Server for hosting a minecraft network

[Nicolo Rancan]

Hi everyone,

I recently opened a Minecraft network that has peaked at 20 players in the past few days, but we are planning to expand.

At the moment we are paying a hosting platform that gives us a panel to manage our minecraft instances, so no direct control over the server (i.e. ssh/ftp).

 

I currently have an old server and i'm wondering if i can migrate all the minecraft instances locally so i can avoid paying like 100$/month for the hosting and have a greater control over the server.

 

I think the server that i already own is too old to keep up with the task, so i'm looking to buy something cheap used maybe, but i don't know what not knowing server grade machines.

 

Any suggestions?

 

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My server:

Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2407 v2 @ 2.40GHz

4x 8gb 1333 MT/s

2x 1Tb hdd

[Bersella AI]

Since Minecraft tends to be a kind of single-threaded workload, this Xeon processor would be just too slow for it. Build a computer with recent Ryzen processors starting from R5-4500 (R7-5700X recommended), as well as 32GB of DDR4-3200 memory, an A520 motherboard, and an SSD to host both the supervisor & the maps. They can be grabbed in reasonable prices nowadays.

[Nicolo Rancan]

So amd is recommended for this kind of workload.. ok, i have in fact a ryzen 9 5950x in my current cloud setup.

But i'm still wondering how many players my current local server can handle;

If i can handle 20 to 40 players at the moment i'm ok with it.

 

i'm interested in knowing more about the single thread nature of a minecraft server... if i create a virtual server for each mc server instance, is it better?

[Bersella AI]

15 hours ago, Nicolo Rancan said:

i'm interested in knowing more about the single thread nature of a minecraft server... if i create a virtual server for each mc server instance, is it better?

That's a long story, about which, honestly, I do not know much. For example, in vanilla Minecraft virtually has all the stuff, including rendering, chunk generating and entity movements, run on a single thread, and there have been a bunch of mods designed to mitigate this issue like Concurrent Chunk Management Engine (C2ME) and Lithium. Even when I'm playing on a public server, which means only rendering is done on my computer, the framerate is still limited by single-threaded performance of my processor, no matter how fast my GPU can run.

 

Running VMs for each instance is not recommended. Memory is dynamically allocated by Minecraft, and we cannot predict how much of memory Minecraft would consume in a specific scenario with conditions like concurrent players, loaded chunks or entities, and installed mods. After all, this 5950X build would host Minecraft pretty well, given adequate amount of RAM.

[Nicolo Rancan]

On 12/20/2023 at 10:09 AM, Bersella AI said:

That's a long story, about which, honestly, I do not know much. For example, in vanilla Minecraft virtually has all the stuff, including rendering, chunk generating and entity movements, run on a single thread, and there have been a bunch of mods designed to mitigate this issue like Concurrent Chunk Management Engine (C2ME) and Lithium. Even when I'm playing on a public server, which means only rendering is done on my computer, the framerate is still limited by single-threaded performance of my processor, no matter how fast my GPU can run.

 

Running VMs for each instance is not recommended. Memory is dynamically allocated by Minecraft, and we cannot predict how much of memory Minecraft would consume in a specific scenario with conditions like concurrent players, loaded chunks or entities, and installed mods. After all, this 5950X build would host Minecraft pretty well, given adequate amount of RAM.

Ok, i see... vms wise, you can specify the maximum memory for a given minecraft server, so i don't see the problem in that case, or am i wrong?

[Bersella AI]

14 hours ago, Nicolo Rancan said:

Ok, i see... vms wise, you can specify the maximum memory for a given minecraft server, so i don't see the problem in that case, or am i wrong?

There might have another solution. Make the most hungry instance, which is usually the main survival server with the most concurrent players and loaded chunks, hosted on the supervisor, then it would have access to all processor cores and RAM. Meanwhile, host other instances like mini-games, with less concurrent players and resource consumption, on each VM, although more RAM would be required due to the nature of early RAM allocation from the supervisor and additional overheads by systems in each VM.