Dedicated servers with larger player counts

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wesley7611

New member
A few friends and I have been looking for a new server since our old one wiped, and eventually started looking into the possibility of starting our own as we couldnt find one to our liking.

The other server we played on began to really struggle when 20+ players were connected, it was a hosted service with prioritised CPU usage, not too sure about CPU clock speed and RAM though, but the admins were insistant that it would not be possible to increase performance with that provider, so im assuming they maxed avaialble RAM and clock speed.

My question is, if we were to start a server with say a 30-40 player cap, what would be the best approach to take in terms of hosting? I have a few machines lying about that I could potentially recommission as a decicated server at home with a few hardeare upgrades. If so, what kind of specifications would I need to meet? The only information I can find so far seems to be for smaller player counts.

If this isnt feasible or affordable, are there any game server hosting services I can use? Or would I need to rent a decicated server? I have looked into some, the max memory/CPU available on a VM seems to be around 16GB with 4.2GHz clock speed on NVme, would this be sufficient for a larger player count?

Thanks in advance x

 
One reason why you probably don't find information about performance on huge player counts is that the multiplayer officially only supports 8 players.

The other one might be: It depends.

I don't think CPU power is needed at a linear increase with player count, at least i didn't see noticable increase of cpu usage between 2 or 6 players. But it's heavily affected by the zombiecount. So it will be an issue during blood moons when each player spawns lots of Zs. It does multithreading already... at least a little bit. It doesn't scale that good from what i saw, so much cores on the cpu will not really fix this problem.

Regards of RAM for me it looks like the server holds the entire map in memory all the time. So player count doesn't affect ram usage noticable too. But your map size does. A 10K (nitrogen) map makes my server use 10-12GB permanently.

Some kind of mods will also affect cpu and memory usage like custom POIs. Don't know if you plan to use mods.

If you plan on doing such "huge" things i recommend using an own dedicated server as from my experience access to these hosted server is very limited and if you ran into problems you can't even look into system looks or track cpu/ram usage directly (as they are shared, not even neccessarilly on 7d2d server as one VM).

In A17 i ran a server on a Xeon E3-1225v3 with 16GB RAM for 10 players without any problems. CPU was mostly bored and also sufficient for blood moons and the 16GB RAM wasn't fully used.

Haven't looked on Disk-IO yet, but as the dedicated seems to keep everything in memory anyway and my server runs from an hdd i guess there is no problem. The other way round: I assume a nvme won't give you any performance gain (maybe starting up the server faster but not in performance while running the server).

 
Region data access uses a lot of disk IO, so if you have several people on using vehicles, you'll want to have a fast SSD at a minimum. Personally, two SSD's in RAID or one NVMe is preferable.

 
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