[mohaa] Thoughts on resources?

[Greg Miller]

Chris Nims wrote:

> I'm running the server on a PII 400 96Meg w/ Red Hat 7.3 behind a cable
> modem.   Any thoughts on how many players I can realistically host
> withoug having performance problems?
>
> Thanks,
> Chris

First of all, I don't claim to be an expert on this issue, so take what I
say with a grain of salt.

I've found dual 550 MHz P3 with a 133 MHz CPU-memory speed and 384 MB of
RAM to be unsatisfactory.  (Why this is, I'm not sure.  I probably don't
have my MOHAA server optimally configured.)  But the best I can tell is
that performance at the system level is tied to a combination of (CPU speed
AND CPU-to-memory speed AND memory size).

On the issue of bandwidth, the limit appears to be upload speed to players,
namely because upload bandwidth on an unbalanced (asynchronous) connection
will usually limit the number of players a system can support.  I've heard
that you need at least 5 kbits/sec per player on a Q3 server -- my
experience with Win32 MOHAA shows that 20 kbits/sec is not atypical, and
that compared to the typical upload limit of 128 Kbps on a 1-way cable or
ADSL line means that 6 players is about all you can support.  I certainly
hope that's not the case with the linux server, but who knows.

Now I may be completely wrong.  I'm trying to run a MOHAA linux test server
between 8-10pm EST via my crontab on a 1 GHz P3, 512 MB RAM, and 384 kbps
SDSL connection, to see if I get better results.  I tried it last night,
got in, though I initially timed-out -- as I do on every server I attempt
to connect to (my cable ISP sucks).  Anyway, performance appeared to be
okay, but then again I didn't have much time on there, and no one else
jumped in.  So if you see 'WST Linux' in the server list, jump in to see if
'slow server' or lag appears and let me know.

As to your original question (no I haven't forgotten), I think your going
to have a hard time with more than 6 players even with a nice pipe.  But if
that is not the case, by all means let the mailing list know.  I'd
certainly be interested to know that I'm wrong.

Happy gamin'

--
name:Greg C. Miller
title:Systems and Network Administrator/Sr. Analyst
e-mail:gmiller at oei-tech.com
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