Whats the best OS for a popular tekkit classic server?

[jominer247]

I used to use windows server 2012 R2 until I decided I'd try Linux to see why people say its so good.

 

Now I understand, its really fast.

 

I'm using Debian 7.5 Wheezy.

 

I understand everyone will give a different answer - But whats the best OS for a popular tekkit classic server?

 

I'm not changing back to Windows so dont even go there

[plowmanplow]

For any system which is intended to be a dedicated server one should:

• Focus on Linux distros which are known to work well in a "headless" setup.
• Focus on Linux distros with great community support and a history of stability.
• Become familiar with tools which assist in running background processes: Linux screen, cron jobs, etc.
• Become familiar with monitoring tools: atop (stats over time, woohoo), Java profilers, etc.
• Become familiar with statistics reporting tools: rrdtool, MRTG, vnstat, etc.
• Have patience
• Become familiar with the use of (and etiquette for) IRC on Freenode (for Linux and services) and Esper (for many modded MC projects).

[jominer247]

Thanks plowmanplow.

 

I found many hosts use CentOS. So I might try it on a VM (VMs are not as good for mc I know)

But when I tried CentOS I struggled with IPTables :L

 

is Debian good in a headless setup? Also what exactly is a headless setup?

[jominer247]

Also - Added a small ionice onto the start of my launch code and the performance has gone up 10 fold.

 

May I ask what exactly IONICE does? I heard it's something to do with priorities and disk I/O.

[plowmanplow]

• A "headless" setup is one in which you have no KVM (keyboard, video, mouse). In this configuration you would be managing your system through SSH terminals and SFTP/SCP file transfers (or Samba/CIFS if you are fancy).
• Be careful messing with niceness settings. "nice" levels in Linux refer to how a process' system calls are prioritized ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nice_%28Unix%29 ). IONice does the same thing for disk IO ( http://www.askapache.com/optimize/optimize-nice-ionice.html ). There are "gotchas", however, it can be VERY handy for things like backup operations so the server doesn't lag like a beast when running your periodic world backups.
• Running Forge/MC servers in a VM is extremely viable. Running servers in a shared hosting environment where resources are painfully oversubscribed is an enormous stack of suck. As long as you aren't oversubscribing (specifically memory) you can get great performance using VMs, especially when using a Type-1/bare-metal Hypervisor.

[jominer247]

Oh alright, So Debian works really well in a headless setup (SSH) And ionice seems to be working fine and has reduced lag so ill keep it on

 

Thanks plowmanplow.