How much RAM?

[Somark28]

I would like to host a server with 20-25 slots. A lot of buildcraft will be gone to reduce lag, and only one world with no anchors. How much RAM would be needed to run this on a hosting companies computer? I would also like the answer with an extra gb of RAM included. Also what would a good hosting company be? I want the cheapest one possible that has fair server performance.

[almightyskippy]

Honestly, if you're going to host a server I'd put 16 gigs in there of 1600 or 1866. All being 9-9-9-24 timings. A really really awesome processor and a decent graphics card. I play on a server that this guy hosts from his house with a PC that only has 8 gigs on it. There's usually only two or three of us on there and if a nuke goes off there is lag everywhere. With servers, you really want to concentrate on a good processor and a good graphics card. Get 16 gigs of RAM and you should be fine.

[Silent]

Graphics card for a server, what the fuck?

Well, I host a server on a 2GB machine allocated 1GB to the server and it runs fine with 8 people on it with intense machines all over the place, I set off 64 nukes and the server only hung for like 5 seconds so its pretty solid.

[Djinnii]

Okay... Ignoring the almightyskippy....

You will need a minimum 1G of RAM to run Tekkit smoothly for 1 player with no issues. You can then count on needing at least an additional 150 - 200Mb of RAM per player.

Personally if I want things to run smoothly I would run a minimum 4G of RAM for 20 people and probably 5G for 25 people. You can usually run it with that many people with a lot less but you don't have so much room for expansion, and I don't personally like to set limits on what players can and can't do.

On a side note... the almightyskippy isn't 100% wrong, You DO need a good processor, the newer and higher clock speed the better, of course comparing server host processor specs can be a bit of a pain given that the good ones will usually be using Dual-Quad Xeons, (2 CPU's x 4 cores on each) But with those anything over 2.3GHz should be fine. (if they say it's 5GHz or more... avoid them like the plauge)

[D3matt]

I'm not gonna lie, I laughed really hard at you, allmightskippy. 1) He asked about a hosted server. 2) Minecraft server (and sever apps in generally) make absolutely no use of graphics processing whatsoever. 3) WTF?

Back on topic, I'd say 5-6GB would be good, but at that size of server CPU becomes more of an issue than anything. Remember, minecraft is almost entirely single-threaded, so it doesn't really matter if they have a single quad-core xeon or 4x 6-core xeons, you're more concerned with speed. Unfortunately I've never run a server that large, and I've never run a server on a current-generation Xeon, so I can't really give a good ballpark with that. The best you can get is all I can really advise you. Assuming you're running a VPS, I'd as for just 2 cores allocated to save money, you really can't take advantage of anything more than that unless you're running multiple servers. Maybe 3 cores if you plan on hosting additional applications like teamspeak and a website.

[Djinnii]

I am currently running my Tekkit server at a self limited 15 slots and about 30 plugins on 2616Mb of RAM (I have a 3GB VPS so I've left a fair bit for the OS and other things like the website and MySQL.)

[Somark28]

What if the server where to hold 10 people? The server would have the same conditions stated in the original post except with 10 slots.

[Djinnii]

pretty much :-)

[Silent]

Well as I said, my server has 8 people online with pretty much every house chunk loaded with teleport pipes and timers at .2 sec etc and still no lag at 1Gb