As my Minecraft server has grown faster that I expected, I am now considering purchasing a new server. The intention is that it should be able to hold 200 players at peak times and 75-125 in other hours. The server I currently use has quite a lot of RAM (so I use a RAM-disk), but the CPU is a terrible AMD Opteron 8360 SE (2511.574 MHz). I run just one Minecraft server with a regular world + the nether. I've been looking for a new server that I can replace this one with, and the one I came up with was this one: https://eshop.atea.com/senew/product/lenovo-thinkserver-ts140-70a4/?prodid=1431869 Would this server be able to handle 200 players, providing I purchase some additional RAM?
16GB is more than enough to run 200 players. Hell, I managed to run 80 on 2GB. That server would definitely be able to handle 200 players.
Thank you for the quick reply! I am mostly worried about the CPU, but you reckon it would be able to handle the load? The server I run is a survival one with Towny (I'm not sure if that makes much of a difference, though).
Not the best, but it's good. It should do for 200 players. Only use that as a rough guide though, but in my experience it is accurate enough to tell a good CPU from a bad one.
Just sayin', I can confirm that I can fit approx 98 players with my core plugin, worldedit, worldguard, and voxelsniper with just 2GB of ram.
I had 60 plugins and a Factions server with a lot of chunks loaded, so 80 people was about my max. If it was a hub where players could not walk more than 100 blocks from spawn, I would say you could fit up to 150 people on 2GB. Indeed, later the same year on the Factions server, I managed to fit 70 people on 1.5GB.
question: Buying your own server, I assume you will host that at your own premises? Wouldn't that be quite an easy target for a ddos attack?
you also need a DMZ. hosting at home is everything but not cheap. i would recommend a root server you can get 40€/per month server with 24 gb of ram without a problem with 9000€ you can run that for years having a 1 Gbit/s flat
I recommended you go to somewhere like SYS as it will be MUCH cheaper and you'll have things like DDoS protection and engineers that will fix errors for you.
View range of 4. Low activation ranges. Very optimized growth, I shared this trick in my optimization guide. Lower mob spawning. I still had about 5,000 entities in the world at all times, but I limited the mob spawning at that and instead decided to make mobs harder to kill. Keeping players close (e.g. most of them at spawn PVPing) reduces the chunks loaded, and hence also reduces lag. A few other things I can't remember. Definitely not plugin selection. I had a huge amount of heavyweight plugins, such as SpecialEffects and a poorly-coded custom plugin. I also restarted the server about every 4 hours, but theoretically I could keep it up for about 8 before any RAM issues occurred.
