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[HELP] Game servers required resources
Hi guys,
I'm a newbie when it comes to game servers stuff and I want to run a few game servers for some friends but I'm not sure about required recourses, Is a VPS enough(1or 2GB Ram+ 1vCPU + 30GB or more of storage)?
Games are (will be installed separately) :
1- CS: GO (20+ slots)
2- CS: CZ (20+ slots)
3- Day of defeat (source as well) (20+ slots)
4- GTA San Andreas (50+ slots)
Maybe more games later
Edit: I tried installing on VPS and everything was fine but because there were no players the load was very low
Thanks in advance guys
Comments
monitor with usage, since CS:GO and CS:? servers can get CPU hungry. Also DoD and SAMP require more of a good disk/io throughput and memory. I think you'd be better of with a little bigger of a VM.
Edit: could you also post the output of a ''df -h'' to see disk usage?
You need a dedicated server or at least a VPS with dedicated cores. I run a 8 slot fps game server on an $25/month old i3 dedicated server and it still lags sometimes when all 8 slots are full. Or maybe you can go with gameservers.com, they have lots of locations and relatively cheap price. It's also easier to manage since everything is done through their control panel.
Hosting FPS games on a VPS with only 1 shared core is really a bad idea. Your server might get throttled or even suspended depending on providers.
You need a dedicated server to run so many gameservers assuming they get populated. If you try to run this all on shared core VPS, the CPU will be maxed out and server fps will drop to under 10 while even the RAM won't be enough lol.
You can run them empty without problems, but if you don't want to have lag when they are populated, invest in a dedicated server.
I would go for an E3 or E5 or Ryzen server with at least 16 GB RAM and SSD's. 100Mbps port will also be saturated if you are gonna run fastdl server for the source games while all servers are populated, so go for 1Gbps if possible.
Cheapest options would be SoYouStart, Hetzner and Kimsufi
nevermind.
What?
Could probably get away with a SmartHost vps since it has 4 shared cores, would recommend 1GB ram per server plus SSD
CSGO 14 slot runs fine on Intel Atom aka KS1.
The games you have listed are not really resource intensive.
2GB could get tight, besides only 1VCore, I would suggest at least 2.
Thanks a lot guys I didn't get VPS/dedi yet it was just an example
Been running multiple csgo servers on various vps' and dedis for about 6 years now.
RAM usage depends completely on player count and which mods/plugins you are running and can vary between 512MB and 4GB per instance.
Network usage depends on playercount, tickrate, cmdrate, and updaterate but you should expect about 1TB bandwidth usage per month, per instance, and an average of about 2mbps per player (although this increases too as player counts increase, 2mbps would be at around 20 players).
Use a separate download server in order to reduce player download times and save your gameserver resources for the important work. Don't let players download files directly from your gameserver machine. There are cvars for this.
The csgo server itself is about 20GBs in size, and is constantly increasing. Typically when it updates, it needs to download a large patch which can itself be up to another 20GBs, so while updating, you could already be at 40GBs disk used, before it replaces the old version (unless you add some logic to uninstall your old server before an update begins, which ends up saving disk space, but increases your network usage and time to update). Maps, models, materials, sounds, logs, plugins, plugin-related data, database, all take up additional space. On my servers, this runs about 40GBs extra. And yes, I do think it's a good idea to run your databases on the same machines as your gameserver instances are running on (in most cases). And if you are going to be running a database on your gameserver machines like this, than it's very nice to be using a raid 10 SSD to increase database performance, although not at all necessary! A regular, slow, non raid 10 hard drive actually works perfectly fine. In summary you probably want about 100GBs of space for things to be easy. Or if you don't mind headaches and problems, you can make due with about 40-50GBs...
For the best performance, you want a dedicated server with a high cpu clock, and 1-2 cores dedicated to each gameserver instance.
For budget performance, you want multiple VPS', one for each gameserver instance.
OpenVZ6 gives the best performance. In my testing, I haven't found a single KVM vps that performed adequately. Stay away from KVM for gameservers... I've heard that xen is ok but I haven't tried.
1 dedicated core, with the highest clock possible. Or 2 can be better if you enable experimental multithreading cvars to offload some of the tasks onto the second core. No point in going higher than 2, srcds does not support multithreading in general.
I would seriously advise more ram
Thanks alot @Syntats that's very helpful
Will Netcup RS 1000 G8 be a good choice for 1 game server? it's 8GB of Ram + 2 dedicated cores + 40GB SSD or 320GB SAS + 1 Gbit/s connection (it's KVM BTW)
https://www.netcup.de/vserver/#root-server-details
The specs seem very impressive for the price. It's good value. Although you won't be using even half of the resources of the machine with just one gameserver. So a lot of the value would be wasted were you to just run one gameserver on it.
They advertise 1gbps port speed but it doesn't seem like they mention the monthly bandwidth cap, so that might be something to ask them.
Even though it's KVM, they do offer an extremely high cpu clock speed, which MIGHT offset KVM's kernel latency.
They do offer a 30-day money back guarantee, so it could be worth trying it out just to see how it runs?
If you're going to try it out:
Set up a vanilla csgo server with 20 slots. (add parameter -maxplayers_override 20)
Choose the server tickrate for your application but keep in mind that tickrate is generally proportional to cpu usage. Default is 64 (no parameter). Competitive leagues use 128. (add parameter -tickrate 128).
Join the server as a client.
Fill the server up with bots by entering "bot_quota 19" in the gameserver console to start stress testing.
In your client console enter "net_graph 1". Record the average+max sv and var values at the bottom of your screen.
For max performance, both values should be under 1ms. But for some gamemodes, or less "competitive" servers, higher values are "ok". 1-4ms sv is typical for a lot of servers.
To reason whether your higher values are ok, join another community server who's gamemode approximates what you will be running on your server. Compare your values to theirs... And post your results here too because I would like to know
And if all goes exceedingly well with one gameserver on the machine, try two? Give each srcds process 1 dedicated core. See what you can get away with.
I think it's unmetered as there smaller VPSes gets 40 TB of bandwidth(Edit: it's 80 TB per month then connection limited to 10 Mbit/s )They are very popular here on LET BTW
I will give it a try this weekend or earlier if I got time and will let you know
I think the 320GB SAS sotrage would be a better choice than the 40GB of SSD, Right?
Thanks for your help
Awesome, not a problem then.
That's definitely the better choice. I don't think an SSD would be worth the hassle.
Very cool. Good luck!