Hi Andy,
At the time, I was running a Bitfolk VPS with 480MB RAM, but with rarely
more than 4 people online at the same time. The problem seemed to be less
related to the number of players and more to the size of the map over time -
the more people spread out and built things, the more had to be loaded in
memory while the server was running, as, for instance, just two people
standing at opposite ends of the world mean that two huge chunks of the
world need to be loaded at the same time. On a new, clean map, problems
were barely noticeable; after a month of play from just 4-6 people, the
entire VPS was barely responsive while Minecraft was running, and the
Minecraft server swamped the entire available RAM and swap even with just
one person online in a well-built area. I don't know enough about how
Multiplay set up their servers to fully know the hardware differences
involved, but running a huge, well-developed map on a 1GB RAM Multiplay
server presents no problems, while running the same map now on my Bitfolk
VPS at half the RAM would almost certainly have proved impossible.
The numbers provided for maximum players per RAM size struck me as a touch
inadequate, knowing how much RAM the same map had required when running on
my VPS, which is why we chose to to go for 1GB instead of 600MB. While
they're not cheap, and it's certainly possible you could undercut them with
more information on the technical requirements (I suspect you're right about
IOPS), the differences in noticeable performance are quite staggering, which
suggests that the hardware requirements for a well-developed map are likely
a little on the ridiculous side.
I'd be willing to help out with some interesting diagnostic testing on a
server if it'd help establish these sorts of requirements more concretely.
I know I'd personally rather have a Minecraft server running on a Bitfolk
VPS than a Multiplay one - for all their slickness, I miss being able to
roll a new Bukkit build when it's released and test experimental plugins,
rather than waiting for someone to pull their finger out and install the
latest Recommended Build.
Ta,
Tom
On Tue, Sep 6, 2011 at 6:07 AM, Andy Smith <andy(a)bitfolk.com> wrote:
> Hi Tom,
>
> Thanks for your reply, I was hoping you would chip in given your
> experience here.
>
> On Mon, Sep 05, 2011 at 09:18:32PM +0100, Tom Crosby wrote:
> > Honestly, you're really going to struggle to run anything for more than a
> > couple of people, and once you've done a decent bit of exploring and
> > building it's going to become unplayable unless you've really opted for a
> > reasonably huge amount of RAM - and then you're looking at quite an
> > expensive VPS for the purposes of running one game. I ran a server for a
> > handful of people for quite some time on a Bitfolk VPS
>
> Can you say how much RAM your VPS has, and how many Minecraft
> players you could comfortably have online before performance became
> unacceptable?
>
> > it was painful enough to convince us to fork out a little bit for
> > a Multiplay server instead.
>
> Looking at multiplaygameservers.com they seem to suggest that you
> should be able to fit the following amounts of players into these
> amounts of memory dedicated to the Minecraft server:
>
> Memory (MiB) | Max # of players
> -------------+-----------------
> 200 | 4
> 600 | 17
> 1024 | 35
> 2048 | 53
>
> Now, it does say that this is the absolute minimum memory, and that
> large maps may require more. Also bear in mind that they appear to
> be hosting off of SSDs which will likely be providing more IOPS than
> a BitFolk VPS.
>
> Can you say how much memory your Multiplay server has, and how many
> players you're able to support?
>
> It strikes me that 600MiB is not a huge amount of memory to dedicate
> to Minecraft and that 17 players may be plenty for some people. The
> IOPS may be an issue however.
>
> > sort of VPS setup that's likely to be affordable - you're much better off
> > getting something that's far less flexible but far more geared towards
> the
> > purpose.
>
> I've no idea how comparable a 720MiB VPS would be to a 600MiB
> Multiplay server, but the VPS will set you back £137.88/year inc.
> VAT, whereas the Multiplay server would be £153.00/year inc. VAT.[1]
>
> Conversely, for £167.88/year inc VAT you can have a 960MiB VPS.
>
> I'd be interested in finding out what the IOPS requirements are for
> a Minecraft server. I suspect they are quite high otherwise Multiplay
> wouldn't be using SSDs.
>
> Multiplay's prices seem quite high given that what you appear to get
> is a VPS dedicated to Minecraft, backed by SSD. Possibly I'm
> missing something. If not then I'm confident that I could undercut
> them with servers I have taken out of service for being too slow for
> VPS hosting, but with disks replaced by an SSD or two.
>
> The problem is that I don't know what the shelf life of Minecraft
> is, and I haven't got time to be playing computer games to work out
> what I could host next, nor to be replicating Multiplay's quite
> slick interface. I'd do all the work and then most likely Minecraft
> would become old hat and no one would want to buy servers for it.
> i.e. I don't see a way for me to make a product out of this.
>
> There's spare memory capacity at the moment. If anyone would like
> to experiment with how usable a Minecraft server is on a BitFolk VPS
> at various levels of RAM then I'd be willing to let you do that
> for free provided you write up your findings.
>
> Such VPSes would be purely for testing Minecraft though and once I
> need to sell the resources I'd have to convert you to a paying
> customer or end the arrangement.
>
> Also at the moment I am exploring caching block devices with SSDs.
> Once I have a server in that configuration colocated then it would
> be worth repeating the experiments to see if/how that improves
> matters.
>
> Finally, I might be willing to provide a single BitFolk Minecraft
> server free of charge for use by BitFolk customers (only), if any of
> you would actually use it. I personally probably wouldn't have time
> and I'm aware that several of you are running your own Minecraft
> servers already, and realise you probably want to focus your
> Minecraft attentions there. :)
>
> Cheers,
> Andy
>
> [1] I gather from
> http://forums.multiplay.co.uk/feedback-bug-reports-etc/78738-vat
> that Multiplay are not providing customers with VAT invoices, so
> those outside the EU are paying VAT when they don't need to, and
> VAT registered customers may find it difficult to claim back the
> VAT. Not that I imagine there are many business users of a
> Minecraft server...
>
> --
> http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
>
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>
>
> _______________________________________________
> users mailing list
> users(a)lists.bitfolk.com
> https://lists.bitfolk.com/mailman/listinfo/users
>
>
I've just had an interesting problem turn up: I replied to an email
on a kernel.org mailing list. There were Chinese characters near the
top of the original mail. On its way out through my mail hub, the mail
was run through the Bitfolk spamassassin, which added its usual two
headers: one with the spam score in it, and one with a horribly
mangled extract of the original mail. This mail got rejected by
vger.kernel.org on the grounds that it doesn't accept UTF-8 in mail
headers.
Is there any way I can get the X-frost.carfax.org.uk-Spam-Report:
header either suppressed completely, or (in preference) without the
content of the original message in it?
I'm guessing the answer is "not without running your own
spamassassin", since this is a shared service, but I thought I'd ask
anyway, just in case...
Hugo.
--
=== Hugo Mills: hugo@... carfax.org.uk | darksatanic.net | lug.org.uk ===
PGP key: 515C238D from wwwkeys.eu.pgp.net or http://www.carfax.org.uk
--- This year, I'm giving up Lent. ---
Hello peeps. New here (looks around nervously).
I'm migrating from Gandi (gandi.fr, somewhere near Paris) and
was a bit surprised that my "rsync -azP" seemed to be shifting only
about one megabyte a second. Any ideas? AFAIK both ends are
sitting on fairly fat pipes so I would have hoped for a bit
better.
In case you haven't already heard:
----- Forwarded message from Jan Henkins -----
Hello there,
Forwarding this to official support due to it's importance (should have
done this earlier!). Please pass this on to the Bitfolk list!
Since I've sent the below message, I have found a mitigation strategy for
Debian:
1) Create /etc/apache2/conf.d/setenvif with the following content:
---star---
<IfModule mod_setenvif.c>
# Drop the Range header when more than 5 ranges.
# CVE-2011-3192
SetEnvIf Range (,.*?){5,} bad-range=1
RequestHeader unset Range env=bad-range
# optional logging.
CustomLog /var/log/apache2/range-CVE-2011-3192.log common
env=bad-range
</IfModule>
---end---
Be advised that the above should not work out of the box, since "headers"
module was not enabled by default (this could be the actual Debian and
Ubuntu standard).
2) Enable the headers and rewrite modules:
a2enmod headers
a2enmod rewrite
3) Restart apache
---------------------------- Original Message ----------------------------
Subject: Apache 1.* and 2.* vulnerability
From: "Jan Henkins"
Date: Thu, August 25, 2011 11:00
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hello Andy,
Sorry for not posting this to the Bitfolk list directly, I'm on my
web-mail (didn't put the mailing list address in my address book), so
please consider passing this on.
Yesterday a nasty Apache DoS vuln was released. So far all versions of
Apache is affected by this. Here are some advisories:
RedHat:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=732928
Debian:
https://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/httpd-announce/201108.mbox/%3C201…
While I have not managed to work out a mitigation strategy for
Ubuntu/Debian servers, the following works rather nicely on RHEL5 and
RHEL6 (so could be good to go for CentOS too):
Create /etc/httpd/conf.d/setenvif.conf with the following:
<IfModule mod_setenvif.c>
# Drop the Range header when more than 5 ranges.
# CVE-2011-3192
SetEnvIf Range (,.*?){5,} bad-range=1
RequestHeader unset Range env=bad-range
# optional logging.
CustomLog /your/log/dir/range-CVE-2011-3192.log common
env=bad-range
</IfModule>
Restart apache
That should do it nicely! :-)
More reading here:
http://eromang.zataz.com/2011/08/24/cve-2011-3192-apache-httpd-killer-remot…
Please pass on to the Bitfolk community at your discretion.
--
Regards,
Jan Henkins
--
Regards,
Jan Henkins
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Hi,
We've had reports that the password reset feature of the panel is
broken at the moment.
Some new code was pushed live a few days ago and this obviously got
past testing. I am working on fixing this as a top priority, but in
the mean time if you do require a password reset please:
1. Check to see if we've fixed it yet
2. If not, contact support@ requesting reset
3. Use phone if urgent and you haven't received confirmation that
it's been done yet
I do expect it to be fixed today.
https://tools.bitfolk.com/redmine/issues/80
Apologies for the inconvenience.
Cheers,
Andy
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Hi,
With immediate effect we are moving to a calendar monthly /
quarterly / yearly billing cycle instead of a rigid 30 / 90 / 360
day cycle.
This was requested in:
https://tools.bitfolk.com/redmine/issues/13
You do not need to take any action. You will effectively get 5 or 6
days of additional service per year compared to before.
Cheers,
Andy
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I know there is a lot of discussion on this topic going around at the
moment. I was just wondering if the site-blocking will be enforced on our
VPS's, is Bitfolk the kind of ISP they are going for? Do bitfolk have to now
monitor our connection packets? I'm aware that they say they are going for
compyright-infringing sites...but it seems like a slippery slope down to me
(where does it stop, YouTube has plenty of fan videos) and I'm sure a lot of
you are with me on the issue of freedom of speech, i'm fairly sure before
long we will have the "Great Firewall Of Britain"
Thank you,
Daniel
Hello,
There was a request to provide an additional non-standard port for
SSH which would have relaxed Fail2Ban settings:
https://tools.bitfolk.com/redmine/issues/75
This is now done, and the additional port is 922. You won't be
blocked by Fail2Ban on that port no matter how many times you fail
your password.
I would also like to remind you that SSH key upload is also
supported, which you may prefer to password auth:
https://panel.bitfolk.com/account/security/
Cheers,
Andy
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Hello,
As you may be aware, CentOS 6 was released recently. We've also had
requests to investigate another RHEL clone, Scientific Linux.
Here's the feature request for CentOS 6:
https://tools.bitfolk.com/redmine/issues/77
If you read that, you'll see there's a bit of a problem with not
being able to specify partitioning details in the text mode
installer any longer.
I'm not sure of the best way to proceed with this, so it would be
really helpful if any customers with a stake (i.e., if you're likely
to want to run CentOS / SL 6 at some point in the future) could log
in at the above URL and update the feature request with your
thoughts.
Replying to this email instead is OK too, though it'd be nicer to
keep it all in the feature tracker.
Thanks!
Andy
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Hi,
I was hoping to only mention this much closer to the time when it
could actually happen, but a few people have been asking about this
so I thought it was only fair to give an update.
TL;DR version:
We're planning to soon double the amount of RAM offered for the
current price. You'll be contacted individually when this can
happen; hopefully it just happens, but if you're unlucky then you
might need to be migrated or keep the same amount of RAM for a lower
price instead. Do not panic. You can stop reading now. :)
Longer version:
For a while now it has been clear to us that BitFolk has fallen
behind its competitors in how much RAM we offer for a given price
point, and I wanted to reassure you that I have been taking steps to
remedy this. These have included:
- 56GiB of RAM installed across several machines at the recent
maintenance at the end of February.
- Ongoing migration of all customers off of dunkel.bitfolk.com so
that some non-urgent hardware maintenance and a RAM upgrade can be
done.
- New server with 48GiB RAM being prepared for colo now.
We are hoping to double the RAM allocation for the same price, i.e.
the smallest VPS will come with 480MiB RAM and additional RAM may be
purchased 240MiB at a time.
We could of course just offer this right now to new customers, but I
really dislike it when existing customers are not offered the same
deal as new, even if it does make some business sense to chase the
new. So, I'm holding back from doing that until I know it will be
possible to apply the upgrade to the majority of existing customers.
I can't give any firm timescale for this right now; it's going to
happen as soon as possible.
For many customers this is all going to be very simple; you'll
receive an email that says "congrats, shut down and boot again to
enjoy twice as much RAM". That's it. Unfortunately for some of you
it's not going to be possible to "just do it".
Some of you will be on hosts that cannot be economically upgraded.
8GiB DDR2 DIMMs are stupidly expensive; it's cheaper to buy new
machines with 8GiB DDR3. Here's how it's going to work:
Customers with 240 or 360MiB RAM will be upgraded first. That's
because 240 and 360MiB plans won't be available to new customers
afterwards. If we can't upgrade you because the host is out of
RAM then you will be offered migration[1] to a host that does have
enough RAM. If there's no host available with enough RAM then you
will remain with the same amount of RAM and your future renewals
will be cheaper, however we will upgrade you to at least 480MiB RAM
as soon as we can and you will have no choice in this.[2]
Next, customers with 480MiB or more RAM will be upgraded. If we
can't upgrade you then you'll stay with the RAM you have, at the
lower cost.[3]
As soon as we start upgrading people, the new plans will be
available to new customers, although we may run out of capacity
quickly due to upgrading existing customers. Once this happens,
please don't try to cancel your monthly contract and sign up again
to get the extra RAM quicker; I would hope to have upgraded everyone
that I can within a couple of days of starting. :)
As usual if anyone wants to downgrade then they will be free to do
so from their next contract renewal.
However, if:
- you currently have 480MiB or more of RAM *and*;
- you know you don't need twice as much as you have now *and*;
- you're definitely going to ask to be downgraded back towards what
you started with;
then it would be helpful if you could email support(a)bitfolk.com with
your VPS account name and the amount of RAM you'd like to end up
with. We *may* be able to both downgrade you (and give you some
service credit back) and use that RAM to give to someone else. No
promises though; you may have to wait until your next renewal as
normal.
If you have any questions about all this then please just hit reply
to direct them to the users list, or send an email to
support(a)bitfolk.com if you'd rather discuss off-list.
Cheers,
Andy
[1] Migrating your VPS between hosts will require us to shut it down
and then boot it up again, with something like 5-10 minutes of
downtime in between. If a migration is necessary then we'll
contact you individually to co-ordinate the work.
[2] While you may be satisfied that 240 or 360MiB RAM is adequate
for you, I don't want to keep lots of custom plans going and I
don't want to bill below £8.99/mo if possible.
[3] e.g. If you're on 480MiB RAM, 10GiB disk, 100GB/mo data transfer
then that currently costs £13.99/mo. If we couldn't upgrade you
to 960MiB RAM then you will remain on 480MiB but the plan will
only cost you £8.99/mo from your next renewal.
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