Thinking of having some fun

[EmanonCow]

Don't know -- I'm more than a bit behind the hardware curve.

Did searches on SATA and competing standards of hard drive connection, and I got SATA (2.6) @ 300 MB/second and SCSI-U640 @ 640 MB/second. Just standards, not products.

Sadly, getting the raw throughput stats on HDD doesn't seem to be something that manufacturers push out as easy to get. So I can't tell if SATA's 300 MB/second will be saturated by 3 Raid5 drives.

All of this is based off of the question: how heavy duty a system does EQEmu take? My initial suspicion would be that a very low-end system, by todays standards, with maybe an unusually large amount of ram would be more than enough to run a server, given that EQEmu servers have been around for multiple iterations of moore's law: but I just don't know.

And the bandwidth seems important: how much bandwidth does each single player, playing actively, use?

[johnyp]

Well bandwidth for a single player is going to vary because of the factors of : Location and speed/connection. I run a minilogin server in my house and use the Media computer (2gb ram, 2.8ghz AMD dual core, and a 300gb hd, and 2 Nvidia SLI cards)..(its early cant remember everything).. I run through lan but that wont help u determine how the ping is like but, with 5 computers connected to the same computer (server) I get about 14-28ms ping, and the load is fine, I dont lag at all on any computer, and the zones load considerably fast... But I only allow 5 zones to boot, since I have only 5 computers connect.

Hope it helps , its not hard to set up hehe, and since u know alot more than I do, then you should be fine setting it up.

[techguy84]

I only mentioned the dual core as you also mentioned it being a possible file server among other things. The more stuff you tend to do, the more process power you will need. May not be so much as a dual core, but you can get x2 or p4D's pretty cheap now a days, so you might as well go with one. Heck, a server could run on a celeron or sempron if you really wanted it to. Memory and bandwidth is more the key than procces power with the emu.