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What are the minimum specs needed for a dedicated server?


Utlagi

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6 hours ago, CyberAngel67 said:

Windows 10 updates can be scheduled, regardless if it is the Home Edition or Pro.

I have two devices, the main PC is running Windows 10 Home and the Tablet is running Windows 10 Pro (latest Insider Preview) and I am able to schedule the time to that the updates get applied on both systems.

See https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10-update-winpc/disable-automatic-reboot-after-update/9125af8a-0029-433d-873d-06c22b899c51 

Home edition gives some control over updates and reboots, but not enough control to run a server without an occasional reboot of Window's own choosing.

If you know the incantations to take total control of updates and reboots on Home edition, please post details or a link here as I'm sure it would help lots of people.

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8 minutes ago, DuoMog said:

See https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10-update-winpc/disable-automatic-reboot-after-update/9125af8a-0029-433d-873d-06c22b899c51 

Home edition gives some control over updates and reboots, but not enough control to run a server without an occasional reboot of Window's own choosing.

If you know the incantations to take total control of updates and reboots on Home edition, please post details or a link here as I'm sure it would help lots of people.

Wrong, 

I said reschedule the reboot, Windows 10 Home will not reboot without you telling it too. I have delayed reboots up to a month down the track. Yes it is a pain, to reschedule it all the time, but it works. And as you said Reboots can only be scheduled on the Pro Edition, I clearly said that is not true. You 100% can, been doing it every since Windows 10 first dropped 3 years ago.

When I need to pull Ark down, is the time I do a complete reboot for Windows allowing it to do the update then.

BTW, that article has nothing to do with actually scheduling an update reboot.

You just need to set the option to say show me a reminder when you are going to restart, it will usually be hours in advance to when it will, which you will then get an option to reschedule.

I know this for fact, because I do it on my Windows 10 home Edition. You can google it and find hundreds of articles how to do it as well.

 

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23 minutes ago, DuoMog said:

If you know the incantations to take total control of updates and reboots on Home edition, please post details or a link here as I'm sure it would help lots of people.

Most recently, I have switched to a new plan.

At a certain time of day, I pull the Ark server down every day. It allows for my maintenance window, where I also update the Ark Server if need be and any mods and reboot the machine, so that any updates that Windows has is also applied.

Down time for me is usually at most 30mins. I also make sure the active hours for Windows doesn't include that 30 mins, so I can force any reboots to when I want them.

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5 hours ago, AvocadoMike said:

Hi all, got another option to consider, similar spec but slightly lower CPU speed (down to 2.33 v 2.66) but with 64gb ram. Could run a 10k SAS drive, or go SSD. Any further thoughts appreciated!

Definitely go for SSD if you can.  My server with 5 maps lives on a 512GB SSD.  Backups go on to a 2TB HD.

CPUs are harder to recommend remotely.  Ark is CPU hungry, especially so when a tribe goes into a boss fight, or when a survivor with a large base logs on.  Both those circumstances can cause disconnects for other survivors.  So faster is better - but you can't rely on clock speed alone to show which is faster.

Use google to look for CPU comparisons.  "e5640 vs i7 3770k"  for example.  cpu.userbenchmark.com is my favourite site, but there are lots of others.

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  • 4 weeks later...

Hi guys, any thoughts on this box for (as previous query) running a cluster containing each of every map: 

Dell PowerEdge R710 (2U)

2x 2.4Ghz Xeon quad CPU's (8 cores)

6x 4GB + 6x 4GB DDR3 RAM (48GB)

Dell PERC 8700 RAID controller (LSI)

8x 500GB SAS 7.2K 2.5" hotswap

4x GB Ethernet

dual 870w PSU's hotswap

There’s still 6 spare Ram slots so I can add more if player count grows (max 288gb if I swap out what’s already installed). It used to be a web server box...

I would hope a good enterprise standard raid array would be comparable for server saves to an SSD.

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1 hour ago, AvocadoMike said:

Hi guys, any thoughts on this box for (as previous query) running a cluster containing each of every map: 

Dell PowerEdge R710 (2U)

2x 2.4Ghz Xeon quad CPU's (8 cores)

6x 4GB + 6x 4GB DDR3 RAM (48GB)

Dell PERC 8700 RAID controller (LSI)

8x 500GB SAS 7.2K 2.5" hotswap

4x GB Ethernet

dual 870w PSU's hotswap

There’s still 6 spare Ram slots so I can add more if player count grows (max 288gb if I swap out what’s already installed). It used to be a web server box...

I would hope a good enterprise standard raid array would be comparable for server saves to an SSD.

You haven't specified which CPU you have.  Mine is an i7-7800X.  I have 3 threads allocated to Rag and The Island - and they max out at about 20 online users.  Other maps have only 1 thread because they're not so heavily populated.

Each map will probably use between 4.5 and 5.5 GB RAM (without any mods).

I'm running 5 maps on a 512GB SSD.  I'd strongly recommend SSDs in preference to HD's - but HD's will work.  I can't believe a HD RAID will be anywhere near the performance of an SSD - but it may not matter.  Try it and see how it goes - you can always swap to SSD later (which I did).

I have auto-saves set to 40 mins on each map.  20 minutes saves were causing noticeable lag spikes.
I backup daily to an internal HD

 

I'd say "go for it".  Tweak the settings and config as you learn where the bottle necks are.

Let us know how you get on.

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23 minutes ago, DuoMog said:

You haven't specified which CPU you have.  Mine is an i7-7800X.  I have 3 threads allocated to Rag and The Island - and they max out at about 20 online users.  Other maps have only 1 thread because they're not so heavily populated.

Each map will probably use between 4.5 and 5.5 GB RAM (without any mods).

I'm running 5 maps on a 512GB SSD.  I'd strongly recommend SSDs in preference to HD's - but HD's will work.  I can't believe a HD RAID will be anywhere near the performance of an SSD - but it may not matter.  Try it and see how it goes - you can always swap to SSD later (which I did).

I have auto-saves set to 40 mins on each map.  20 minutes saves were causing noticeable lag spikes.
I backup daily to an internal HD

 

I'd say "go for it".  Tweak the settings and config as you learn where the bottle necks are.

Let us know how you get on.

*COUGH*

He did

2x 2.4Ghz Xeon quad CPU's (8 cores)

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1 hour ago, CyberAngel67 said:

I am aware there are variations, but maybe choose your words a little more carefully. Maybe which Xeon CPU rather than what you said.

Dear Cyber.  I do sincerely apologise for my poor and imprecise use of the English language.  I shall endeavour to correct my imprecisions and ask percisemotally the aproximatingly (non-differentiated) informatikonals that I am trying to achievements.  Howeverly, my lacking in qualificationifications in the districts of subjections leaves me undecipherable at times of greatest incoveniencies.  Perhaps (or otherwise) I need to resorts to non-native speechlies (Wakarimasu ka) becausements despite my lacking in graspments, I'm convinced the majorityments of ably-minded perusers of this forum have enough nousements to decipherment my mumbles.

I sit back in my wallowments with pizza in hand correctited and morally putted-right.

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Tell me please, what can be the problem with Windows 10. ARK's game servers are constantly unloaded from memory. When the server starts, it takes up 4.5G in memory, but after a while the memory size used by the server is reduced to 200-2500M (depends on the number of players). Accordingly sometimes happens HANG or a critical error. Server with 32G RAM - usage 4-7G of 32

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25 minutes ago, TOXid said:

Tell me please, what can be the problem with Windows 10. ARK's game servers are constantly unloaded from memory. When the server starts, it takes up 4.5G in memory, but after a while the memory size used by the server is reduced to 200-2500M (depends on the number of players). Accordingly sometimes happens HANG or a critical error. Server with 32G RAM - usage 4-7G of 32

Disable the pagefile entirely... With that much RAM its not needed if it only runs the OS and Ark.

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  • 3 months later...
On 5/10/2017 at 5:02 PM, Crystal said:

I would expect 5Mbps upload speed to be able to manage about 8-10 players without issue (assuming you are not using the bandwidth for other things at the same time). More than that and people are likely to start experiencing lag and disconnects. Also, Ark is not very resilient to packet loss (will cause disconnects), so make sure you have a good connection quality. (To test, you can run a long-running ping to some public site and see if it gets any timeouts, or use a service like pingtest.com in a Java-enabled browser.)

As far as computer specs, I recommend the following:

  • A stable OS that doesn't need a lot of maintenance or rebooting and doesn't run a lot of background stuff (which often interferes with CPU availability). I would either run Windows Server or a Linux distro. This is not a requirement, but running it on an end-user version of Windows is generally not going to be a great experience for you as the operator. I am running Windows Server 2012 R2 which I can leaving running for 6 months to a year without a reboot and have no problems. I can't run my Windows 10 Pro machine for more than a week or two before it is having issues, and the whole time it is constantly nagging me about things like updates.
  • The computer must have at minimum 2 (virtual) CPU cores available to the server, although there have been some issues with machines that only have 2 cores in total. CPU single-thread performance is the most important hardware decision when building a server for Ark. In Ark, the more spread out around the map people are, the more active NPCs there will be, and more active NPCs means more CPU power is needed to keep the server FPS stable. Also, player built structures (especially when people are actively placing them) contribute a lot to CPU demand. Most of this happens on a single thread, so the server will exhaust one core of the CPU while only using the others very little. There is no clear minimum requirement here, as it really depends on what is going on on your server. For your stated use case of 6 players, you should be fine with any decent mid to high range quad-core CPU, so long as it has good single-thread performance.
  • The server should have at least 6GB of RAM available to it (probably at least 8 total in the system). This again depends on how spread out people are and how many NPCs and structures are around them. If there are 10 people all in different parts of the map, RAM usage might spike above 6GB. I would recommend 16GB RAM or more in the system just to not have to worry about it, but you should be fine with 8GB if the system itself is very lean. Some people have run servers with only 4GB (the absolute minimum), but it is not a great experience for the players.
  • Make sure the server machine is plugged into a UPS (uninterruptible power supply). Power loss will cause your server to lose everything since the last save, and sometimes even corrupt the save so it is unusable. For better uptime, you can also plug your network equipment into a UPS to keep the connection alive during a short power outage.
  • Edit: As other people mentioned, run the server from an SSD. It did not occur to me to mention this originally because I never tried to run from a mechanical HDD, but definitely use an SSD.

Also, don't play the game from the same computer that is hosting the server. You can if you have enough CPU power and RAM, but there are things like the game starting up that will basically freeze up your PC for several seconds at a time. That is not a great experience for people playing on the server when it stops responding for several seconds. Also, running the game is likely to cause you to have to restart the machine more often, meaning more server uptime interruptions.

As a side note, if you have enough RAM and available CPU cores (1 per server plus at least 1 extra), you can run multiple servers from one machine without issue. I run a three server cluster on a machine with an AMD FX-5950 (4/8 core) and 32GB RAM. I can only support about 40 players max across all of them though due to my connection upload speed (25Mbps).

I found this post very helpful. Is there any update on performance? How does it scale with cores when running multiple maps? Is the game finally able to parallelise better the load?

I am running my cluster on a WIN2016 VM on a WIN2016 host, with 64GB ram and an E5-2608L v3 (to save up on energy).

I am runnign 3 maps, theisland,ragnarok, scorchered earth. The cluster has currently 15-20 users online every night (peak time of the day). Problem is that it started to lag a bit. Not sure if this is more because of CPU (I originally gave 4 cores to the VM, with max load of 100% each, but the CPU use was close to 90%, so I changed to 6 cores, still CPU use gets as high as 75% on peaks), or because of network (fiber 100/40 connection, true speed more likely 40/20), or network devices. As I want to add 2 more maps to the cluster, I am considering a CPU upgrade, to something like E5-2630L v4. This would increase single-core performance a bit (+30%) and add 4 new physical cores (6 to 10, logical cores 12 to 20). Would this be a good choice? Please also consider that unfortunately most players decided to concentrate on ragnarok map, so at the moment I am afraid ragnarok is stressing a single core while other maps have very little CPU use....

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The Ark server still doesn't use multiple cores properly.  It tends to use one core quite heavily and another not so heavily.  I haven't found any way to force Ark to spread its CPU load. 

I'd be interested to hear of any way to get Ark to take more than about 20 players on a map without serious lag.

You'll almost certainly need more cores if you're going to add more maps.  Faster clock speeds will help each map a bit.

 

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We would recommend the following dedicated server specifications to host no more than 4 game servers on 1 machine for optimum performance.

3.2GHZ Quadcore + 32GB Memory + SSD Hard Drive + 1Gbps Network Port

-------------------

We operate the following spec machines for our customers and we also offer these machines for rent upon request:

CPU: E3-1270V6 (Turbo/OC 4.0Ghz/4.5Ghz) – 4 Cores, 8 Threads
Memory: 64GB DDR3 ECC
Hard Drive OS Drive: 500GB Enterprise SSD (512MB Read / Write)
Hard Drive Game Files & Backup Drive: 500GB Enterprise SSD (512MB Read / Write)
Network Port Speed: 10.0 Gbps (30TB Bandwidth Usage Allowance)
Operating System: Windows Server 2012 R2 X64 Standard 

I hope this helps you find the machine you are looking for. If you require any further help please DM us, we are always available to help the community.
 

Side Note: If you are looking to rent a high performance ARK Survival Evolved game server for an affordable cost with powerful features such as Auto Mod Updates and Free BattleMetrics Premium RCON subscription please feel free to checkout our sales page

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  • 3 months later...

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