And I'm (wildy) guessing that if four zones were heavily used you could end up with all the load on one processor.

[paaco]

Hmm yeah thinking about it that way the OS probably does load balance across all 4 cores. I run mine on a Phenom 9850 Quad core, I have never payed attention to that though.

When I answered the question I was only thinking about the eq client not being optimized for dual/quad core. My mistake, I apologize for not thinking about it first ;p

[trevius]

I recently upgraded my server to a Dual Core CPU and it seems to load balance pretty well. I imagine that it just loads zones and splits them between the processors.

The deciding factor for most servers is upload bandwidth. With 1MB up, you can get about 80-100ish players on without too many performance issues. For more than that, you would need more upload bandwidth.

[Yeormom]

All of your zones will each support the ability to have their infinity set to a different core, but world.exe will obviously only run on one. Your only problem is going to be bandwidth, as it looks like your talking about residential cable for Internet. It might also be nice to have some additional storage for backups.

[Rhodan]

Well I took a shot at leading every .map statically (283?) on a 4 gig machine. Got as far as TakC (253 I think) before having problems. TakD and on would end up restarting over and over again. At the end I had almost 6 gigs of paged data and just shy of 400 megs of ram free.

Each loaded zone ran as a separate process and there were multiple threads created for each zone (over 1400 threads were running though some were unrelated to eqemu of course).

I'm going to cut out a bunch of maps (earlier in the alphabetical listing) just to make sure it was memory restraints that caused the failure to load the maps.

[hayward6]

Just curious, but why are you trying to open up all the zones? you can set it up for say 100 consecutive random zones and as people move between them the zones will open and close to free up resources. Since you can now set your zones to save state when they shut down, you don't really lose anything... just some thoughts.

Also, if you're looking to go big with this server like it looks you are... you're going to be much better off running it on a Linux box.

[Rhodan]

Not going big at all. I'm not planning on having more than a couple dozen people at most.

I also don't plan on loading all zones statically - just cities and the most often visited zones (maybe 30-40 static zones, probably less).

So why try? Just to see

Oh and I really did want to go linux but I'll also be using the server for development under the Lawmaker engine and lawmaker is pure windows. Perhaps when I've got an app actually built in lawmaker I'll see if I can get it to cooperate with linux but until I'm entirely comfortable with the sdk I don't want to be sitting there trying to figure out if the problem is lawmaker or my linux setup.

[Rhodan]

Yep, got home and the remaining zones loaded up (takC+) so the loading failures were probably memory related - thats a heck of a lot of zones to have loaded all at once! So the 250ish zones ate up 2.5 gigs of ram and 6 gigs of page file space. A six gig machine could probably load everything statically though I don't know how much memory a player takes - I figure there wouldn't be a lot of space left for people to actually play. 8 gigs would probably work fine.