Server specs and performance.

[Maniac199]

I am just curious what others have found to work as far as hardware and to share some stuff that we have found. Obviously for voice server hosting, the RAM and CPU requirements are not very hardcore. We did find though that the HDD I/O is through the roof for some reason and in fact had to upgrade a lot of our hardware very recently. Our servers are currently running the following:

 

dual Xeon 5130 DDC processors

4GB RAM

Gigabit network card

Hardware raid with battery backup and SAS 15k 73 GB drive in raid 0.

 

We have not fully loaded (by this we typically load a server to 40% and consider it fully loaded) this spec yet so are not sure what sort of slot count to expect but with our old setup of a single dual core processor, SATA drive, and 2GB of RAM we were able to get about 8800 slots out of it.

 

If anyone has hardware setups or experiences to share please feel free to do so here. Obviously we would all love to have 1 machine in each location that can handle all our clients but we all know that will never be true and so I would love to see what hardware setups yield what sort of slot counts.

[Defcon|Rich]

The last time we had just one server in any location was around 2003.

 

8800 slots on any machine is breaking something.. Was that a mistype?

[HGN-Daniel]

Have you tried lowering the page file? That way everything is cached in the RAM instead of your HDDs thrashing constantly (you probably shouldn't listen to me though..). I never imagined voice hosting was very disk intensive..

 

But 8800 slots does sound like a lot like Rich said. The obvious solution would be to get a new server and share the load between them. You'll thank yourself later.

[Derek]

Seems like it's outdated hardware as well.

[Dan M]

Hardware is the most vital aspect of every GSP's business, which is why you want to spend more on hardware, every penny counts.

[HIS-MOTHER]

8800 slots isnt terribly high if it's just voice.

 

300 Ventrilo servers X 25 slots each = 7500.

 

I will say the I/O for Vent is crazy with each one continuously writing to a log file, but you can run more than that on a properly configured box . Although a higher spec machine with a RAID 5 array would be best for the clientinstalls drive. Keep the OS on a single drive.

[Maniac199]

Yeah, its only for voice hosting, not game servers. I did not think about the lower page file idea and also about splitting the OS from the server installs location is also good stuff. We recently got servers from colocrossing for testing so will try some of this stuff on them.