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[MINECRAFTdotNET-YT]

Hello Minecrafters!

I am the owner of http://www.youtube.c...MINECRAFTdotNET  12.300 members!

I am looking for server hosting, and all i can find is servers that host up to 100 people.

I want a server that could possibly host 500 people.

Please link me to any server hosting that will host over 100 people.

I want the server to be able to run 24/7 with as little lag as possible.

[chuckaknuckle]

Ha, 500 people? Even 100 people is pushing it. Finding a server that would handle that would cost a ton, if it's even technically feasible/possible to have that many people.

[Orcworm]

I can just imagine the in-game chat with 500 on.

[chuckaknuckle]

Orcworm said:

I can just imagine the in-game chat with 500 on.

Yeah, all the noobs posting about seeing Herobrine. *boom*

[rch]

What kind of budget are you looking at for a system like this? That might be a better metric to use to gauge the system you'd be able to get, instead of going off of some arbitrary guesstimate on the # of users.

I don't think anyone has had 500 users on a server at one time successfully.. but if someone has I'd love to meet them and ask them a ton of questions about hardware.

Also where is the majority of your user-base located? Are you looking for a US, EU, Canada or Asia based server?

[jarland]

rch said:

What kind of budget are you looking at for a system like this? That might be a better metric to use to gauge the system you'd be able to get, instead of going off of some arbitrary guesstimate on the # of users.

I don't think anyone has had 500 users on a server at one time successfully.. but if someone has I'd love to meet them and ask them a ton of questions about hardware.

Also where is the majority of your user-base located? Are you looking for a US, EU, Canada or Asia based server?

Custom built server to support distributed processing among 50 16 core machines with 1000mbit up/down each and SSDs?

Shh...just let me dream.

[Tibs]

Since the Minecraft server process will only run on one core, that is your bottle neck. Whatever the fastest per core processor you can find, maybe a xeon Intel W3690 or a i7 995X over clocked to 5 or 6ghz with ram(64G-96G) and 1gbit bandwitdh is about as fast as your going to get right now.

There are many plugins that support chat channels, that would solve the chat spam issues.

Bug notch and/or the bukkit team to support multiprocessors, then it will be easy to support 500 players on a server.

I want to re-enact Braveheart in Minecraft..

[rch]

Tibs said:

Bug notch and/or the bukkit team to support multiprocessors, then it will be easy to support 500 players on a server.

No we're really getting into the dream realm. Oh how easy hosting would be if the Minecraft team were to do this...

[dstruct2k]

The bigger issue is bandwidth. As I see it now, the current networking code must just be a temporary stand-in for future code.

Games like Garry's Mod (on the Source engine) can host 30+ players on a dual-core 3.2 GHz with 4 GB of RAM. And only use about 20-40 KB/s per player. Minecraft currently requires between 3-5x those specs to host the same number of players.

I understand the difference between "(near-unlimited) objects on a mapfile" (as in GMod's case) and "objects ARE the (unlimited) mapfile" (in the case of MC) but the simple fact is that the current code could probably stand to be optimized/replaced to lessen the hosting requirements significantly.

Also, in my experience, the bottleneck encountered on most servers is either RAM or bandwidth related. CPU power isn't usually a concern, although multithreading MC would still be nice.

[rch]

Huh? 4GB RAM to host 30 players? I've crammed 50+ on a 2.5GB system.

CPU is indeed an issue as well as disk i/o. Where exactly are you seeing 250kb/s per user? The average for one of our customers 20-30 person server has been about 300kb/s in the last 24 hours.

[Clinton]

We've built servers to get around 250-300 people. We've never done 500 though, that's quite a bit for any kind of gameserver. PM or instant message me if you want to get some help on a solution that would be good for you.

[Izraili]

Tibs said:

Since the Minecraft server process will only run on one core, that is your bottle neck. Whatever the fastest per core processor you can find, maybe a xeon Intel W3690 or a i7 995X over clocked to 5 or 6ghz with ram(64G-96G) and 1gbit bandwitdh is about as fast as your going to get right now.

My server seems to use more :/
I have a quadcore and it uses up to 50% at times, so i dont think this is right anymore or im just terribly wrong. On topic though, goodluck finding a 500 man server. Let me know when you do

[Tibs]

Lets be really conservative and say mc needs 150kbit/sec per player, in my experience it seems to be more around 80kbit.

500 players = 75mbit definitely achievable with today's hardware even if you doubled or tripled that a 1gbit link would handle it, so..
bandwidth is not an issue.

I have read a lot of different reports on how much ram you need. So it's harder to put a number on that, but if I was running a server for 500 people, I would want at least 64GB. with today's hardware systems can be built with 64G+ ram. 128-256GB is not very hard. 512GB is possible but damned expensive right now.
Ram is not an issue.

Disk access, you could run entirely from ram.. or ssd or raid or massive SAN with multi10gbit uplinks.
disk/io is not an issue.

Minecraft server will only use one core/cpu. It is not SMP/CMP. Current top end server processors are shipping with 6-12 cores currently and 16 core cpu's are right around the corner. Big servers will have more than one multi-core processor, 2 or 4 is common. So in the server world, we see anything from 4 to 64 core boxes becoming available. If you are running a Minecraft server on a 4 core cpu, it will at most ever use 25% of the systems available cpu power. Yes it is possible to offload some things like java gc to other threads, but this is not really doing much, if gc is tuned properly it's not going to consume that many resources. Ask around how many people see their server spike and use 100% of one core. This is the bottle neck.

CPU is the bottleneck.

With multiprocessor support, you would be able to fully use servers available resources and not need as much power to run a server.

I know this is not a simple thing to solve, its not just flipping some bit in the compiler and everything magically works. It's going to take some engineering, but its not impossible, and would improve things for the server providers considerably. Come on Notch we need this, we run all these servers for people to play your game, help us out here.

[PhonicUK]

I'm calling BS on this one.

EOT.

[Tapdragairsoft]

O.o Thats crazy... unless your some sort of millionaire.

But it's obviously possible, would cost lots.

[shroom]

This has been mentioned before, but the MC server is not multithreaded. MAYBE MAYBE MAYBE bukkit is, but I really don't know. I would go for 5 100 player servers, because expecting the 500 to fill is pushing it.

A lot.


EDIT: I would seriously consider breaking it up into so many servers, since someone has developed a bukkit plugin that links servers together. Buy VPSes or servers from brohoster, I don't care. I would break it up into 20 25 player servers, considering that, unless buying higher player count servers is cheaper by the player.

[MINECRAFTdotNET-YT]

Thanks for all the responses.

Looks like we will got for 100 slot servers

Is there many Minecraft servers about with 100 slots ?

Once our site launchs the plan now is to have 1 100 server, as soon as thats full create another server with a different concept. For example one server may have RPG plug in, one may be normal etc..

[shroom]

MINECRAFTdotNET-YT said:

Thanks for all the responses.

Looks like we will got for 100 slot servers

Is there many Minecraft servers about with 100 slots ?

Once our site launchs the plan now is to have 1 100 server, as soon as thats full create another server with a different concept. For example one server may have RPG plug in, one may be normal etc..

This is what I was talking about. What you're talking about is awesome. Send me the IPs.

[Clinton]

We build custom solutions for a few clients and currently host 100-300 slot servers. Feel free to contact me if you're interested or don't find someone else that meets your needs.

[PhonicUK]

The McMyAdmin stats tracker currently has data on 17 servers in the 100-200 player range. Most of them are owned directly by hosting companies as community/demo servers.

http://www.phonicuk....erverlist/#8491 << This server has a 200 player cap, sees around 60 players peak during weekdays.