I have a PIII 500 with 384 megs and a 1.5/384 connection. How many people should I allow on at maximum?

quote:
I have a PIII 500 with 384 megs and a 1.5/384 connection. How many people should I allow on at maximum?


This really depends on the type of players you have and the types of games you run. One of my TWGS servers runs on a P90 w/40 mb RAM, another TWGS runs on a quad 2 GHZ business server. The P90 will support about a dozen simultaneous players providing they're not doing any heavy scripting. The big server will support 100 nodes all running intensive scripting simultaneously. It should be noted that the bottleneck on the little server is not the 90 mhz chip, but the limited RAM. Each TW2002.EXE session takes up 2 mb of RAM. After six or so simultaneous connections, disk swapping begins slowing the system down.

If you run unlimited games, expect heavy scripting, and set your max nodes to around two dozen or so at most. If you're running low turn games and players don't seem to be doing much scripting, you can safely set max nodes to 100.

Lisa M. Wilson
aka Rave
uhndagrowhn bbs

uhndagrowhn bbs
telnet://uhndagrowhn.merseine.nu

quote:
I have a PIII 500 with 384 megs and a 1.5/384 connection. How many people should I allow on at maximum?




Just an old fashioned Rule of BBS Thumb. Don't use the 1.5 down. use the 384 up as a ruler. Allowing 38.4 per person, You would be looking at 10 simultaneous users with no lag. I think I can speak for about everyone and say, the systems that allow their systems (bandwidth) to get overloaded lag and that is irratating. I would suggest putting up 10 nodes and see what happens from there. Chances are, not all 10 will ever be filled at one time anyway especially at first.



Visit slbbs.com port 2002 for a rip roaring game of TW where you also have to battle the Klingons, Romulans, Orians and the Borg.

Thanks, I set it to 100 because I was doing a ZTM and it was only taking up like 300 bytes of UP bandwidth. I didn't figure it would get much worse...I'll pop it back down to 10 for awhile and see how it goes.

quote:
Thanks, I set it to 100 because I was doing a ZTM and it was only taking up like 300 bytes of UP bandwidth. I didn't figure it would get much worse...I'll pop it back down to 10 for awhile and see how it goes.




Also, you can actually use it as a multi role machine at that point. You have the horses to go out and play, surf, or whatever while others are on your TWGS without disturbing them one bit. Just keep the TWGS server set to HIGH on priority.

Visit slbbs.com port 2002 for a rip roaring game of TW where you also have to battle the Klingons, Romulans, Orians and the Borg.

I have an almost identical configuration...TWGS on a K6-III 450 and a 1.5M/384K connection. However, my BBS and internet services run on a Linux/Thunderbird rocket.

Basically, your upstream bandwidth of 384K bits is the limiting factor. You've got a bandwidth of about 48K bytes to work with. I've found that 10 busy users will draw about 12-15K bytes. You can probably support 20 concurrent users without any lag. I'm running 32 nodes, but have never hit the limit. The most I see on my system is around 25 drawing about 30K bytes. Haven't had any significant complaints about lag and when I've spyed on users to see how its running with that load, it seems perky enough. Also under that load, my system monitor reports an average of about 30% CPU utilization and about 40% memory utilization (out of 256M).

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Edited by - craig on March 13 2002 02:01:12 AM