here's the deal.

i'm getting a high-speed connection soon, so i figure, why not have a 24/7 dedicated server? i managed to find an old computer lying around the house, so i put windows xp on it. turns out it has three fans as well. the only problem is, it has 96mb of ram.

i'm planning to add 768mb of ram to it, totaling to 864mb, but is this much really necessary? i plan to run four servers on it, but only two will be used heavily.

feedback would be appreciated, as i do not want to waste money on unnessessarry (hate that word) ram.

btw, amd athlon 2.4 ghz.

I think it is better to have a unix operating sistem installed on the comp than win...
And you were talking about 4 servers, that isn't a good idea unless you have a very high u/d rate

i know i should be running a better os, but i was brought up on microsuck. i never learned other systems.

my online service says i'll be getting 200kbps on average, so i guess that means no chainsaw only pointmatch or soldat bar servers. will two servers work alright? one being a pub with max 10 people, the other being private with a 14 person limit and 200 as max ping?

Soldat uses 10kbit/sec down and up for each player I guess (20kbit total) so 10 players would really be the maximum I think.

Is that an AMD64 athlon or an XP / sempron ?
If it's a 64Bit you should definitely change OS so the OS supports 64bits (Windows (except WinXP Pro x86) doesn't support 64 bit and will run in 32bit).
Also RAM is one of the most imprtant things after bandwidth I think , so if you're running 4 servers I'd get atleast 1GB (800 is close though).

Anyway , I'm not too sure of all I said , FliesLikeABrick should know this one very well.

Grtz , DePhille

soldat (and almost any game) server's resource usage is not linear: so if it uses 5% of something with 10 players, it will not use 10% of that resource with 20 players. This mainly applies to CPU and connection usage.

From my experience:
-a 10-12 player soldat server will spike at 20Kilobyte per second upload bandwidth
-A 10-12 player soldat server will run fine on anything faster than 500mhz. For a long time I ran a popular 8 player server on a computer with dual 350mhz processors.
-The more RAM the better, but 256/512 should be fine (512+ for windows)

Your processor is more than enough for 4 servers, esp if only 2 are used frequently. Find out what your upload limit (cap) is for your connection, aka how fast you can upload. This will most likely be the limit to how many servers you can run and how many players can play in each.

Feel free to ask any questions, I'd be glad to answer them. See the link below for the reply I gave someone on a similar question a week or two ago.


http://www.soldatforums.com/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=29744

thanks brick. that's just the information i needed. expect to see some new public servers soon :D

Brick , what about the download bandwidth , how much does it use? the same?
And I think you may be a bit off on upload. My upload cap is 25KByte/sec and I can maximum run a 6-8 player server before everyone gets 300+ ping , I don't remember what my upload rate was when I did run such a server but I do know it was at the maximum (so prolly 25KByte/sec).
But i'm not the one running alot of dedicated servers and my ISP isn't too good ;)

Also , if you're running alot of servers at the same time try turning off logging to increase performance , but that's just a basic trick.


Grtz , DePhille

well, since file logging seems to be screwed up in 1.3.1, i don't have any reason to.

Haha , yea ur right :)
Anyway , I think it'll be fixed soon.

Hang on , especially with 1.3.1 that file logging feature is going to make alot of diffrence , it keeps on creating empty logs every 1 minute or so!
Anyway , you won't turn on logging unless you're intrested in empty logs.

Grtz , DePhille

everyone running a 1.3.1 server now should turn off file-logging so they don't flood their filesystem with "empty" logs.

The download bandwidth is typically less, but that isn't an issue, because any connection usually can upload far less than download, thus making that the bottleneck


edit: i'm not off on my guess. Just becuase your cap was 25KB doesn't mean that soldat could get the full bandwith it needed as soon as it needed it, creating the lag. it matters not only on the throughput of your connection, but also the latency