A Simple Home/Friend-use Server
Posted: Wed Oct 24, 2012 7:03 pm
I'm actually looking into almost the exact the same thing as this guy.
I want a dedicated machine to serve up Minecraft (via Bukkit), Mumble/Murmur in-game VOIP, and Team Fortress II for my friends and I -- and FTP, VPN, and media streaming services for myself. This would allow me to keep my more power-hungry desktop to sleep when I'm not using it, and provide better quality service for connected users.
I'm having trouble deciding on platform, AMD versus Intel. On the one hand, I live in Wyoming. Energy costs are cheap, so going the AMD route each month might not cost me all that much, and I could get killer performance for a hell of a lot less upfront money than with an Intel-based system. An FX-8320 with 2 x 4 GB DDR3-1600 ECC RAM, along with a 60 GB OCZ Agility 3 SSD and maybe a cheap low-RPM "green" hard drive would get me a great deal of stability and performance for not a lot money. I could conceivably save even more money (but not power) by choosing to go with the severely discounted Phenom II X4 965. On the flip side, it's entirely possible that a decent Core i3 system, with two strong cores and two side "hyperthreads" would handle the workload I'm proposing just fine, and sip power to boot.
On the flip side, I'm told Minecraft Server is not multithreaded except where chunk loading is concerned (which is actually the area I'm most concerned about). I have no information about how multi-threaded Mumble/Murmur is, despite spending the better part of an hour or two searching for that information. I'm unaware of how well Source Dedicated Server multithreads, nor how well Filezilla Server multithreads.
I want a dedicated machine to serve up Minecraft (via Bukkit), Mumble/Murmur in-game VOIP, and Team Fortress II for my friends and I -- and FTP, VPN, and media streaming services for myself. This would allow me to keep my more power-hungry desktop to sleep when I'm not using it, and provide better quality service for connected users.
I'm having trouble deciding on platform, AMD versus Intel. On the one hand, I live in Wyoming. Energy costs are cheap, so going the AMD route each month might not cost me all that much, and I could get killer performance for a hell of a lot less upfront money than with an Intel-based system. An FX-8320 with 2 x 4 GB DDR3-1600 ECC RAM, along with a 60 GB OCZ Agility 3 SSD and maybe a cheap low-RPM "green" hard drive would get me a great deal of stability and performance for not a lot money. I could conceivably save even more money (but not power) by choosing to go with the severely discounted Phenom II X4 965. On the flip side, it's entirely possible that a decent Core i3 system, with two strong cores and two side "hyperthreads" would handle the workload I'm proposing just fine, and sip power to boot.
On the flip side, I'm told Minecraft Server is not multithreaded except where chunk loading is concerned (which is actually the area I'm most concerned about). I have no information about how multi-threaded Mumble/Murmur is, despite spending the better part of an hour or two searching for that information. I'm unaware of how well Source Dedicated Server multithreads, nor how well Filezilla Server multithreads.