Building server hows this hardware?

[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.