Hope Can Help Me With A Little Info

antichrist

I have a:

athlon 2400xp
512mb ram
Win2k
512k dedicated line

How many players could play on that?

And after that answer what would be the best and cheapest way to get more users onto this system?

Vadakill

To give you my optimistic judgement by taking your bandwidth estimates as truth I would say an 18-20 slot server. Realistically, I'd say 16-18 slots to leave a little overhead. Here's a bandwidth usage chart I took a while back so you can see the bandwidth differences.

<a href='http://www.vadakill.com/files/bandwidthComparitive.png' target='_blank'>http://www.vadakill.com/files/bandwidthComparitive.png</a>

There is no cheapest way to expand your slots after that. You run into two bottlenecks after hosting a 18-20 slot server. First is upstream bandwidth, second is CPU power. You'd need more then 512k to host more then a 20 player server with very little choke.

You really want to make it so that the CPU is not straining itself; as soon as it starts using 60-70% of the CPU, pings start to rise.

This is all assuming you run regular NS as well as combat. Combat takes way less CPU then a Normal NS game, that's just the the way it is.

antichrist

Well thanks very much for that info i ll try it!

CheesyPeteza

<!--QuoteBegin-Vadakill+Jun 4 2004, 09:12 PM--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> (Vadakill @ Jun 4 2004, 09:12 PM)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin--> This is all assuming you run regular NS as well as combat. Combat takes way less CPU then a Normal NS game, that's just the the way it is. <!--QuoteEnd--> </td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'> <!--QuoteEEnd-->
Not for me. <!--emo&:(--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html//emoticons/sad.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='sad.gif' /><!--endemo-->

You run a windows server right? I hate to say it, but I really am seriously thinking about converting to windows, from what I've heard from others it seems to use about a quarter of the CPU power than a linux system. I just get nightmares thinking about what a hassle it would be running the server on windows.

Vadakill

You know, I hear that a lot but I just don't see that issue. I've run a redhat 7 & 7.3 on my system forever and I've never really had much issue with CPU usage using the plain redhat kernels; I don't custom compile them.

If you check out my graphs on my system it shows total overall CPU usage for the server which takes into account all the other services I run. Take note when the Green "players connected" bar shows up in places and you'll see that it hardly ever goes above 50%. Due to the inactivity of my server recently, you may have to look at the weekly graphs to see anything.

<a href='http://www.vadakill.com/rrdtool' target='_blank'>http://www.vadakill.com/rrdtool</a>

CheesyPeteza

What tool are you using to create those statistics?

I run a separate combat and classic ns server both 18 players running on separate CPU's so its easy to spot that they both use the same cpu usage of about 60-70%.

model name : AMD Opteron™ Processor 246
cpu MHz : 1991.519
cache size : 1024 KB

Vadakill

<a href='http://www.qstat.org/' target='_blank'>Qstat</a> for player counts and map info and vmstat (ie command: vmstat 1 2) which is built into linux for cpu information. <a href='http://people.ee.ethz.ch/~oetiker/webtools/rrdtool/' target='_blank'>rrdtool</a> is used to build the graphs.