Is server hardware a bottleneck for game performance ?

[Granger]

I am sorry to say you have no clue of what you are talking about.

When you are wrong and losing an argument it is always a good way to just call the other person stupid without any reasoning.

While there is a difference between being clueless (= having not enough or false information about a topic) and stupid (= having problems learning)... you two should skip discussing that fine detail.

[dullah]

I am sorry if you feel offended, shubla, but you started with the aggressive tone.
I am in no way calling you stupid, i am sure you are far from stupid.
As Granger outlined, i am calling you clueless, because you aren't an expert with the topic we are talking about, i am.
I'll try to be constructive and enlighten you.

Its not best nor the cheapest option really for such a small company as seatribe. Its maybe the worst option.

Buying a server is always the best economical option, it is like buying a car vs renting a car.
Rented servers are low quality low specs and runs on mutualized infrastructure stacks, they suck.
With the lifespan of server hardware, which is usually 3 to 5 years, the rented option costs you 2 to 3 times the price of a server. you'd have bought.

What if something breaks? You have to pay it, and overall, take care that the server hardware is running without problems.

DELL and HP servers comes with onsite warranty. Depending on the workload and how critical you server is, you'd buy the 4 hours warranty, or next business day one.

You also have to upgrade the hardware every now and then, something that you wouldn't have to worry about if you just rent a dedicated server.

The aren't many upgrades you could do on a server.
It's either add more RAM, or add more disks, both of these operation are easy and could be done by my 8 year old son.
Your point is not valid, with rented servers, you'd still have to worry abouyt upgrading = paying more.

There are plenty of dedicated servers with SSD possibilities these days, been for years. I dont see how things that you said about professional servers and old grumpy databases running are relevant to the discussion in any means.

You are wrong, less than 5% of servers use SSD for main storage.
It's frequently a RAID1 of 2x 256GB SSD to boot a virtualized server with VMWARE, Hyper-V or Openstack, then RAID5 or RAID6 arrays of SAS 10k or 15k rpm disks.
On SAN arrays, you can find some SSD caching, which is not SSD main storage.

[Ardennesss]

Yes, Officer? I'd like to report a murder.

[shubla]

Buying a server is always the best economical option, it is like buying a car vs renting a car.
Rented servers are low quality low specs and runs on mutualized infrastructure stacks, they suck.
With the lifespan of server hardware, which is usually 3 to 5 years, the rented option costs you 2 to 3 times the price of a server. you'd have bought.

If its 66% cheaper and you will get more powerful servers, why wouldn't everyone buy their own servers then?
Because things that you said are not true.. Its totally not the same as renting/buying a car.

1U costs 89€ from some local datacenter, 2U 149€, for one month, and that is only the rack slot, no bandwidth or electricity. Then you must buy (and upgrade, replace etc.) the hardware, which costs a lot if you want to have the latest things.
With that price, you can get a decent dedicated server with plenty of DDR4, SSD's and most recent (or 2nd most recent) generation CPU and you don't have to use your time to solve hardware problems, (other than call them if something breaks).

I can believe you if you prove (calculate) that its cheaper to buy a server yourself, than rent one.

There are plenty of dedicated servers with SSD possibilities these days, been for years. I dont see how things that you said about professional servers and old grumpy databases running are relevant to the discussion in any means.

You are wrong, less than 5% of servers use SSD for main storage.

I am not wrong. I can literally go to Hetzner(or any other hosting provider) sites and there will be plenty of servers with SSD option, ready to buy with click of a button!

The aren't many upgrades you could do on a server.
It's either add more RAM, or add more disks, both of these operation are easy and could be done by my 8 year old son.
Your point is not valid, with rented servers, you'd still have to worry abouyt upgrading = paying more.

No they are not easy to do when your server is located in some large data center, far away. You have to either travel there (takes a long time and possibly lots of money) or pay somebody to switch them for you, which is also very expensive (could be as high as 70€ / one hour).
If you think that devs should just have the server at their home, I don't think its a good idea. Long time ago this was the case, there is a reason why the server is no more located in jorb's living room.

What you said may have been true 10 or more years ago.
But its 2019 now, dedicated server providers have small margins and there is a lot of competition, thus prices are down.

[borka]

@dullah

about the idea of buying a server and have it colocated in Stockholm (back in summer 2015)

What about your idea of having the server located in your hometown ?

I'll consider that when my electricity and Internet is as stable as that Hetzner can provide.

And with all the HDD failures since the server is at Hetzner they have good experience with the included basic service of swapping hardware



I guess the main reason for a new server would be CPU ... and with all server packages coming into question at Hetzner SSDs or NVEs are included anyway ... btw another good point for Hetzner at Falkenstein Datacenter is broad connection to Nürnberg IX, Frankfurt IX and Amsterdam IX ...

[The_Blode]

Omg! I see you had such a heated discussion. I just stumbled across your post, and still, it seems like there's no clear answer to your problem.

Guys I am fucking BAFFLED by this one. Absolutely confused. This reads like the usual botpost:
-sounds like it's setting up an answer to the problem
-necroposting a 4 year old thread
-one forum post

BUT:
-no link
-2 year old account

-actual profile picture

[Zentetsuken]

Omg! I see you had such a heated discussion. I just stumbled across your post, and still, it seems like there's no clear answer to your problem.

Guys I am fucking BAFFLED by this one. Absolutely confused. This reads like the usual botpost:
-sounds like it's setting up an answer to the problem
-necroposting a 4 year old thread
-one forum post

BUT:
-no link
-2 year old account

-actual profile picture

[Nightdawg]

Omg! I see you had such a heated discussion. I just stumbled across your post, and still, it seems like there's no clear answer to your problem.

Guys I am fucking BAFFLED by this one. Absolutely confused. This reads like the usual botpost:
-sounds like it's setting up an answer to the problem
-necroposting a 4 year old thread
-one forum post

BUT:
-no link
-2 year old account

-actual profile picture

Playing the long term game. Next fake message is scheduled for 2025, and the third one containing the malware link will drop by 2027

[vatas]

viewtopic.php?f=40&t=72534&p=914567&hilit=truck#p914567

The server being able to handle more than a few thousand people is a big must, too.

(This is based on what I remember, but I'm rather certain I remember correctly. I do end up speculating a fair bit.)

I'd like to clarify that according to Loftar, the issue with scaling server capacity is software, not hardware. Assuming server wasn't rewritten alongside the client when "hafen" launched in 2015, it doesn't have the best multithreading support.

This means that no matter how much processing power you give to the server, the software has bottlenecks that make server increasingly lag out once X number on players are connected and are interacting with the game world.

Well, yeah, I know, it's just easier to say "Once we can carry it in our truck" instead of "Once we can find a way to disassemble the larger whole and divide the load in order to carry it in a truck that can't handle the entire load all at once"
The base method of sending info to the server and back is the bottleneck but my point still stands: the server needs to be able to handle more than a few thousand people.

I'm not expert on computers/programming, but with this analogy, implementation of multithreading would be upgrading the road into something that two trucks can drive at the same time without wrecking each other.

Clarification of clarification: I can't come up with good software/hardware comparison analogy using real physical objects, but I think the trucks on road is serviceable for multi-threading at least, if you accept that this is weird computer land where the two (or more) trucks need to move in perfect synchronicity with each other for the whole thing to work.

[HarryDresden]

Omg! I see you had such a heated discussion. I just stumbled across your post, and still, it seems like there's no clear answer to your problem.

Guys I am fucking BAFFLED by this one. Absolutely confused. This reads like the usual botpost:

My bet is a bot accessing an actual account that was created by a player that was previously unused on the forums. Password captured and sold in one of those big data dumps and the firm that bought it decided to start using the account.