Modded Minecraft server on a kinda budget

[Furball159.]

Country: Australia

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Minecraft Server

Other details (This is a question about a exsisting computer so I don't really need any system suggestions.)

My Question/Planning: 

Hey, so recently i realized me and 3 friends were all in to modded mc, the problem is everytime we run a server that is actually affordable for all of us we end up with one in london/america and when we are in australia we end up with terrible ping and the server slowly becomes unplayable as more low ping machinary is built, till the server either crashes due to network load or is so slow for us we give up. Sometime later this year i may be coming into contact with 2 or 3 little Lenovo computers that were ready for E-waste.

I personally already have one and use it as a Plex Media server, but i want to make a whole entire server network using the 3-4 ill end up with if i get these e-waste ones, i want to deticate one of them to a vannilla mc server ill rent out to some kids at my school for some passive income and deticate one of the other ones to a modded mc server.

The mod pack is 149 mods which i understand is alot but atleast 14 of them are client/server preformace mods and around 30 of them are librarys so in context not as many as you'd think, My question is do you guys thing that one of these server will be able to handle this roughly 150 mod modpack if i ran it on ubuntu server?
From what i can tell asides storage they are identical to the one i already have which has a Core i5-3470T and 8GB of DDR3 ram, im planning to allocate a max of 6gbs to allow the server to have some breathing room obviously.

I can't really afford to build a tailored machine especailly considering i don't know how long they will play it let alone if they will help fund the remaing setup im doing like purchasing a firewall and network switch, rack, security, software and matnince/management i do for it.

 

[TylerD321]

I would expect it to be perfectly fine. Minecraft servers also run off of 1 core, so you might could make two servers work on the same machine, though I am not sure if it would be required to have a core just for the OS. If you do that you would obviously want to upgrade the ram but that is cheap.

[Crunchy Dragon]

Minecraft is a very singlethreaded game, so as long as you have good singlethread performance, you should be okay.

 

For a server with that many mods(even supporting just 4 total players), I would recommend you upgrade the RAM to at least 16GB, and let the server have as much of it as you can(14GB out of 16GB if you're hosting the server on Windows 10). CPU performance matters, but Minecraft is still a Java game and it loves to have RAM, especially with a stack of mods.

[Furball159.]

Since i have no way to test as of the moment I will leave the thread as is and i will mark the appropriete anwser as Resolution depending on the results, one extra question would be if i need to upgrade the ram would i get a whole new kit or just the nessesary extra?

 

@Crunchy Dragon, @TylerD321

[TylerD321]

3 minutes ago, Furball159. said:

if i need to upgrade the ram would i get a whole new kit or just the nessesary extra?

 

@Crunchy Dragon, @TylerD321

Depends on the ram you currently have. You may be able to find the exact same ram on ebay if it is good enough. Another option is buying a new kit for two of the PCs and then moving the existing matching sets to the two other pcs since you said you will have 4. This is what I would do.

 

8 minutes ago, Crunchy Dragon said:

For a server with that many mods(even supporting just 4 total players), I would recommend you upgrade the RAM to at least 16GB, and let the server have as much of it as you can(14GB out of 16GB if you're hosting the server on Windows 10). CPU performance matters, but Minecraft is still a Java game and it loves to have RAM, especially with a stack of mods.

I am playing RAD2 mod for minecraft off of my buddys PC with him. We only have 4 people on at most and he has 6 gb allocated and it runs just fine. You have to remember that the server doesn't have to load in anything visual so it's ram usage is far lower. I actually have my in game ram set to 20 gbs on it though.

[Crunchy Dragon]

5 minutes ago, Furball159. said:

Since i have no way to test as of the moment I will leave the thread as is and i will mark the appropriete anwser as Resolution depending on the results, one extra question would be if i need to upgrade the ram would i get a whole new kit or just the nessesary extra?

 

@Crunchy Dragon, @TylerD321

Depends on how many slots the machines have, and how many are populated.

 

If it's got 8GB off the shelf that's cool, but it's less cool if the system has 2 DIMM slots and has a 2x4GB kit installed.

[Furball159.]

Thanks for the help guys, one last question for now, is a single thread score of 1810 good enough for a modded mc server or is this a waste of time and should i look for a slightly beefier second hand pc, i really don't want to if i don't have to i just want somthing that'll last more than a few days if you get my drift.

 

@Crunchy Dragon, @TylerD321

[Crunchy Dragon]

Just now, Furball159. said:

Thanks for the help guys, one last question for now, is a single thread score of 1810 good enough for a modded mc server or is this a waste of time and should i look for a slightly beefier second hand pc, i really don't want to if i don't have to i just want somthing that'll last more than a few days if you get my drift.

 

@Crunchy Dragon, @TylerD321

It'll hold you over for now.

Ultimately, the real test is to just go for it and see what happens, but as long as you don't have too many zero tick machines running at once, you should be fine.

 

My buddy ran his server off an i5-3750K for many many years without issues, servicing a small amount of mods/plugins, and around 15 players at peak usage.

[Furball159.]

14 minutes ago, Crunchy Dragon said:

It'll hold you over for now.

Ultimately, the real test is to just go for it and see what happens, but as long as you don't have too many zero tick machines running at once, you should be fine.

 

My buddy ran his server off an i5-3750K for many many years without issues, servicing a small amount of mods/plugins, and around 15 players at peak usage.

Yeah I guess your right, overall our servers CPU's that we were renting didn't seem to stress, nor did there ram it was always the ping that caused issues, thats why i want to host one, I sencearly hope that it works and i have added some mods specifcally to aid the servers preformance so i have tried. Only time will tell so wish me luck ill message back with if it was a sucsess or not in the hopefuly near future, and if not i might provide a budget and see what some people including you could brainstorm for a server.

 

Thanks for your help so far.