How many CCU could this setup handle?

Remix919
edited May 2011 in Photon Server
For now while I am doing just development, I plan to just use an old PC I have as a temporary server. I was just curious as to how many CCU this type of setup could handle:

AMD Athlon 3400+ CPU
512MB RAM
60GB HD
10MBps line

The game I am developing will be a MMO top-down military shooter with capture the flag capabilities. It won't be too graphically intensive but will be using 3d blender models.

Comments

  • 10MBps line is the number for downstream? Upstream is often about 1/10th of it, so maybe 1MBps in your case. I think that will limit you to about 20 players in total, but that really depends on the amount and size of messages that you are going to exchange.
  • Ok, thanks Boris :) If I were to want a server capable of having 1000CCU, what kind of server specs and connection would I need? Also, is the total CCU limited more so by the server power or the connection to the server? And yea, your right, speedtest.net shows 10Mbps/s downstream, 1Mbps/s upstream.
  • Again, this really depends on your game. If you plan on having 8 or more players per map you will need 100Mbit of bandwidth and at least a 2.4ghz 4-core with 1 or 2 GB of RAM.
  • You'd want more than 2gb ram for a server. 4 atleast.
  • Isn't it normally a simple rule of thumbs to calc 1-2gb RAM per core, as a bottom end, unless the application is significantly more cpu than data limited (a MMO application based one would potentially fit that, while Lite / Lobby is near definitely RAM and bandwidth bound)?
  • I don't recall that I have ever seen such a high RAM usage when load testing photon.
  • dreamora
    dreamora
    edited May 2011
    Out of the box, none of the Applications that are offered at least along Photon have anything like a persistency layer or cache, no AI and NPCs nor "real MMO scale data amounts" for example, so yeah I guess with just them the RAM usage will go through pretty low.

    But I know that scaling the UO Freeshard I and friends were running over a decade ago (and UO used and required far less data than 3d games using the mmo solution now adays), the number would be much higher than 1-2gb as we back then already needed 512MB of RAM for 100CCU and the required monsters, their inventory etc to give them something to do. Part potentially could be reduced through more usage of a database for realtime fetching of data, but then you just need more to much more RAM on the DB side side for the same gain (normal RAM cached on the server eats less RAM to gain similar performance as you need RAM for DB caches).
    DB is naturally required for serializing etc, but I wouldn't rely on DB caching for "persistent objects", only for larger and more intense non persistent queries (Auction House searches and alike)

    What I meant and forgot to add on the Lite comment above: You will likely be at pretty large CCU numbers when you hit the border there unless your lite games have a lot of "cpu driven and data intense" stuff around.
  • If I understood Boris right in some conversations, memory is cheap and fast and helps a lot if you use it right. So if your server has good memory, you could put a lot of non-persistent or not-so-often-changing stuff in there instead of asking the DB for every info you need to send to someone.
    Using the DB excessively could easily become a performance bottleneck.
  • That's true. With a DB and with Caching you will want a lot more RAM.