Whats more important; Computer or Net

[DshWinchester]

Whats more important to hang on more players ?

Like,in this case

4Gb RAM,Nvidia geforce 9,dual core,500gb HD  AND 1mb of Uplink(net)

or

248mb RAM,no video card,1ghz,40gb HD  AND 12mb of Uplink(net)
?

[Bloodmorphed]

For more players?

Usually hosting a server,

Upload Speed and RAM = better hosting

Thats why you can see some hosts with like 200 mbps upload speed and 250 MB RAM, and then only like 150 gigs of hard disk space.

so this one

> 248mb RAM,no video card,1ghz,40gb HD  AND 12mb of Uplink(net)

is way better for hosting.

[juvanio]

Blood, open the server. -AppleBloom-

[DshWinchester]

Thanks blood :D

[Godlord]

Neither are important, because of the fact that server optimisation i.e. reprogramming the server to be optimal is **far more important** (no exceptions). Hardware is fine nowadays, most software isn't.

Regards,
  Stephan.

[Aranshada]

@S.J.R.:

> Neither are important, because of the fact that server optimisation i.e. reprogramming the server to be optimal is **far more important** (no exceptions). Hardware is fine nowadays, most software isn't.
>
> Regards,
>   Stephan.

"Hardware makes a computer fast. Software makes a fast computer slow."

Amen? Amen.

[janpan40]

It depends, cause if you got a bad comp than your server has chances of being laggey and crash.
and the same for the internet connection

[Godlord]

@janpan40:

> It depends, cause if you got a bad comp than your server has chances of being laggey and crash.
> and the same for the internet connection

@S.J.R.:

> i.e. reprogramming the server to be optimal is **far more important** (no exceptions).

I've got some 9MHz - 25MHz Amiga machines at home that actually run a graphical user interface with a special multi-tasking model. The software is completely written in Assembly, C and even BASIC and is optimised.

Software is usually non-optimal. Let my load module in my server, which is written in C, be an example of that. I wanted to perform some tests, and configured my server to load (or create when non-existent) 50,000 NPC files and 50,000 item files. The result of that was:

> - Execution time: 34068541µs.

i.e. a mere 34 seconds.

To improve performance I decided to change the memory allocation and freeing algorithms in the server. First I decided to actually pool the item and NPCs objects, that brought me to this result:

> - Execution time: 25584417µs.

i.e. a mere 25 seconds and a half.

To further optimise the performance, I decided to re-implement the string allocation to use the stack instead of the heap:

> - Execution time: 18455230µs.

i.e. a mere 18 seconds and a half.

To even further optimise the server loading, I decided to drop the entire stack allocation and implemented a single stack allocation, which finally brought me to:

> - Execution time: 16259803µs.

i.e. a mere 16 seconds and a quarter (a reduction of more than **50%**!).

I could even further optimise it, by improving the file I/O and such, but that's something for the future when my library is more mature. But this should already prove that the hardware is perfectly fine. Since this server was actually being ran on a 1.8GHz single-core AMD processor with 512 MiB DDR2 RAM and an old ATA hard disk.

Regards,
  Stephan.