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Glowstone: open-source Minecraft server

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Re: Glowstone: open-source Minecraft server

#21

Post by franga2000 »

mort96 wrote: post #10
tylerhou wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$10 per GB? That’s insane -- basically what high end DDR4 costs upfront.

It's basically what Digital Ocean's droplets cost: https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/ $5/mo for 0.5G, $10/mo for 1G, $20/mo for 2G. All the standard droplets, except for the 3G for $15/mo one, make you pay $10 more per gigabyte. Both Vultr and Linode seem to offer twice the amount of RAM per dollar though.

I have yet to find a better $/RAM value than Contabo. 7€/month for a dual core 6GB RAM VPS. And the value only gets better the higher you go: https://contabo.com/?show=vps

Re: Glowstone: open-source Minecraft server

#22

Post by throwaway2048 »

brianwawok wrote: post #18
tylerhou wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$10 per GB? That’s insane -- basically what high end DDR4 costs upfront.

Yes because buying a stick of memory from Best Buy is ALMOST the same thing as hosting a sever in a cloud data center with an slice of an entire computer, redundant power, redundant network, and administration baked in. It is soo insane that every time we have a post, and someone compares hosting a computer in their garage with AWS. This may be a new record though, comparing hosting with buying a stick of memory at b…

Its not exactly a controversial statement that AWS carries a massive premium on stuff like RAM.

Re: Glowstone: open-source Minecraft server

#23

Post by Filligree »

I don't want to denigrate the effort, but... I'll be interested when I see something with a Forge-equivalent API.

Porting Electrical Age to a different Java-based minecraft server is in principle not terribly difficult, it's reasonably well abstracted already, but there needs to be a modding api.

Re: Glowstone: open-source Minecraft server

#24

Post by mort96 »

TheRealPomax wrote: post #19
mort96 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's basically what Digital Ocean's droplets cost: https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/ $5/mo for 0.5G, $10/mo for 1G, $20/mo for 2G. All the standard droplets, except for the 3G for $15/mo one, make you pay $10 more per gigabyte. Both Vultr and Linode seem to offer twice the amount of RAM per dollar though.

They just added a $15/mo 6G plan, though, which is mighty nice.

No, it's just 3G for $15/month, so that one particular plan takes $5 per gigabyte like Vultr and Linode.

That isn't to say it isn't a nice deal though.

Re: Glowstone: open-source Minecraft server

#25

Post by vertex-four »

mort96 wrote: post #10
tylerhou wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$10 per GB? That’s insane -- basically what high end DDR4 costs upfront.

It's basically what Digital Ocean's droplets cost: https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/ $5/mo for 0.5G, $10/mo for 1G, $20/mo for 2G. All the standard droplets, except for the 3G for $15/mo one, make you pay $10 more per gigabyte. Both Vultr and Linode seem to offer twice the amount of RAM per dollar though.

Digital Ocean do a really good value base VPS, but once you're spending $20/mo with them, there's much better options with more traditional VPS providers. They're priced to compete with an EC2 box, while not providing the value-add to go with it, IMO.

Re: Glowstone: open-source Minecraft server

#26

Post by iscoelho »

astrodust wrote: post #3

Great work, but...Java? Is this for compatibility with mods? One of the biggest pain points with running a Minecraft server is the onerous memory requirements. Java needs a ton of memory to get out of bed, and after that it's not always pretty with how the allocator works. That's fine on an enterprise server with 64GB of memory, but not cool when you're paying $10/mo. per GB of memory for what should be an inexpensiv…

Memory has never been a problem for MC servers. Speaking as someone who's personally been involved in some of the larger servers --

Pain point has always been CPU usage on a single threaded level. Nowadays servers are optimized to the point where we squeeze all of the performance out of the CPU and run multiple instances of MC in order to accomplish that on a multi-threaded level. You can easily hold 500 players concurrent with zero lag on as little as 16GB of RAM and an E3v3 processor. You might say this is a lot of resources, but compare it with other FPS games and how many players they hold on single instances, and you'll realize Minecraft is in it's own league.

Also, due to how much CPU is a bottleneck for MC, Cloud providers are avoided at all costs. 2.2ghz (AWS) is not acceptable at all for the use case.

Minecraft servers are extremely optimized nowadays -- I have no clue where the rumor started that Java was the pain point.

Re: Glowstone: open-source Minecraft server

#27

Post by ReverseCold »

tylerhou wrote: post #9
astrodust wrote: post #3

Great work, but...Java? Is this for compatibility with mods? One of the biggest pain points with running a Minecraft server is the onerous memory requirements. Java needs a ton of memory to get out of bed, and after that it's not always pretty with how the allocator works. That's fine on an enterprise server with 64GB of memory, but not cool when you're paying $10/mo. per GB of memory for what should be an inexpensiv…

$10 per GB? That’s insane -- basically what high end DDR4 costs upfront.

I don't even think you can get 16 GB of DDR4 for $160.

Re: Glowstone: open-source Minecraft server

#28

Post by Teknoman117 »

majewsky wrote: post #16

Does anyone know if this is less resource-intensive than the original server (both CPU and RAM)? Or if it can at least leverage multiple cores properly?

I spun it up on my server (an FX-8350) and it seems the load is higher than the stock server w/ a view distance of 24. Mind you I'm only running one realm (we really only stay on the default world) because it's just my ~8 person gaming group.

It is continually surprising to me that there are all these reverse engineered minecraft servers yet none of them seem to provide a significant performance advantage within a single world. Cuberite, Glowstone, etc. They provide a notable boost when your machine is serving many worlds, but it seems most still use a single thread per world model. At least cuberite offloads chunk generation to a second thread, but in their own documentation they claim they don't want to support arbitrary levels of multithreading for fear it would hurt performance on anything less than a quad core. Even though this is a bit of a misconception, I don't understand why they wouldn't make such a thing configurable.

Re: Glowstone: open-source Minecraft server

#29

Post by SolarNet »

Teknoman117 wrote: post #28
majewsky wrote: post #16

Does anyone know if this is less resource-intensive than the original server (both CPU and RAM)? Or if it can at least leverage multiple cores properly?

I spun it up on my server (an FX-8350) and it seems the load is higher than the stock server w/ a view distance of 24. Mind you I'm only running one realm (we really only stay on the default world) because it's just my ~8 person gaming group. It is continually surprising to me that there are all these reverse engineered minecraft servers yet none of them seem to provide a significant performance advantage within a si…

It's a trade off, my understanding is that Glowstone's trade off is providing customization through APIs and mechanisms that will last. E.g. simplicity and power at the cost of performance.

As an aside they make a claim that will be familiar to many lisp programmers. Their claim is by providing better power they will improve the average performance in the long run for their users (e.g. people who like lots of mods). Look at it this way, if you use horribly buggy edge cases to build flying machines that's going to take a ton of work for the server to simulate (minecraft flying machines often use tick perfect timings arrived at through - effectively - busy loops); if instead you used a mod that provided flying mechanics, and flying control blocks (e.g. that knew when to inject their logic) you would save a lot of performance. They may not be able to have the fastest server around, but given the things their users will use it for, theirs will probably be faster than those efficient servers in those cases.

Re: Glowstone: open-source Minecraft server

#30

Post by mentos »

TkTech wrote: post #11

If you're interested in roll-your-own things like this, stop by #mcdevs on Freenode and take a look at our documentation at http://wiki.vg , where we've been RE'ing the protocol and game internals for 8+ years.

Are Minecraft servers with a massive number of players something common or really not something the average player cares to participate in?

I used to run my own Ultima Online server with an emulator called RunUO about 15 years ago. The same sort of fun I had running that server is what I see people enjoying in Minecraft today. Its really great to see. It was possible back then with a .Net windows server to support 1000+ concurrent clients with very little noticeable lag.

I'm currently working on my own game in Unreal Engine 4 but if I could clone myself I think I would set about creating a Minecraft client that could connect to a RunUO server so that you could achieve those kind of 'MMO' numbers. As well, you could leverage the RunUO codebase to add support for a lot of the Ultima Online functionality (home ownership, spell casting, deep crafting, etc, etc)

What is the best community to look into for supporting massive numbers of concurrent players in Minecraft?

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