Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How we built an auto-scalable Minecraft server for 1000+ players

worldql.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 145 posts

Re: How we built an auto-scalable Minecraft server for 1000+ players

#121

Post by ianhawes »

stjo wrote: post #104

A couple of weeks ago I made https://playmcnow.com with the opposite idea - have many super lightweight servers for small groups of players. Instead of saying to friends “register to digital ocean, pay $5 and get a Minecraft box”, I can host thousands of worlds for them. I made a custom minecraft proxy (similar to bungeecord but A LOT less resource intensive) that starts the real server when someone attempts to conne…

You should honestly look to monetize this. The MC server community is constantly plagued with hosts that will cram as many servers onto a box as possible, but they insist on the “always on” approach which IMO is pointless. Someone did an automated survey a year ago of all public Minecraft servers and found the number of servers exceeded the number of players.

Re: How we built an auto-scalable Minecraft server for 1000+ players

#122

Post by e12e »

grp000 wrote: post #95
ipaddr wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cheapest available right now was 140 euro. When do the 25 dollar server come out?

If the cheapest is $25/month, I think it would just make sense to get a used school/office PC. I was able to pick up a used Haswell i5, 8GB of memory PC for $200, which you would probably get better performance out of, and break even at ~8 month mark. That being said, pandemic prices might shift those numbers.

Nothing wrong with getting a used pc, but do you have 1gb uplink at home?

In the cheapest offers right now, there's a Intel Core i7-4770, 2x 2 TB Ent. HDD (spinning rust, not ssd) with 32 GB ram. And a xeon box with ecc ram (same, low price).

Re: How we built an auto-scalable Minecraft server for 1000+ players

#123

Post by e12e »

NavinF wrote: post #118
xuki wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can I have a link please? I'm a sucker for cheap dedicated servers :).

I use he.net/colocation To be clear, I'm taking about racking your own servers, not cloud "dedicated servers"

I'm not sure what you imply with the quotes around dedicated servers - this is hardware for rent, not VMs (hetzner has VMs too, starting from about 5usd/month - but that's something else).

You do need to go a bit up in price for proper server hw - although there are a few aging xeon boxes with ecc ram on the low end now.

Re: How we built an auto-scalable Minecraft server for 1000+ players

#124

Post by Jweb_Guru »

e12e wrote: post #122
grp000 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the cheapest is $25/month, I think it would just make sense to get a used school/office PC. I was able to pick up a used Haswell i5, 8GB of memory PC for $200, which you would probably get better performance out of, and break even at ~8 month mark. That being said, pandemic prices might shift those numbers.

Nothing wrong with getting a used pc, but do you have 1gb uplink at home? In the cheapest offers right now, there's a Intel Core i7-4770, 2x 2 TB Ent. HDD (spinning rust, not ssd) with 32 GB ram. And a xeon box with ecc ram (same, low price).

Also, even if you do have a 1 Gbps uplink, a lot of providers will throttle you if they suspect you're actually hosting a server that tries to utilize most of that bandwidth in anything but bursts.

Re: How we built an auto-scalable Minecraft server for 1000+ players

#125

Post by e12e »

_fnqu wrote: post #119
e12e wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might be too pricy, but if you go to about 25usd/month, you can get a dedicated server with an i7 from hetzner server auction. These cheap boxes don't have ecc ram etc - but should work well for things like this. https://www.hetzner.com/sb?country=us

If you go with Oracle Cloud, you can get an 4-core, 24gb RAM aarch64 server for free. I've been using it for minecraft and it performs excellent, especially combined with PaperMC

Note, looks like oracle cloud has a nice free tier, but that's not a dedicated arm server, but a vm (but still, with 24 cores):

https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/?source=:ow:o:p:nav:0916BC...

> Infrastructure

> 2 AMD based Compute VMs with 1/8 OCPU* and 1 GB memory each.

> 4 Arm-based Ampere A1 cores and 24 GB of memory usable as one VM or up to 4 VMs.

> 2 Block Volumes Storage, 200 GB total.

> 10 GB Object Storage.

> 10 GB Archive Storage.

Just to compare with Hetzner - you would typically be able to get 16 or 32gb ram, an i7 with 4 cores and 2x1tb disk (no ssd). I'm guessing single core performance might be higher than the arm offering - and a better fit for minecraft.

Ed: although maybe core count would win out with PaperMC?

Re: How we built an auto-scalable Minecraft server for 1000+ players

#126

Post by 3np »

Jaxkr wrote: post #6

Hi, I made this! Was gonna wait until it was downloadable and the documentation was more complete before posting it on HN. Thanks for sharing it though. The Minecraft setup will be available and useable by anyone Wednesday of next week. More documentation and a roadmap will follow shortly after.

> To accomplish this, the world state needed to be stored in a central database and served to Minecraft servers as they popped in and out of existence

Could you elaborate on this point? To me "need" seems to strong; it could also be addressed via replication or a distributed model.

Centralized is absolutely the most straight-forward (and may be the most suitable) but I'd love to see some reasoning as to why it's the only appropriate approach.

Re: How we built an auto-scalable Minecraft server for 1000+ players

#127

Post by freemint »

ipaddr wrote: post #85
e12e wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might be too pricy, but if you go to about 25usd/month, you can get a dedicated server with an i7 from hetzner server auction. These cheap boxes don't have ecc ram etc - but should work well for things like this. https://www.hetzner.com/sb?country=us

The cheapest available right now was 140 euro. When do the 25 dollar server come out?

They are in a separate category called Serverbörse [1]. The cheapest currently available is for 28€ a i7-3770 with 16GB RAM and 2x3TB spinning rust.

[1] https://www.hetzner.com/sb

Re: How we built an auto-scalable Minecraft server for 1000+ players

#129

Post by rcxdude »

sbierwagen wrote: post #82
Qi_ wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The development priorities of Minecraft are a little strange. They have had a lot of opportunities to increase extensibility and performance (see modding API, cubic chunks, etc) but were too slow about it or focused on other things. AFAIK the long-term vision is to move the game entirely to the C++ clients which are much more performant, but a lot of the core playerbase is still on Java for modding and platform compa…

That would be fine, but there's substantial UI, graphical and gameplay (!) differences between the C++ and Java clients. Crafting recipes are different, redstone has very different connection rules... If the plan is to gently ease Java users to Bedrock, then I would have thought the first step would be to actually port the game, rather than rewrite it with many small pointless changes.

Yeah, it's explicitly not a goal to make the two versions the same (despite being incredibly similar), and bedrock is (un)affectionately known as 'bugrock' in the community due to its tendency to glitch out even more so than the java edition, often in extremely frustrating ways like randomly applying fatal fall damage. AFAICT there's not a huge performance win from bedrock anyway (especially compared to the various performance mods for java).

Re: How we built an auto-scalable Minecraft server for 1000+ players

#130

Post by rcxdude »

JCharante wrote: post #46
bruce343434 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They also call servers not being able to keep up and thus the gameloop slowing down "tidi" (time dilation). Like yeah, that's just what happens when a gameserver can't keep up.

Well no, TIDI had to be added in. It's purposefully slowing down in-game ticks. Normally your requests would just be dropped if it had to process everything within a 1s tick. Now all reload times etc get slowed down by a huge factor depending on load.

Exactly. It was not something that happened automatically (not would it in almost any architecture). Instead the game would either cease to function properly or players would get disconnected or the server would crash, usually all of those in roughly that order. With TiDi at least things can happen, albeit at a frustratingly glacial pace.
Post reply on HN