How well will a Optiplex 3010 SFF run a minecraft server?

[dackadoo]

Im trying to snatch this off of ebay:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/114793550726?_trkparms=aid%3D1110006%26algo%3DHOMESPLICE.SIM%26ao%3D1%26asc%3D20200818141841%26meid%3Dc839d393b2394f75ab70a3c86617b2fa%26pid%3D101111%26rk%3D1%26rkt%3D12%26mehot%3Dpf%26sd%3D254911093445%26itm%3D114793550726%26pmt%3D0%26noa%3D1%26pg%3D2563228%26algv%3DDefaultOrganicWithAblationExplorer%26brand%3DDell&_trksid=p2563228.c101111.m2109&autorefresh=true

 

I'm going to throw some decent RAM in it (prolly 16gb of 3200 mhz) and a old 2tb hard drive so I can use it for some media storing as well. I obviously know it can run a small vanilla server but I'm just wondering what the limits of this would be? For example, could I run a server running feed the beast with ~4-6 people playing on it? Specs seem decent enough for that but I know nothing about the consumption of minecraft servers so I wanted a second opinion.

 

 

[kelvinhall05]

It'll do fine.

[TheCoder2019]

If anything it's  a bit overkill. Ayy, whaterver, more chunks can be loaded, plugins, if thats what you plan, etc. It'a better than my Raspberry Pi server, thats for sure!

[dackadoo]

1 minute ago, TheCoder2019 said:

If anything it's  a bit overkill. Ayy, whaterver, more chunks can be loaded, plugins, if thats what you plan, etc. It'a better than my Raspberry Pi server, thats for sure!

A friend of mine ran a server on a rasberry pie but it did not go so great- we tend to do some pretty intensive messing around in our servers lol. It seemed a bit overkill to me as well tbh, but I figured if I could pick it up for under $100 and could also use it for plex stuff and family photos/videos, it would be worth it.

[TheCoder2019]

1 minute ago, dackadoo said:

It seemed a bit overkill to me as well tbh

Never.

 

15 minutes ago, dackadoo said:

could I run a server running feed the beast with ~4-6 people playing on it?

And you can probably run it with 10 or 15 people, 10 max, you would need a larger and better system/server and it's violating your ISP's TOS if you try to dump like 100 players in it. 6 players is fine though. @manikyath you can explain if you want

[dean_5234]

39 minutes ago, dackadoo said:

prolly 16gb of 3200 mhz

thats a ddr3 machine

[dackadoo]

2 minutes ago, davemc said:

thats a ddr3 machine

Good catch, I haven't used DDR3 stuff in so long I forgot they exist lol. I'll probably just slap another 8 gb of 1600 mhz in it to make it 16 gb.

[BondiBlue]

26 minutes ago, dackadoo said:

Good catch, I haven't used DDR3 stuff in so long I forgot they exist lol. I'll probably just slap another 8 gb of 1600 mhz in it to make it 16 gb.

It probably has 2x4GB DIMMs. I'd be surprised if it was a single 8GB stick. 

[dackadoo]

12 minutes ago, BondiBlue said:

It probably has 2x4GB DIMMs. I'd be surprised if it was a single 8GB stick. 

Yea I just pulled up the handbook on it. You're right. Might have to just try the server out with the 8 gigs provided since 16gb packs of it are surprisingly expensive.

[manikyath]

15 hours ago, TheCoder2019 said:

Never.

 

And you can probably run it with 10 or 15 people, 10 max, you would need a larger and better system/server and it's violating your ISP's TOS if you try to dump like 100 players in it. 6 players is fine though. @manikyath you can explain if you want

i thought you dragged me back into an old thread for a second there

 

here we go:

 

the limit for anything you host out of your house is very simple:

only for your direct friends.

It's safe to assume that as long as you dont completely blow up your map, or arent 'the popular kid' in school (at which point.. those people arent your friends...) anything that is 2nd gen core i-something or better will suffice for vanilla and most modpacks.

however...

if you're planning on essentially opening this thing up to the public (eg. advertise it on mcforums, etc.) and/or for larger player bases (like above's 100 player example) there's security concerns, there's some serious concerns with your ISP's terms of service, there's bandwidth concerns, there's reliability concerns, there's uptime concerns, .. you get the point: concerns.

 

i totally have a battery of game servers running out of my attic, but with the distinct choice of having those limited to friends only. it's essentially good practisce to have anything that's running from your house as "under the radar" as possible. i'm not saying that your ISP will most defenately pull the plug on you when you advertise your server on whatever, i'm saying that the more traffic there is, the more eyes are pointed towards you. (or on your ISP's side notably.. the more they can smell the dollars of forcing you into a more expensive business package, because that's all they really care about anyways.)

 

5 people's gonna go under the radar, 10 people's gonna go under the radar, having 100 people on your server 24/7.. is gonna raise some flags.

 

-------

that rambling aside.. back on topic:

 

presuming that you're doing this just for your friends, one of those cheap office bangers is a great point to start.

some stuff i do suggest is to immediately give it the full once-around: are all the fans fine, are all the connectors nice and snug, is the storage drive in it *actually decent*, check what sort of memory it's running, etc.

 

if you buy a box that's got single channel memory... just buy a stick of kingston valueram and slap it in the second channel. dont bother with high MHz memory, because the box doesnt support it anyways.

while you're doing upgrades, SSD+HDD combo, and an external drive for nightly backups. doesnt matter if it's a fast hard drive or a 5400rpm slug, just get something that's not a WD green, and configure weekly backups to an external drive, because drive failures only happen when you expect them least.

also, pull out the dedicated graphics card, they're always so shyte you may as well not bother. it's just an extra 40 watts of heat into your room.

 

on the software side of things... my preference goes to Xubuntu. it's just user-friendly enough to not be a major hurdle for previously windows-only users, being ubuntu based means 90% of the world's linux tutorials will apply to you, and it differs notably in the memory usage department. oh.. and no "windows update lolz surprise reboots" either.

 

if you're feeling adventurous, you can try running your mc server as a system service, if you're not feeling as adventurious you can just run it in a screen session, or if you just want a fancy webUI no matter how terrible the code behind it maybe.. there's always mineOS. (dont use their turnkey linux thing.. it's so bad i cant even joke about it...)

My server runs some homebrew kludge to run "anything that runs in a terminal" as a system service. it's a mess, it was a mess to get working, but it was a great adventure.

 

on the media server side of things.. my preference is to just have a well laid out SMB share at the server side, and let the client side application do the heavy lifting.

[dackadoo]

On 5/7/2021 at 1:52 PM, manikyath said:

i thought you dragged me back into an old thread for a second there

 

here we go:

 

the limit for anything you host out of your house is very simple:

only for your direct friends.

It's safe to assume that as long as you dont completely blow up your map, or arent 'the popular kid' in school (at which point.. those people arent your friends...) anything that is 2nd gen core i-something or better will suffice for vanilla and most modpacks.

however...

if you're planning on essentially opening this thing up to the public (eg. advertise it on mcforums, etc.) and/or for larger player bases (like above's 100 player example) there's security concerns, there's some serious concerns with your ISP's terms of service, there's bandwidth concerns, there's reliability concerns, there's uptime concerns, .. you get the point: concerns.

 

i totally have a battery of game servers running out of my attic, but with the distinct choice of having those limited to friends only. it's essentially good practisce to have anything that's running from your house as "under the radar" as possible. i'm not saying that your ISP will most defenately pull the plug on you when you advertise your server on whatever, i'm saying that the more traffic there is, the more eyes are pointed towards you. (or on your ISP's side notably.. the more they can smell the dollars of forcing you into a more expensive business package, because that's all they really care about anyways.)

 

5 people's gonna go under the radar, 10 people's gonna go under the radar, having 100 people on your server 24/7.. is gonna raise some flags.

 

-------

that rambling aside.. back on topic:

 

presuming that you're doing this just for your friends, one of those cheap office bangers is a great point to start.

some stuff i do suggest is to immediately give it the full once-around: are all the fans fine, are all the connectors nice and snug, is the storage drive in it *actually decent*, check what sort of memory it's running, etc.

 

if you buy a box that's got single channel memory... just buy a stick of kingston valueram and slap it in the second channel. dont bother with high MHz memory, because the box doesnt support it anyways.

while you're doing upgrades, SSD+HDD combo, and an external drive for nightly backups. doesnt matter if it's a fast hard drive or a 5400rpm slug, just get something that's not a WD green, and configure weekly backups to an external drive, because drive failures only happen when you expect them least.

also, pull out the dedicated graphics card, they're always so shyte you may as well not bother. it's just an extra 40 watts of heat into your room.

 

on the software side of things... my preference goes to Xubuntu. it's just user-friendly enough to not be a major hurdle for previously windows-only users, being ubuntu based means 90% of the world's linux tutorials will apply to you, and it differs notably in the memory usage department. oh.. and no "windows update lolz surprise reboots" either.

 

if you're feeling adventurous, you can try running your mc server as a system service, if you're not feeling as adventurious you can just run it in a screen session, or if you just want a fancy webUI no matter how terrible the code behind it maybe.. there's always mineOS. (dont use their turnkey linux thing.. it's so bad i cant even joke about it...)

My server runs some homebrew kludge to run "anything that runs in a terminal" as a system service. it's a mess, it was a mess to get working, but it was a great adventure.

 

on the media server side of things.. my preference is to just have a well laid out SMB share at the server side, and let the client side application do the heavy lifting.

Yea, I'm aware of the security issues. I was only planning on hosting it for my direct friends. I actually passed up on the office computer because a friend of mine who I had given some semi-old (but good) parts to from my old pc still had them and wasn't using them. I think ill try and jerry rig the weird proprietary micro-atx motherboard from my old pc (a prebuild alienware) together with the actually decent i5 and DDR4 RAM from it into a shitty full-tower case. If everything still works, it will be hilariously overkill for a minecraft server, but Ill probably use it as a home network as well for storing photos and shit.