Zone launcher/player Ratio ?
 

I was wondering if there is any particular formula that (anyone) might think
about in how many zones to launch in the launcher table per number of
players. Obviously, a home server never needs more the default of 5, but I
look at some of the higher populated servers and wonder how many zones
they launch for that kind of count. (Like EZ Server or even Project 99).

Is there some kind of "rule of thumb" that one would go by, for example, how
many launchers per 100 players, etc. ?

Basically you need to have launchers for every zone somebody might be in. It depends on a lot of things, including how many zones you have available on your server. The more options and players, the more launchers you'll want to have to cover them.

As a practical matter, idling zones don't take much by way of resources. So you could aim high and probably be OK.

Oh definately have to have enough launchers for every zone that's going to boot up. I
realize it does depend on what might be going on for activity, but I'm kind of wondering
something along the lines of normal casual players.
But just as an example, for instance, your Vegarlson server has spiked up to over 70.
How many dynamic launchers did you need (in reality) for that amount of players ?

If they are all in separate zones you would need atleast 70, if the were all in one zone then atleast one. Personally if I knew i could have 70 people on my server I would enable 70 zones. like he says it won't take much resources unless you are actually using all 70 at one time.

I use 30 dynamic and 10 statics. That's always been my setup. Might be overkill sometimes, but as I said, the footprint isn't big at all.

I would expect that 10 launchers would probably work for a small 'friends' server in most cases.

Oh, ok. That gives me a little more insight to it, thank you.
One of the main things that lurks around in the back of my head, if a new public
server starts up, that person has no way of knowing, or anticipating how many
players are going to lunge at it. So if one launches, say, 15 zone launchers in
the table, but ends up with players trying to boot up 16 zones, it could cause a
little grief at the moment ?

PEQ has like 150 static or some shit and a crap ton of dynamics :P

(chuckle) I couldn't imagine what kind of setup for that server is like these days.

I ran in to an old post from nilbog from 2009 about running 77 static zones with
10 dynamic zones.

http://www.eqemulator.org/forums/showthread.php?t=30097