Hosting a server - Specification relevance?

[Nadromar]

Does it make a difference how much ram etc is on a computer or is the only thing of importance the internet connection?

Example, would you be able to host a decent server on a pc with 1 gig ram?

[Fyurie]

Well, RAM does matter, yes. As far as I can remember (Read the info quite a while ago), each user not only uses a certain amount of bandwidth, but also has a small section of memory reserved to them.

I'm not sure if that's true now.

Hope this helps though.

[Fictitious]

The software requirements shift between OS's. And it'd also be helpful if you could post what emulator you're gonna use. This was posted on the MaNGOS forums by freghar, a dev..

If you really care about answering your question, search around. There's 20 or more topics on "minimum system requirements".

The short answer - it depends on many things.

You can easily handle 100 players with ~128MB of RAM, with grid unloading, vmaps turned off, etc. You can handle even more using HDD swap (10k rpm shouldn't definitely lie around unused (raid1)) and/or memory compression (which is a good idea for something like quadcore, since mangos (still) can't use all the power).

The HDD space depends on what you really want to have in the database. It's about .. 300-400 MB for 100 players, including full world DB (~200MB). About HDD activity - well, expect 100-200KB per second on average.

CPU power is perfectly fine for 100 players, I've measured ~200 players (using vmaps, ...) on dual 3.40Ghz, one core rather idle (8-40% usage, probably mysql), second core about 50% (it's not a strict estimate, since the kernel does rather dynamic scheduling). So with vmaps off, you should be able to handle 100 players with ease on your dual 2Ghz.

Oh and the network - well, ~500KBytes for ~200 players with compression=1. So ~200KBytes / sec for ~100 players with compression=5.

After all, you didn't specify what OS you're going to use.

[Lbniese]

You need:

1. High Upload speed (Download speed doesnt matter)
2. A lot of ram...
3. Fast computer etc.

[Nadromar]

I'm using arcemu

[The-Eradicator]

I don't know how ArcEmu performs, but the main bottlenecks will probably be connection speed and memory speed.

For an optimal server setup, i'd probably recommend two Seagate Barracudas as a RAID-1 array. This ensures you're safe from hardware-failure. For memory, i'd probably go with any brand of Corsair server memory. For motherboard, anything ASUS is usually a good idea. For your processor go with a cheap quad core.

That's my two cents.

[Numb]

OpenDNS This would be good for you, to start off with.

[Cison]

I run a duel core processor 2gig ram 1tb HD and 12meg connection speed and i never have a problem with players logging in or out at all... so you dont have to have a LOT of specs to have a good server just dont have a lot of programs running in the background or it will lag up your server.