3 ms·

About 60 of those machines are custom L7 frontend load balancers, and an additional 40-50 are database and dev machines. As for the actual gameservers, that's a

About 60 of those machines are custom L7 frontend load balancers, and an additional 40-50 are database and dev machines. As for the actual gameservers, that's about the numbers we expect on average (150/box), although it varies wildly by gametype. Simple games of Skywars or Murder Mystery with no AI and an ultra-slimmed-down world we can fit 300+ players per box and are CPU-bound. Housing or Skyblock servers with full AI, dynamic worlds, and player-built structures we might only be able to fit 100 players per box and are RAM-bound. You're pretty accurate with the per player bandwidth. We measure it at an average of 200kbps/online player. We are incredibly compute-intensive, though, and these machines are all operating with E3-1271v3 CPUs, 32GB of RAM, and ~100GB SSD.

winter_blue 6y ago
Thanks for the insightful comment. I saw you mentioned in another thread Minecraft performs better when the CPU has better single-threaded performance. I'm guessing, going forward into the future, you'd probably want to build machines with Zen 2 AMD Ryzen CPUs (or future Zen 3 Ryzens), like the Threadripper 3960X (which has a base clock of 3.8 GHz, 24 physical CPU cores, and costs ~$1200 — so $50 for each of those cores). Or, the AMD Ryzen 9 3950X, which is about $40 per core (when you get it on sale), and despite a lower nominal base clock actually performs better on single-threaded benchmarks (e.g. https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html).
- AgentK20 6y ago
  It's definitely something we're keeping our eye on. The challenge with that is that because Threadripper is so new, it's only just now beginning to be supported on server motherboards. In a few years we're hoping that there'll be enough competition in the AMD Ryzen motherboard market that we can get comparable pricing to what we're getting now for cheap Intel boards.
  - debian3 6y ago
    You should check Hetzner AX series. Even their cheap (39 euro with ecc) ryzen 5 3600 give us 4 times the performance than our E3 1245 cpu.

winter_blue 6y ago

Thanks for the insightful comment. I saw you mentioned in another thread Minecraft performs better when the CPU has better single-threaded performance. I'm guessing, going forward into the future, you'd probably want to build machines with Zen 2 AMD Ryzen CPUs (or future Zen 3 Ryzens), like the Threadripper 3960X (which has a base clock of 3.8 GHz, 24 physical CPU cores, and costs ~$1200 — so $50 for each of those cores). Or, the AMD Ryzen 9 3950X, which is about $40 per core (when you get it on sale), and despite a lower nominal base clock actually performs better on single-threaded benchmarks (e.g. https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html).

AgentK20 6y ago
It's definitely something we're keeping our eye on. The challenge with that is that because Threadripper is so new, it's only just now beginning to be supported on server motherboards. In a few years we're hoping that there'll be enough competition in the AMD Ryzen motherboard market that we can get comparable pricing to what we're getting now for cheap Intel boards.
- debian3 6y ago
  You should check Hetzner AX series. Even their cheap (39 euro with ecc) ryzen 5 3600 give us 4 times the performance than our E3 1245 cpu.