Server need for turnbased game

I want to host 1v1 game. It's turn based, and it will run one Unity .exe file/instance per 2 players (one match). What is the difference between Photon Server Unlimited and Photon Server Enterprise? Those exe files will run physics and communication logics. Will Photon Server Unlimited be enough for 1000 instances (matches) per hour?

Comments

  • chvetsov
    chvetsov mod
    edited April 2017
    hi, @KPK12
    EDT:
    I was wrong in my initial answer. sorry.
    difference between Enterprise and Unlimited only in license details. Unlimited is one server for one title. this server does not have any limitations. Enterprise - 10 servers included. All liceses except Enterprise are for one server machine.

    >Will Photon Server Unlimited be enough for 1000 instances (matches) per hour?
    this is not really correct question. You are going to start unity on server, and calculate physics too. so, the question is will it enough your machine to start 500 Unity per hour and also calculate physics for those games. answer is correct for all licenses of Photon Server.

    We use photon in our cloud and one machine servs for upto 5000 connections. and this 5000 are realtime games. for turnbased it will be able to handle much more. because turnbased are very slow and rtt independent.

    best,
    ilya
  • Hi @KPK12.

    I remember a particular project with up to 4 player per match which used full-blown server-side physics and while, as chvetsov has mentioned, the typical nowadays server hardware can easily handle up to several thousand concurrent players (how many players exactly depends a lot on the specific needs of your game and on how much you optimize its network usage), running server-side physics for every room is really costing a lot of CPU-power, let alone running all those Unity instances.

    That particular game project I am talking about did not run any game engine on the server, but just a slim physics engine and still the servers could only handle about 100 CCU each, as 100 CCU meant about 25 physics engine instances, which required nearly 100% of the CPU, so running even more of them left no CPU power for anything else like for example for Photon.

    It might be even worse when running a full-blown game engine like Unity on the server side. Of course you can run the engine in headless mode to avoid wasting resources for rendering the graphics on the server, but even without rendering: game engines like Unity are designed for running one instance of them for one game on one instance of end-user hardware. Normal server hardware at reasonable prices is far from being thousands of times as strong than even the least powerful modern mobile phones. Try running 10 instances of your Unity game on a Windows PC and observe how many resources (especially CPU and RAM) they need, then do your math on how strong your server hardware would need to be to be able to run 100 or 1000 Unity instances at once (keep in mind that users will already experience a lag when the server runs at i.e. 90%, not just at 100%).
  • KPK12
    KPK12
    edited April 2017
    @chvetsov @Kaiserludi Thank you for your answers. I ran my project in headless unity mode on my PC, more precisely I ran 100 instances and it took 40-50% of my cpu. I have AMD FX-8350 processor. Is there info on photon server hardware specifications, which I can use to estamate how many instances can photon server run? So basically, I am not restricted by concurrent connections but by cpu capability of server that will run unity headless instances and calculate physics? If that is right, is there option to expand photon server so that it will fit my needs? Thanks in advance.
  • hi, @KPK12
    because you are using turnbased you may not worry about photon performance at all. you may do tests locally on your pc and see that photon just takes nothing.

    best,
    ilya