PC Dedicated server requirements

S

Spatch

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Does a dedicated server need a huge video card or does the video processing all happen on the clients?  I'm building a Linux server to host local games and don't really want to have to buy a top-notch video card for the dedicated server.

What is a good setup for a dedicated server?  CPU, Mobo, memory requirements, etc.

TIA

 
No videocard needed, except if you want to create huge randomgen worlds on that server in less than a few hours (a videocard gets only used for generating randomgen worlds, without it it takes considerably longer).

Any modern desktop CPU with at least 4 cores will be good enough. SSD is important, 16G RAM is enough if it is a private server for you and your friends, otherwise 32G might give some emergency breathing room. I think someone once posted a formula with RAM= 4G+users*500M, not sure if it is accurate anymore or I remember correctly.

 
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Spatch said:
Does a dedicated server need a huge video card or does the video processing all happen on the clients?  I'm building a Linux server to host local games and don't really want to have to buy a top-notch video card for the dedicated server.

What is a good setup for a dedicated server?  CPU, Mobo, memory requirements, etc.

TIA
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I use a scrap video card I had laying around on our current dedicated server. As mentioned, it doesn't generate maps very well but I usually do that on my gaming rig first using Nitrogen. Then, I go in single player and check the map for bugs/weird layouts. If it passes muster, I just copy the world to my Gaming Server and make it public. I host 16 players on a relatively older 3.6Ghz I-7, 16GB of RAM and a Samsung EVO Series SSD. It rarely peaks over 50% of RAM usage and the CPU sits around 10% except for Bloodmoons. It's got enough oomph that I can simultaneously host either 5 ARK islands for a few (around 4-5) users or an Astroneer Server in the background with no issues. I haven't tried to host all 3 games at once yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if it could based upon what I've seen. The size of my map and how many zombies on screen at the same time have affected the performance the most. 16K maps - Clients with only 8GB of RAM have great difficulty loading our larger maps/playing. 12K seems to be the cap size for most of our clients despite the server not struggling at all.   

 
I'm not sure if the requirements have changed now we're in 19.1 b8, but I have a server with 12 cores and 32 GB ram and with 4 people on playing a horde night it got pretty laggy. 

Would you suggest adding more CPU cores to it? 

 
MeaTLoTioN said:
I'm not sure if the requirements have changed now we're in 19.1 b8, but I have a server with 12 cores and 32 GB ram and with 4 people on playing a horde night it got pretty laggy.
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Take look at the system load in detail before assuming what to upgrade. If the cpu is not at full use or at least some cores at 100%, a cpu upgrade will help nothing.

From what i saw in previous versions, 7d2d seems to be locked to few cores in some cases. E.g. structural integrity calculation doesn't seem to use all cores, but only few.

Just my assumption: More cores won't help much. If the limit is caused by the CPU, most likely a CPU with higher per-core-perfomance might help more.

Since you didn't mention your system specs, not that e.g. some "real" server-cpus of the Xeon-family have many cores but their frequency is very low ( often < 3Ghz). They may have much power with multicore, but the per-core-perfomance is often really underwhelming.

 
Take a look at your network upload speeds as well. Was everybody complaining of lag at the same time? What is your per-player zombie setting for horde night and what is your gamestage?

 
Also not only the CPU from the server needs to handle the load. Your own PC needs a good CPU too. No matter how good the server CPU is, when the players have a weak cpu it will still lag. But for example 64 zombies will cause lag even on a top notch CPU.

 
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Boidster said:
Take a look at your network upload speeds as well. Was everybody complaining of lag at the same time? What is your per-player zombie setting for horde night and what is your gamestage?
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The network upload speeds are fine, my server is in a data centre with no limit to the throughput it can handle (perks of working for a data centre 😁).

MaxSpawnedZombies was set to 64. I have just reduced it to 32 and once I can restart the server I will know whether that is any better. (This very well may have been the answer but until I can restart it I cannot be sure)

pApA^LeGBa said:
Also not only the CPU from the server needs to handle the load. Your own PC needs a good CPU too. No matter how good the server CPU is, when the players have a dual core with 2ghz it will still lag.
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I can't speak for everyone, but I know at least 2 of the 4 people in the party has great setups. Myself I have an RTX 2060 super, 32GB ram on a ryzen 5 3600X.

I think my last comment maybe the answer though, we'll see soon enough.

Thanks for the advice guys. Appreciate it.

 
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Another thing I have run into - Someone on my server has a bad ping (200 for example)...affects all of us. 

 
Surprised no one mentioned HDD speeds yet, although I didn't read all the necroed posts so maybe it was there. Running the client and save data from SSD is almost a requirement for a dedicated server.

As mentioned, host bandwidth will play a large factor as well. 

 
I run multiple dedis on a 2010-ish server with 8 cores and 32GB RAM. Games are on an SSD on SATAII. We get a little lag when multiple people go off into new areas, but otherwise we don't really have any problems with 4 players even on horde nights.

 
Just a suggestion:

Whether you use in-game generation or NitroGen, generate your maps on your gaming computer to avoid needing to wait a week before playing them, then upload them to the server, so all you need is the basic requirements to run the game server.

 
SylenThunder said:
Surprised no one mentioned HDD speeds yet, although I didn't read all the necroed posts so maybe it was there. Running the client and save data from SSD is almost a requirement for a dedicated server.
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I'm running a server on a xeon 1225v3 (äquivalent to the i5-4570, 4 core, no HT, so from 2013!), previously ran with 16GB RAM (now 32GB, because even multiple servers for different games are running in parallel), with a Debian Linux with KVM as host (on old 128GB SSD), and the 7d2d server running from within a virtualized Win10 (old 5400rpm 500GB HDD). So much much weaker system as told here, and most likely with much more software overhead.

I had this running on A18 with a maximum of 9 players and we still just got little lags on bloodmoon (all default settings), however the server was at 100% load.

Current server (A19) is running on a Phenom II X6 1100T (6-core, from 2010, so even older) which is in overal performance on par with my xeon (but divided to 6 cores, so single thread performance is LESS). It also runs Linux KVM with 7d2d server from a virtualized Win10. It's a friends server so i don't have detailed information about what disks it uses and how the server load looks like... on this server we only played with 2 players, but doubled zombies per player (16) and still absolutely no performance issues.

Afaik 12-core CPUs that are weaker than those two don't even exist. Maybe their singlethread performance is a little less, or maybe the cpu doesn't have 12 cores, but only 6 cores with SMT. Whatever, such a CPU should be just fine. That's why i said, look at the load first. I guess, the issue is NOT the CPU.

Could also be a bandwith problem. I can't tell because both my servers have 50Mbit/s upload, so way enough, and the 9-player scenario was even with all 9 players in a LAN.

 
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