Using optiplex prebuilt as a steam caching server

[cboyatcboy]

Hi,

 

 

 

I'm looking at using/ upgrading a old optiplex with a SATA3 ssd, 4590, and 16gb ddr3 to try and set up a steam caching server, along with some other smaller servers (2-5 vinilla mc, SCP Secret Lab, etc)

 

 

 

Mine main question is what my bottlenecks are going to be and how much it's going to affect performance of the cache. Ideally once I have that then i can start looking at what upgrades I should get and/or whether they are going to be worth the cost.

 

 

 

I also don't know if this is the right place to be asking so please point me in the right direction if it's not

 

Thank

[Zando_]

You'd run into a core/RAM limit first running multiple game servers at the same time (AFAIK a vanilla MC server still wants 2GB ram or so). If they aren't going to all be running all the time, then you should be fine. With an SSD you should be good, I don't know that the game servers are very hungry for drive time, and the cache only needs to read/write big chunks when asked. 
 

Cores would remain the biggest limitation for that setup, but it's hard to fix because the best you can get is pretty much the same CPU but with hyperthreading. If you can find a cheap 4c/8t Xeon for that socket then that's probably the best bet, but I wouldn't spend too much for it. 

 

If you already have the hardware, defo worth setting it up and just seeing how it goes though, that'll get you a 100% solid answer as to whether it can handle the servers + cache or not. 

[flibberdipper]

As far as Steam caching goes, realistically your own PC will become the limiting factor unless it's beefcake enough to handle full-dick gigabit downloads (decompression go brrrrrrrrrr after all).

 

When it comes to the game servers though, the 4590 will almost certainly be the limiter first, followed by RAM. I don't have any problems with my 4690K, but I also don't have a high enough player count to make the one, maybe two Minecraft servers punish it that much.

[cboyatcboy]

On 2/1/2022 at 11:49 AM, flibberdipper said:

As far as Steam caching goes, realistically your own PC will become the limiting factor...

So by this are you mainly thinking single thread performance? I have found just on my personal PC that downloads and be bottle necked by my HDD vs even SATA SSD. 

 

I do know that download/ decompressing is super single thread, in terms of steams servers to my house, but what is the workload from cache server to PC on a local network? Is it still mainly single threaded or is there more ability to use multiple threads? Or maybe CPU isn't a bottleneck at that point.

[flibberdipper]

9 hours ago, cboyatcboy said:

So by this are you mainly thinking single thread performance? I have found just on my personal PC that downloads and be bottle necked by my HDD vs even SATA SSD. 

 

I do know that download/ decompressing is super single thread, in terms of steams servers to my house, but what is the workload from cache server to PC on a local network? Is it still mainly single threaded or is there more ability to use multiple threads? Or maybe CPU isn't a bottleneck at that point.

Most Steam downloads take pretty good advantage of compression so it'd be more multi-thread performance. It also shouldn't change if you're using a local cache server since (as far as Steam cares) it's still the same download. And I guess for some personal experience, the 8750H and 2TB MX500 in my laptop is generally capable of downloading at ~40MB/s (which is as fast as my wireless will go) and then decompressing as fast as it can, which can be anywhere from the speed of the download on up to about 350MB/s.

[Domrockt]

Iam invested in lancache right now.

 

i give you a few numbers 

 

right now about 3tb of games are compressed down to 2tb of Cache data.

 

if you want to leverage the speed use cheap ssds as cache drives. I have my 1gbit lan fully saturated. The CPU is not even twitching.

 

I tryed caching with HDDs Even raided but Never got more than 14mb/s. The CPU reached easily 100% on multiple Cores.

 

 

the cpu ryzen 5700g