Setting up a community dedicated-monster-of-a-server

Discussion in 'Planetary Annihilation General Discussion' started by cola_colin, October 10, 2014.

  1. icycalm

    icycalm Post Master General

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    If this is a reply to me, I don't understand a word of it. You might as well be speaking Chinese to me. I just fail to see what argument there can be against supporting colin in making a custom server for us.
  2. websterx01

    websterx01 Post Master General

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  3. tatsujb

    tatsujb Post Master General

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  4. trialq

    trialq Post Master General

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    AMD cores are slower, which they make up for with more cores. The main sim thread needs to be on the most powerful core we can give it. As far as I understand it.
  5. icycalm

    icycalm Post Master General

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    In a way, it does have those things, doesn't it? I mean, now that I can play 15- or 20-player games every day if I want to, what would I tell people if they ask me what I am playing? Wouldn't I tell them that "I am playing 20-player Planetary Annihilation"?

    I mean, yes, there are some hoops you have to jump through to play that, and the necessary work for the extra features was not done by Uber nor is it supported by them, but it's still all Planetary Annihilation at the end of the day, isn't it? And what other game is there available right now in which you can do that?

    In sum, I take back what I said in your locked thread the other day against modders. As long as you do a little research, they can be the best thing ever. I am going to dive into the mod forum now and use as many mods on my server as I can out of all those that look cool to me. And the improved biomes first of all.
  6. tatsujb

    tatsujb Post Master General

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    this always happens with anti-mod people.... :p ...eventually...
    vyolin, squishypon3 and stuart98 like this.
  7. cola_colin

    cola_colin Moderator Alumni

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    Thanks to the Realm for offering help with their various paypal accounts so people can now donate money via paypal in their favorite currency.
    Read the OP again.
    squishypon3 likes this.
  8. cola_colin

    cola_colin Moderator Alumni

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    Thanks to an anonymous nice person there will now be a 24 core Opteron server with 32GB Ram on a 10gbit network online, hopefully all day.
    It's probably slower for the sim with that kind of cpu, but we'll see.

    I'd say looking for donations to get a server with faster cores is still a good idea though.
  9. zihuatanejo

    zihuatanejo Well-Known Member

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    Bloody hell! Those numbers! So shiny!
  10. zihuatanejo

    zihuatanejo Well-Known Member

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    Happy to donate a bit, but I want some detail before I do:

    1) What's the goal/target, and why (e.g. 200$ cos that'll rent us this server from this host for one month as a trial) (or similar)
    2) Refund possible if target not met?
    3) Who is in control of the money?
    4) Likelihood of reaching target
    5) Preferred host? AWS?
    6) Possibility to upgrade VPS in future assuming more money and necessary.

    Just off the top of my head.
  11. cola_colin

    cola_colin Moderator Alumni

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    I am not really decided on most of those questions tbh. Many depend on "how much money can we get?"
    If we can get enough I'd like an 8 core server with 2x Intel Xeon E3-1280 v3 or similar, if we can find a hoster who has such a server.

    @cwarner7264 has access to the money.
    I don't know if we can refund or not, I would assume we can, but I am sure wrongcat can answer that.
    Last edited: October 18, 2014
  12. cwarner7264

    cwarner7264 Moderator Alumni

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    Yes, it is possible to easily refund money within 60 days of a donation being made (there is a massive button next to each donation to do so). I'm fairly sure I can work with anyone who wants a refund to make that happen after that 2 week period though it'll probably have to be subject to a second round of PayPal fees which will mean anything returned will probably be up to 5% less than was donated.

    Currently I am in sole control of the PayPal account, @zihuatanejo, though in the interest of 100% transparency, I won't rule out the possibility of 2-3 more people within the Realm leadership being granted access at some point in the future because we're going to be starting to use the account for things like a merch shop on our site, running our own servers etc. Obviously these will only be people I trust implicitly and I'll run this by Colin before anyone else gets access.
    Last edited: October 18, 2014
    zihuatanejo likes this.
  13. reptarking

    reptarking Post Master General

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    the 1280 v3 cannot be dual cpu'd. i have asked several server companies and all have said that this is not something that is compatible.
  14. cola_colin

    cola_colin Moderator Alumni

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    meh. What is the best cpu that can be used in that way? Is there really not a single cpu that is fast per core AND can offer 8 real threads in some way?
    We need 8 or we will end up with "yey a fast core for the sim, but there is other stuff on it as well, so it is slowed down"
    zihuatanejo likes this.
  15. harrierx

    harrierx Member

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    I thought the benchmarks showed that there isn't much improvement from scaling beyond 8 physical threads. If you have more than 8 cores (whether packaged in one or more physical CPUs) performance may also suffer from NUMA issues such as increased latency to non-local memory. From the performance/price ratio 8 core Intel CPUs seem to be the sweet spot (if you need more than 4 cores).
  16. cola_colin

    cola_colin Moderator Alumni

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    Well that's why I say "aim for 8 cores" ;)
    Though just for the lulz we really should test if we can push the server to use more than 8 cores with a LOT of players. I would not be surprised to have it use more than 8 cores if we have like 50 players. Ofc the sim speed will be medioocre at best.
  17. reptarking

    reptarking Post Master General

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    Found 6 cores at 3.5 on a e5 1650 v2. Have also found a few 8 core 3.2's I'm seeing if a company is willing to duel 1650's and to over clock them to 3.9 or close to. Will know within next 10 hours on that.
  18. harrierx

    harrierx Member

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    Intel's docs says that the e5 1650 is not pairable. Also, I'm not sure how much you can overclock Xeons at all. Overclocking one of the unlocked hexa-core i7s is probably the best bet for maximum per thread performance (and maximum PA performance). It's also cheaper than the Xeons. You won't get ECC ram, but for a game server that's probably not a big loss. 64 GB of ram would probably be enough I suppose.
  19. cola_colin

    cola_colin Moderator Alumni

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    I am not sure of the 6 high clocked cores vs 8 not so high clocked ones. The thing is that in 32 player games the server used up to 900% cpu according to top. So 8-9 cores in usage. If you go down to 6 cores that means more work per core. If the sim core ends up having to work on non-sim stuff on top of the sim then the not overclocked 8 core might quickly run away sim-speed wise.
  20. reptarking

    reptarking Post Master General

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    i7 have max 32 gb of ram server wise usually... alright well I'm still searching for are perfect monster.

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