Perforce or Git Storage Server

[SiTime]

I'm looking into building a dedicated server for my perforce source control system for the game I'm developing.

 

My question is what are your recommendations for the sort of setup/configuration required for handling this sort task well. I would like redundancy and speed.

Assume a 4k budget but would like a local and offsite setup.

 

Thanks

[asquirrel]

Perforce isn't a particularly taxing load. I'm also willing to bet you don't have more than maybe 5 developers (or more than 1?). As such, you'd actually be better served just getting two Zotac mini PCs (I'm a fan of the CI323, but you can get what you like) and running the servers there. The reason being: You don't need CPU power, you don't need a huge amount of RAM, literally the only thing you need is redundant hardware. That's easy to get in the mini-pc form factor given how little CPU horsepower your tasks actually need.

[Eigenvektor]

I agree with @asquirrel, with one possible exception: Is the server intended "only" for storage or are you planning to use it as a build-machine with automated builds after you push? E.g. at work we use GitLab which does both Git and automated builds. For automated builds you might want to add additional machines to run those jobs.

[asquirrel]

Just now, Eigenvektor said:

I agree with @asquirrel, with one possible exception: Is the server intended "only" for storage or are you planning to use it as a build-machine with automated builds after you push? E.g. at work we use GitLab which does both Git and automated builds. For automated builds you might want to add additional machines to run those jobs.

Good point. If you intend it to be a build machine, the mini-PCs won't have enough guts to do that in a timely manner. Though, for $4000 you could buy a small army of them and they would probably be faster than one $4000 system...lol!

[SiTime]

Yeah our setup has one artist and one coder so not a huge group.

I would prefer to have it be a build machine but not neccessary.

One thing missing from the zotac mini is storage capacity, as we are dealing with quite a lot of assets.

[asquirrel]

Just now, SiTime said:

Yeah our setup has one artist and one coder so not a huge group.

I would prefer to have it be a build machine but not neccessary.

One thing missing from the zotac mini is storage capacity, as we are dealing with quite a lot of assets.

External USB hard drive. $140 each (for 8-10TB) on sale from best buy, shuckable into bare drives for a NAS later on down the line. It's what I use (not for a perforce server, but still). That said, you may want to get a small NAS with SSDs (purely because it's lots of small files, and mechanical hard drives will struggle with that) and then point all the mini-PCs at that. I'd lol if you ended up with 6 mini-pc build servers (2 of them being repos + build servers) and spent $2000 on a NAS with SSDs. But...that's how the cookie crumbles sometimes. Storage is a lot harder to do 'cheap'. You run up against more physics limits.

[SiTime]

Sadly I live in NZ so dont have best buy or even Amazon so some of this stuff is harder to find.