Recommended system requirements

[steve-redka]

Hello. I'm sorry if this question sounds stupid, but I never tried doing anything with gaming server software.

What are the system requirements for running a server? For example, will 2 Gb RAM and 1 CPU be enough to handle 20 people playing simultaneously?

[refracta]

Although I haven't conducted quantitative performance tests, the following facts might be helpful:

• Each crawl process consumes around 50MB of memory.
• For CNC, an Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2683 v3 / 16GB RAM is used.
• You can check the approximate specifications of the CDI server here: > CDI is Live

It is estimated that using a CPU with high single-core performance could provide performance advantages. Generally, if a server is operated with specifications similar to CDI, there should be no significant issues running a live service for 20 players.

[quinnr]

Chiming in with a data point as I've been trying to figure out minimum specifications for a small new server.

We are not quite at 20 players yet, but after a couple weeks of testing with 3-4 players, the https://cco.crawlcosplay.org server has been found to work without complaint (perhaps a slightly low load time on first launch of a new game).

We are on a shared virtual machine instance with 2 GB Memory, 2 vCPUs, and a 150 GB storage volume. We started at the cheapest plan and slowly worked up. I have found this to be an acceptable minimum at this time.

Observations:

• 50 GB of storage is not sufficient. Within 1-2 weeks you will run out of space from the git builds.
• 1 CPU core is not sufficient and there is notable lag especially during build times. Two CPU cores seem to work fine.
• CPU with 1 player peaks around 20% (I think peak is when building new games.)
• Memory usage is usually around 45% capacity but peaks around 65%.
• Our upgrade to 2 CPU cores would not let us keep a lower memory cap. However, current memory usage for OS and server is under 600MB. However: I think this goes up during build time.

This is on a Ubuntu 24.10 x64 image which has been patched to date.

The only other change from stock (develop branch) that would impact performance would be the installation of Caddy for lightweight SSL certificate and reverse proxy management.

[refracta]

The part related to CPU limitations during the build process:

dcss-server/server/scripts/run.sh

Line 14 in 492b4cc

nohup cpulimit -e cc1plus -l 20 &