On Sat, 2011-09-03 at 23:51 +0100, Daniel Case wrote: 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

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: Can you say how much RAM your VPS has, and how many Minecraft players you could comfortably have online before performance became unacceptable? 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. 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

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

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

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: It's interesting that both you and Mathew are on the same server (dunkel) and experienced this at roughly the same time. into 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 _______________________________________________ users mailing list users(a)lists.bitfolk.com https://lists.bitfolk.com/mailman/listinfo/users

On 17/12/2011 5:57 μμ, Andy Smith wrote: Yes, it has: keep your one dev happy. -- Με εκτίμηση, Γ. Μηλιώτης Elementality Υπηρεσίες Πληροφορικής corfiot(a)elementality.biz