What does it take to run a 200p server?

On my first venture a year ago, an older PowerEdge 2.8ghz Opteron started lagging at about 60 players on Windows. My new Xeon E5 has better IPC, consuming less clock cycles per instruction. I notice my server consumes less then it did before, but there's also a tradeoff with the structures rust has added since then. Server fps is less stable then it was before, but I digress.. This makes me wonder what on earth is driving the 200+ player servers? They're all running Windows which astonishes me. I closely monitored my Windows box's metrics and it always used 1 core (besides RustIO). My Linux box runs much more efficiently, and appears to use 2 cores. I would venture to guess a 4.2+ ghz Xeon could only run 100-150 players comfortably. Some servers even have 500 players. What hardware do these game server vendors use? Are they just reducing tick rate to compensate?

 

I run mine on this

Intel Xeon E3-1270v5 processor (four physical 3.6ghz cores on QPI + hyperthreading + turbo->4ghz)
64 GB DDR4-2133 ECC memory
1000 GB SSD
I get 40000 GB of bandwidth transfer a month which I've never even come close to using that much. Usually uses 16000-18000 gigs a month

My Rust server and teamspeak are the only things running on it

 

What's your OS and CPU/Memory utilization?

 

Did you buy the box outright or are you renting?
You could probably virtualize with that sorta power under the hood and rum several servers side by side. Shit I run mine on an old Poweredge 1950 III.

Also how'd you get that cool "server owner" title I want one too!

 

I second the motion. <<< Certified server owner. With dual E5-2470 Xeons

 

Just for shits and giggles here's my specs. Surprisingly this old-boy can run a 4500 x 4500 Procedural Map with 75 players with absolutely no problem.

-Dual-Intel Xeon L5420 @ 2.50GHz
-DDR2 1.50ns speed 8x4GB (32GB)
-2 x 120GB 850 Samsung SSDs in RAID1 with 1 configured Hotspare
-Debian 8 OS
-Infinite bandwidth

 

At the top of the page to the right, is a Servers tab, you used to be able to get your server listed there for nominal fee. which gave you the Server Owner rank. Not working for me at the moment though. Must be getting fixed up.

 

I rent from NFOServer $200 a month

 

Nah they took that off. Oxide Admins don't want users registering anymore. They said it was messing stuff up, consuming resources and they were getting inundated with requests so they just removed it. Don't think it'll ever come back :*(
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Damn, that is a pricey ass server.

 

Yup. Rust runs pretty well on older hardware. As long as you have enough memory, and CPU with a high clock rate it does pretty well. You do definitely notice a difference when running on newer hardware. With something like 30 plugins or more, my Debian server hasn't seen over 1500mhz usage on any single core with 40 players in it. That's just a max value, usually it sits at 800-1100mhz and never gets any higher. Right now there are 4 players and my cores range from 600mhz to 330mhz usage. Using Linux is the secret to sucess. People seem to crash more often though, and it only happens with Linux. On the same hardware using windows, the core Rust used would be using a minimum of 1200mhz and start getting in the 2ghz range when 20 players came aboard.

 

Worth it though. It's the newer Skylake CPU plus NFO has about the best ddos protection and customer service around. Server donations cover the bill, I haven't had to pull money out of my own pocket in well over a year to pay my server bill.

 

Hell yeah, thats awesome. Oh I know, that server is a goddamn monster. If I had the money outright, I'd just buy me one around the same model. I like Dells and HP's, they make good 1U servers.

 

Build a white box server for a quarter of the price. Granted, Dell makes a good server. HP is good too but they have their quirks. I took an Intel 1U server board, retrofitted it a full-tower case, added an SSD array with anLSI controller and two E5-2470s with 64 GBS of RAM and boom, a beefy server for under $1K

 

If anyone is looking for a dedi box in Sydney/Melbourne Australia theres a pretty good deal going on over here:
Exigent Australia | Australian Cloud Provider
Pretty sure the cheapest one there ($130 a month) would be able to run a 150-200 player server.
Looks like its running a E5640, According to PassMark - Intel Xeon E5640 @ 2.67GHz - Price performance comparison it's not too bad of a CPU.