3 Sep
2011
3 Sep
'11
10:51 p.m.
Hey guys,
Does anyone have a Minecraft server running on there VPS? I am thinking
about running one on a Bitfolk VPS but I am not sure how successful it will
be, also let me know how much memory you have if you can :)
Thank you,
Daniel
3 Sep
3 Sep
11:42 p.m.
On Sat, 2011-09-03 at 23:51 +0100, Daniel Case wrote:
Hey guys,
Does anyone have a Minecraft server running on there VPS? I am
thinking about running one on a Bitfolk VPS but I am not sure how
successful it will be, also let me know how much memory you have if
you can :)
Thank you,
Daniel
_______________________________________________
users mailing list
users(a)lists.bitfolk.com
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http://canihostaminecraftserver.com/
Really, unless it's just you and a friend with only a handful of chunks
loaded you'll probably want 1GB of RAM and no other services running on
the server.
I ran a server just to test it out, and it was eating up ~300MB in
memory. That was just me, a house, a cow and two creepers :P
Hope that's helpful,
M
5 Sep
5 Sep
8:18 p.m.
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, and it was painful
enough to convince us to fork out a little bit for a Multiplay server
instead. The game is just far too resource-hungry to warrant running on the
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.
That's not to belittle Andy's VPS options - it's just the wrong hardware for
the job. A decent Minecraft server has very specific hardware requirements,
whereas with a VPS you're paying for flexibility rather than power, and
paying for both quickly becomes prohibitive.
Hope that helps a bit,
-Tom
On Sun, Sep 4, 2011 at 12:42 AM, Matt Molyneaux <moggers87(a)googlemail.com>wrote;wrote:
On Sat, 2011-09-03 at 23:51 +0100, Daniel Case wrote:
Hey guys,
Does anyone have a Minecraft server running on there VPS? I am
thinking about running one on a Bitfolk VPS but I am not sure how
successful it will be, also let me know how much memory you have if
you can :)
Thank you,
Daniel
_______________________________________________
users mailing list
users(a)lists.bitfolk.com
https://lists.bitfolk.com/mailman/listinfo/users
http://canihostaminecraftserver.com/
Really, unless it's just you and a friend with only a handful of chunks
loaded you'll probably want 1GB of RAM and no other services running on
the server.
I ran a server just to test it out, and it was eating up ~300MB in
memory. That was just me, a house, a cow and two creepers :P
Hope that's helpful,
M
_______________________________________________
users mailing list
users(a)lists.bitfolk.com
https://lists.bitfolk.com/mailman/listinfo/users
6 Sep
6 Sep
5:07 a.m.
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
8:48 a.m.
On Tue, 2011-09-06 at 05:07 +0000, Andy Smith wrote:
*snip*
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.
I think the trick is to put the world data in /dev/shm and have a script
that stops chunk saving while you rsync the copy in memory to disk once
every n minutes.
That does mean more RAM and the possibility of losing data, but it might
be worth trying.
M
2:58 p.m.
Andy said:
[1] I gather from
http://forums.multiplay.co.uk/feedback-bug-reports-etc/78738-vat
that Multiplay are not providing customers with VAT invoices,
Coo, not giving people VAT invoices is very naughty and HM R&C love to
hear about it.
I think they haven't got their head around the rules about where the
service is either.
Ian
17 Dec
17 Dec
3:57 p.m.
Hello,
Some of you may recall this thread about Minecraft in which it was
asked if it was possible to run a Minecraft server on a BitFolk VPS.
On Tue, Sep 06, 2011 at 05:07:13AM +0000, Andy Smith wrote:
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.
With the help of popey and the Ubuntu-UK Minecrafters we've done
some testing over the last few weeks, and did get something usable
when running with 1,200MiB RAM.
Here's some notes on that:
https://tools.bitfolk.com/wiki/Running_a_Minecraft_server
We have decided to keep the Minecraft server running[1] as a
semi-official bit of fun. If you're a Minecraft-playing customer and
would like to join in, we'll need to know your Minecraft account
name.
Log in to the panel and go to:
https://panel.bitfolk.com/fun/
and you'll find a place to type your Minecraft user name in. The
server's host name is also on that page.
More info:
https://tools.bitfolk.com/wiki/Minecraft
Have fun!
Cheers,
Andy
[1] It's still running in a Xen VM but not at BitFolk, as we
happened to have 4G of RAM spare elsewhere that can't be sold to
VPS customers, so would rather use that. The original test VM
was a BitFolk VPS however.
--
http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
The optimum programming team size is 1.
Has
Jurassic Park taught us nothing?
-- pfilandr
6 Sep
6 Sep
10:08 a.m.
Does anyone have a Minecraft server running on there
VPS? I am thinking
about running one on a Bitfolk VPS but I am not sure how successful it will
be, also let me know how much memory you have if you can :)
Hi Daniel,
I've been running one on a minimum-spec VPS for a number of months now
(even before the recent baseline RAM upgrades; currently 480 MiB) with
no problems although I've only had ~3 players on it :)
I found the best thing to do was to disable The Nether (edit
server.properties); this saves a lot of memory.
Cheers,
Lee
3:22 p.m.
New subject: Time drift on server
Hi all,
Have you encountered this before? It killed my Dovecot POP/IMAP server.
Sep 6 12:43:01 tegan kernel: BUG: soft lockup - CPU#0 stuck for 47s!
[swapper:0]
Sep 6 12:43:01 tegan kernel:
Sep 6 12:43:01 tegan kernel: Pid: 0, comm: swapper
Sep 6 12:43:01 tegan kernel: EIP: 0061:[<c04013a7>] CPU: 0
Sep 6 12:43:01 tegan kernel: EIP is at 0xc04013a7
Sep 6 12:43:01 tegan kernel: EFLAGS: 00000246 Not tainted
(2.6.18-194.11.3.el5xen #1)
Sep 6 12:43:01 tegan kernel: EAX: 00000000 EBX: 00000001 ECX: 00000000 EDX:
00000000
Sep 6 12:43:01 tegan kernel: ESI: 00000001 EDI: 00000000 EBP: 00000020 DS:
007b ES: 007b
Sep 6 12:43:01 tegan kernel: CR0: 8005003b CR2: b7f29000 CR3: 2cbde000 CR4:
00002660
Sep 6 12:43:01 tegan kernel: [<c0408616>] raw_safe_halt+0x8c/0xaf
Sep 6 12:43:01 tegan kernel: [<c040321a>] xen_idle+0x22/0x2e
Sep 6 12:43:01 tegan kernel: [<c0403339>] cpu_idle+0x91/0xab
Sep 6 12:43:01 tegan kernel: [<c0708a01>] start_kernel+0x37c/0x384
...
...
Sep 6 14:34:27 tegan ntpd[1229]: time reset -46.870263 s
independent_wallclock is set to 1 both in /proc and in sysctl.conf - but I
have recently installed a new CentOS kernel version but not yet booted into
it, and I seem to remember having clocking problems before.
Cheers
Jamie Stallwood
11:06 p.m.
New subject: Time drift on server
Hi Jamie,
On Tue, Sep 06, 2011 at 04:22:05PM +0100, Jamie Stallwood wrote:
Have you encountered this before? It killed my Dovecot
POP/IMAP server.
It's interesting that both you and Mathew are on the same server
(dunkel) and experienced this at roughly the same time.
Sep 6 14:34:27 tegan ntpd[1229]: time reset
-46.870263 s
independent_wallclock is set to 1 both in /proc and in sysctl.conf - but I
have recently installed a new CentOS kernel version but not yet booted into
it, and I seem to remember having clocking problems before.
Can you tell me the output of the following please:
cat /sys/devices/system/clocksource/clocksource0/available_clocksource
cat /sys/devices/system/clocksource/clocksource0/current_clocksource
Also have you verified that /proc/sys/xen/independent_wallclock is
actually still set to 1?
Cheers,
Andy
7 Sep
7 Sep
9:25 a.m.
New subject: Time drift on server
Hi Andy,
Parameters are below:
[root@tegan ~]# cat
/sys/devices/system/clocksource/clocksource0/available_clocksource
jiffies pit
[root@tegan ~]# cat
/sys/devices/system/clocksource/clocksource0/current_clocksource
jiffies
[root@tegan ~]# cat /proc/sys/xen/independent_wallclock
1
[root@tegan grub]# cat menu.lst
#boot=/dev/xvda
default=0
timeout=5
splashimage=(hd0,0)/boot/grub/splash.xpm.gz
hiddenmenu
title CentOS (2.6.18-194.11.3.el5xen)
root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.18-194.11.3.el5xen ro root=LABEL=root
initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.18-194.11.3.el5xen.img
I haven't explicitly set jiffies:
[root@tegan grub]# grep ^[^#] /etc/sysctl.conf
net.ipv4.ip_forward = 0
net.ipv4.conf.default.rp_filter = 1
net.ipv4.conf.default.accept_source_route = 0
kernel.sysrq = 0
kernel.core_uses_pid = 1
net.ipv4.tcp_syncookies = 1
kernel.msgmnb = 65536
kernel.msgmax = 65536
kernel.shmmax = 4294967295
kernel.shmall = 268435456
xen.independent_wallclock = 1
-----Original Message-----
From: users-bounces+vps-bitfolk=project76.net(a)lists.bitfolk.com
[mailto:users-bounces+vps-bitfolk=project76.net@lists.bitfolk.com] On Behalf
Of Andy Smith
Sent: 07 September 2011 00:07
To: users(a)lists.bitfolk.com
Subject: Re: [bitfolk] Time drift on server
Hi Jamie,
On Tue, Sep 06, 2011 at 04:22:05PM +0100, Jamie Stallwood wrote:
Have you encountered this before? It killed my Dovecot
POP/IMAP server.
It's interesting that both you and Mathew are on the same server
(dunkel) and experienced this at roughly the same time.
Sep 6 14:34:27 tegan ntpd[1229]: time reset
-46.870263 s
independent_wallclock is set to 1 both in /proc and in sysctl.conf - but I
have recently installed a new CentOS kernel version but not yet booted
into
it, and I seem to remember having clocking problems
before.
Can you tell me the output of the following please:
cat /sys/devices/system/clocksource/clocksource0/available_clocksource
cat /sys/devices/system/clocksource/clocksource0/current_clocksource
Also have you verified that /proc/sys/xen/independent_wallclock is
actually still set to 1?
Cheers,
Andy
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4753
days inactive
4858
days old
11 comments
8 participants
participants (8)
-
Andy Smith -
Daniel Case -
G. Miliotis -
Ian -
Jamie Stallwood -
Lee Gent -
Matt Molyneaux -
Tom Crosby