Minecraft server, motherboard and CPU

[DanceswithUnix]

So my son has a minecraft server that is doing fairly well, currently running as a VM on the house server. And there lies the problem, that box is doing video recording, PC backups, email storage etc onto a raid 1 disk pair. The VM has plenty of ram and is allowed 2 cores of the AMD FM2 quad core 6500 APU that runs the server.

I am pretty sure the box is just disk constrained, which makes the server sometimes lag.

So, I have kicking around spare:

Mini ITX case, low profile with single half height expansion slot. (https://www.scan.co.uk/products/ther...h-220w-sfx-psu)
120GB SATA 3 SSD (should sort any storage bottleneck )
4GB of DDR3 ECC ram as 2x2GB sticks
Pretty sure I have 8GB DDR3 as 2x4GB non ECC somewhere, but seem to have mislaid them. Am going to have a look. (Edit: Found them, Ballistix Sport 1600MHz)

Now in theory I could probably get an i3 setup which would be pretty quick, but I'm not sure I can justify that sort of cost specially when the Intel motherboards seem stupidly expensive.

AM1: £76

£31 motherboard: http://www.ebuyer.com/638938-asus-am...io-mini-am1i-a
£45 Athlon 5370 2.2GHz APU: http://www.ebuyer.com/745521-amd-ath...-ad5370jahmbox

FM2+: £111

£51 motherboard: https://www.scan.co.uk/products/asro...an-usb-30-mini
£61 3.1GHz quad core APU: https://www.scan.co.uk/products/amd-...65w-cpu-retail

I don't want to go for a 95W APU, I've been down that road and they are too hard to cool silently when java decides to go nuts which with Minecraft seems fairly regularly.

Now an Athlon x4 is a possible, but that is only £6 less than the APU and means I have to either find a half height single width GPU, or a new case which bumps the cost up quite a lot.

Haswell i3: £170

£70 H81 Motherboard: https://www.scan.co.uk/products/asus...-hdmi-mini-itx
£100 i3 3.7GHz https://www.scan.co.uk/products/inte...54w-cpu-retail

Anyone know any other options? Really torn here, looking for bargains...

[DDY]

What about an HP Microserver or Dell PowerEdge T20?

http://www.serversplus.com/servers/t...svdel-t203692p

http://www.ebuyer.com/722189-hpe-pro...er-819185-421?

[DanceswithUnix]

Yeah I have wondered about the Microserver. £125 isn't a bad price, but I would be itching to upgrade the CPU. Two threads is probably enough for Minecraft (I gather it has a main thread and a block loading thread) but a spare thread or two for the operating system and/or help a second Minecraft server instance to run would be really nice.

Just been looking at the case, that graphics slot is single width (boo) yet full height (hurrah?). Perhaps I should look at some candidate cards. The case currently has an Atom D520 board in it, something that would be OK on ram but feels slower as a Linux platform that my Pi 3.

Oh, and almost no space for CPU coolers which makes me wonder if I should just go AM1. I offered up a Wraith cooler I have knocking around, it is nearly the height of the case

Edit: The Dell looks a good price, but too big for the space this would have to take up in the living room.

[Marenghi]

Pardon my ignorance but does running a MC server require a GPU? I can't see that requirement on this wiki http://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Serve...ents/Dedicated

I don't know for certain, but I was under the impression that the server console does not do any 3d rendering

[DanceswithUnix]

Pardon my ignorance but does running a MC server require a GPU? I can't see that requirement on this wiki http://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Serve...ents/Dedicated

I don't know for certain, but I was under the impression that the server console does not do any 3d rendering

Not for everyday use, only for installing Linux and general maintenance. Motherboards often just strop rather than boot if there is no graphics at all.

[EndlessWaves]

I would definitely be inclined to go for a Haswell/Skylake Celeron or Pentium over an A8-7600 in this instance. They're faster running games and put out substantially less heat:
http://www.techspot.com/review/1017-...et-gaming-cpu/
http://www.hardware.fr/articles/915-3/consommation.html
(The 860k is an A10-7850k with GPU disabled).

You can find H81 boards for closer to £60 elsewhere:
https://www.cclonline.com/category/4...slist/1081003/
http://www.ebuyer.com/store/Componen...rice+ascending

That and a Pentium G3260 at £51 comes to the same price as the A8 system:
https://www.cclonline.com/product/17...oxed-/CPU0332/

A Skylake G4400 is the same price, but finding a DDR3 motherboard may be tricky as most are DDR4.

[Marenghi]

Not for everyday use, only for installing Linux and general maintenance. Motherboards often just strop rather than boot if there is no graphics at all.

Apologies, I didn't explain where I was going with that line of questioning! If running a MC server does not require any graphical grunt then could you explore the possibility of getting an old second hand mobo which has onboard graphics. Although having suggested that I don't know how much they tend to go for nowadays

[b0redom]

Wouldn't a cheaper/neater solution be to put an SSD into the server and install your minecraft VM to that? That should help you decide if you're IO bound or not right?

[DanceswithUnix]

Apologies, I didn't explain where I was going with that line of questioning! If running a MC server does not require any graphical grunt then could you explore the possibility of getting an old second hand mobo which has onboard graphics. Although having suggested that I don't know how much they tend to go for nowadays

Fair enough, I suppose I should have said I don't like the idea of using second hand kit. I do have some old parts here, but RAM doesn't tend to fail with age and I know how it has been treated as it was always mine

I have old kit in the garage, but it is old stuff that runs hot so not really suitable.

[DanceswithUnix]

I would definitely be inclined to go for a Haswell/Skylake Celeron or Pentium over an A8-7600 in this instance. They're faster running games and put out substantially less heat:
http://www.techspot.com/review/1017-...et-gaming-cpu/
http://www.hardware.fr/articles/915-3/consommation.html
(The 860k is an A10-7850k with GPU disabled).

You can find H81 boards for closer to £60 elsewhere:
https://www.cclonline.com/category/4...slist/1081003/
http://www.ebuyer.com/store/Componen...rice+ascending

That and a Pentium G3260 at £51 comes to the same price as the A8 system:
https://www.cclonline.com/product/17...oxed-/CPU0332/

A Skylake G4400 is the same price, but finding a DDR3 motherboard may be tricky as most are DDR4.

I did look at the Pentium range. Dual thread puts me off, and yes I know they are faster threads but the kids have had 5 servers running on the two threads of their VM in the past so if I cure the storage bottleneck I can see where they will be going

But you know what, this gives me an idea. I have an old Dell tower in the garage which is *!"& huge but has a Pentium dual core (a bit old, socket 1155 perhaps?) and if it is only temporary hopefully the wife won't freak with it in the living room. She is very understanding, I'm very lucky

Am actually quite shocked that there aren't any Minecraft server benchmarks. I get the impression the big boys just rent a hosted 8 thread Xeon and leave the cap at 200 players, if a Pentium with its chopped down cache etc can do 20 players that is probably enough for now.

So, I shall see how well a dual core Intel box copes. Will check back in after a week or so.

[b0redom]

If you're really disk bound, isn't a cheaper/neater way just to drop in an SSD or even a 3rd piece of spinning rust? I doubt RAID-1 is saturating your server.

[DanceswithUnix]

If you're really disk bound, isn't a cheaper/neater way just to drop in an SSD or even a 3rd piece of spinning rust? I doubt RAID-1 is saturating your server.

The machine copes with it's usual tasks and usual load, just occasional spikes see it "lagging". The home server is quite central to the home network, so I would rather not pull it apart unless I really have to even for upgrades.

The Minecraft VM has gone from regular 3 users to 8 users and climbing, moving it off seems like a good idea, it just has different needs.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Bagnaj97 was running a combined media and Minecraft server fine off an Athlon X4 760K based mini-ITX system with 8GB of RAM.

[DanceswithUnix]

Bagnaj97 was running a combined media and Minecraft server fine off an Athlon X4 760K based mini-ITX system with 8GB of RAM.

I lose count of how many Minecraft servers we were running at some point, and that box was doing a *lot* besides. So yeah, another FM2+ setup was my first thought but specially with FM2+ so close to obsolete I would like to consider other options.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I lose count of how many Minecraft servers we were running at some point, and that box was doing a *lot* besides. So yeah, another FM2+ setup was my first thought but specially with FM2+ so close to obsolete I would like to consider other options.

How much RAM are you running in the current box??

[DanceswithUnix]

How much RAM are you running in the current box??

<stares at feet and mumbles>erm, 24GB

16GB packs were on offer at Ebuyer, and I thought it might help OK?

Looks like we were running 6 Minecraft servers in that VM, on top of the ZoneEdit, storage, email storage with spam filtering, caching web proxy. . .

Down to just three now, lag is far better.

Have spent part of the evening getting Munin (yes the server runs that too) to monitor the Minecraft VM and user count and lag of one of the servers. The disk latency is pretty bad on that VM, coming in at 250ms despite the underlying host OS showing its RAID1 array that the VMs are on at a steady 15ms. The Minecraft VM only has 10GB out of that ram so there should be plenty of cache on the host.

Bah, it's getting late, I'm grabbing a mug of tea and going to read a book. Perhaps have another look tomorrow.