Illarion.org

Bror, I'm planning to purchase some paid game server host, yet I'm uncertain how big the harddrive space I'd need for chat logs etc.  would you please provide me with the following information?  Thanks.

Memory on server for chat log + action logs + player/account profiles etc.
Approx. bandwidth used monthly
Amount of CPU speed required

Many thanks.

I am not sure if Bror is able to access the internet right now ... so I give you some information I know from him.

current server:

PII-233 MMX
192 MB RAM
HDD 10 GB IDE

Bandwith around 15 GB/month


By the way can I ask what you are planning to set up on the game server?

(Edited by Neonfire at 1:29 am on May 6, 2002)

And could you tell us where we could find information about this?

Information about the original Illarion server?

Or what do you mean?

sorry about the late reply.  I've been tied up with homework at home and barely have time in school to reply to stuff...  I hope I'm using the right password...

Anyways...  back to topic...

Me and my friends are slowly slacking together an online RPG in our spare time, similar to Illarion.  However, due to our homeworks and exams - well, ok, and the rest of em are very unorganized, but that's besides the point... - we're going very slow.  Since the server that we planned to use was a cable user, I'm certain that our bandwidth would exceed his contract with the cable provider.  That's why I'm currently collecting data about game server hosting.  However, due to lack of completion, we are not certain exactly what type of host I'd be looking at, therefore I decided to ask around first, just for the general information about it.  So I'd need 15GB of monthly bandwidth and I'll be looking at something along the line of a 15GB hdd for a game the size of Illarion?  Ok, so I guess I'll need a bit more than that just incase I get too much users.  

Thanks for your help Neon, btw, I haven't seen you around in game for quite a bit now - probably because I haven't been around too much my self - are you going to join us in a bit? or are you leaving us to rott w/o your GM support?  ;-)    hehe...

The Server traffic, speed etc depends hardly on the type of game and protocol you create. I can give you the Illarion data, but your game can have 10.000% more traffic/speed or only 1 % of our traffic/speed.

@Traffic: Illarion needs about 18 GB traffic each month. I suppose half of this is for HTTP/downloads.
I don't have any program that is capable of measuring maximum traffic within a moment, so I can only give you the month average (will be enough to know for a provider. If you plan to connect the server from you home, you NEED to know the maximum traffic, so you can select the proper connection). You can make the following calculation: analog modem users say, Illarion is too slow compared to ISDN. If you plan to have 50 players online, they can produce a traffic of 50*64KBit/s (worst case). This will require a 3MBit connection. On the server side. If you take into account, that the webserver is operating parallel to the game you may need 4 MBit. Maybe you can get it running with 2 MBit then, having Lag in the worst case (and having no backup for more than 50 players). I suppose there is no sufficient connection for private households that can cope with an Illarion server at home.
The main development decision about traffic is, if you keep a static map in the client or transfer the map to the client when he moves along (which demands more traffic but is more flexible).
Another decision is, if you want the client to keep data (and do calculation with it), that is hidden from the player. If the client may have this (provides cheating possibilities), there is less need to transfer data between server and client. Illarion must transfer this data everytime between server and client (almost eliminating cheating by patching the client).

@Hard disc space: This depends mostly on the operating system you choose, since this takes the most space. Our linux installation takes about 1 GB. The Talk-Logs take about 300 KB each day, the command logs about 80 MB per day (depends of course on what you log).
All these logs can of course be deleted after a while. The game itself takes very little space. Most space will be needed for the maps, but it is still so little that it doesn't matter in comparison to the other space needed.
We use a 10 MB Hard disk right now and have enough space.

@Speed: Right now we use a Pentium MMX 233 (i.e. VERY old hardware). The CPU usage for the game is 10% in average. Other cpu time is used for the webserver.
The amout of CPU power you will need will depend maninly on the level of artificial intelligence you plan to implement (almost nothing in Illarion right now), and the game architecture you use (we are experimenting with a database architecture but found out that it slows down the game a lot in the first approach, so we have to find a compromise between database usage and normal file and memory storage).

@Memory usage: The memoy you need will of course depend on how much data you store in the memory and which parts you have on the harddisc (loading it on demand). We decided to keep most of it in the memory, so we naturely have a high memory usage. I can't tell exactly how much, but we have no problem with our 192 MB.

The Game server we will start running these days will be (not completely sure):
Pentium III, 1GHZ, 2*20 GB HDD, 256MB Ram and should be able to cover the future developments for at least a year.