Discovery RP server upgrades

[spec]

It'll be great if you can post the machine performance stats - disk IO, CPU usage, Mem IO, Network IO to think of a few...

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<span style="font-family:Century Gothic">Spec - Independent Trader</span>
Small Transport - Hauling without earning

Current Status: Inactive - Too Much Work and Travel

[Korrd]

The point isn't to increase the throughput, its to increase throughput's connection to the MB.

O_o

The NIC on board the motherboard uses a PCI-E lane. That is way far more than enough. The computer buses are nowere near the limit given their current usage.

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Server Status | Server Rules | Players Online | Player Rankings | Freelancer Account Manager

(If you find any mistake in my English, please let me know via a PM)
(Really, I speak terrible English, so please, tell me if I make mistakes. I'd like to improve it a bit )

[looqas]

What kind of case you got? And case cooling?

The reason for asking is that my computer collects dust very, very quickly and in just 3 months time after setting up the E6750 and over-clocking it I was having blue screens because the CPU over-heating. The dust gradually clogged the heatsink and temps were sneaking up on me. Just by dusting the temps dropped 10C.

Now that you have a quite tightly wound up E8400 I think it'll be far sighted to check on those temps from time to time if you have your server collecting any dust. You had a speedfan installed if I recall correctly. A Intel's own Thermal Analysis Tool is also very handy.

Ah, but to the point of up-grades. If the case cooling is not so well taken care of then it could be a nice place to invest.

I personally have Noctuas NS12 120mm case fan and it's very, very quiet (you can't hear it unless you put your ear next to it) and it's efficient. For around $20-30 it's a solid investment.

Another possibility for up-grading is getting a Raptor HD, but that depends solely how much HD is in use. Also a better yet could be the RAM disk like someone suggested. But these don't come cheap and are not necessities.

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Flying under radar.

[jonhpath]

I don't know if you are planing on buying ram but if so i'd sugest Kingston ram. they are the best both in quality and durability. Trust me it does make a HUGE difference. 2x2gb of kingston would be nice but i dont think the server even need that so i'd go with 2x1gb if i were you. But this is only my guess if you alredy got 2gb ram then dont wast money on it.

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[Xing]

I think it's FL Hook, though not sure. They had this on universe server. It allowed you to have your own account bank, withdrawal of money and all, plus a lot of fancy stuffs. why dont we add this instead of risking our credits in a transfer that often disrupt some RP - you often have this guy yelling can some1 pls make me a transfer pls kind of thing going around when you are in a hot debate with some xenos or outcast...

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[ivr56]

I think it's FL Hook, though not sure. They had this on universe server. It allowed you to have your own account bank, withdrawal of money and all, plus a lot of fancy stuffs. why dont we add this instead of risking our credits in a transfer that often disrupt some RP - you often have this guy yelling can some1 pls make me a transfer pls kind of thing going around when you are in a hot debate with some xenos or outcast...

wow, that makes handling money easier.

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[majkp]

We're planning to upgrade the server's RAM (probably up to 4 or even 8GBs) and then create a RAM disk and run FL player database from there.

For the RAM disk we would use RamDisk Plus 9 (http://superspeed.com/desktop/ramdisk.php) which costs something but they claim it's able to allocate >4GB RAM even on a 32bit version of Windows XP. It also automatically saves the RAM disc image during shut-down and reloads it during startup so you don't need to care about that. The RAM disk would be copied onto HDD every hour or so to minimize the losses in case of a BSoD - this fortunately doesn't happen a lot.

We would of course have to purchase UPS this time, as a power failure would delete the RAM disk data.

The flserver currently loads 10-15mins after a crash or maintenance restart and this is caused by huge amount of character files (there are over 15000 characters in the database). We also run some server tools and those need to refresh the character base from time to time. And finally there could be some HDD related server lags that could be reduced this way. I am speaking about player DB backups and such.

Estimation of costs:
- 49$ for the RamDisk Plus 9 license
- 77$ for the 4GB RAM (154$ for 8GB)
- 98$ for the UPS

If you have any idea or see some risks we don't know about please post here.

[mwerte]

1) Would we be able to "roll over" the current 4gb of RAM that we have or would we have to purchase an all new 8gb set?

2) I noticed our HDD is 80gb (is this enough? Should be...) but was -only- running at 7200rpm, would it be worth it to upgrade to a 10000 or 15000 rpm HDD?

3) Do we need the UPS? If the power goes out, assuming the backups are done every day or 12 hours, we wouldn't lose -that- much. Also, for the UPS you're looking at buying, how long will that last? How about buying a separate generator? We need our fix. jk.

4) I noticed RAMdisk was certified for Windows Server 2003, is that what we currently have running on the server?

5) Where did you get $49 for the RAMdisk licence from? the lowest I saw was $299

Thanks for all you do for the server Majkp.

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[majkp]

1) Would we be able to "roll over" the current 4gb of RAM that we have or would we have to purchase an all new 8gb set?

We currently only have 2x1GB sticks, so I'd try to sell them or keep them in case the new ones decide to stop working. Whether to go for 4GB total or 8GB total that's a question. The price jumps up quite significantly and current uncompressed player DB has slightly over 900MB (15k characters). I don't expect it to double in the near future so 2GB RAMdisk + 2GB RAM for the system, flserver and supporting apps should do just fine.

2) I noticed our HDD is 80gb (is this enough? Should be...) but was -only- running at 7200rpm, would it be worth it to upgrade to a 10000 or 15000 rpm HDD?

80GB is enough. Yes, it's a 7200rpm version. Upgrading to 10k or 15k would increase the HDD performance to a degree but it's nothing significant when compared to RAMdisk.

3) Do we need the UPS? If the power goes out, assuming the backups are done every day or 12 hours, we wouldn't lose -that- much. Also, for the UPS you're looking at buying, how long will that last? How about buying a separate generator? We need our fix. jk.

The UPS I was suggesting would only hold the server like 10-15mins, but it comes with a SW which is able to shut down Windows the correct way before the battery runs out and in this case RAMdisk Plus would be able to save the RAMdisk's image onto HDD and restore it after a restart -> no data loss.

4) I noticed RAMdisk was certified for Windows Server 2003, is that what we currently have running on the server?

We currently run on Win XP (32bit version), we need the desktop version of RAMdisk.

5) Where did you get $49 for the RAMdisk licence from? the lowest I saw was $299

http://superspeed.com/desktop/ramdisk.php ... scroll down. You need to look at desktop (not server) versions.

[looqas]

Interesting idea.

Only "doubts" I have the RAMDisk's ability to allocate over 4GB in 32-system. I don't how the system works in detail, but if they say it can work over 4GB even in 32-bit system then it might.

But as you pointed out you could do nicely atm with 4GB too. 1GB for XP, 1GB for FL & player DB and 1GB to mirror the FL & DB leaves you at total 3GB.

You could do it with 4GB as a proof of concept. In case it goes wrong then you have not thrown money away, since having 4GB in 32-bit XP is not total waste.

Other considerations too make getting 4GB better choice. 2GB sticks are still quite costly AND are slower in performance.

That's my input on the matter.

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Flying under radar.