What kind of hardware

[Guest]

I have been interested in this game for a great deal of time and I want to start a server. What kind hardware is needed for a server that can 20+ people on it. Don't worry about money, I know how much it costs, I have hosted mmorpgs before.

[Aaron]

well, atm, good disks

another thing to consider is that if your going to be using meteor swarm, it creates uber lag. youll need something fast enough to handle it, leaf might know the most though...

[Leaf]

I have been interested in this game for a great deal of time and I want to start a server. What kind hardware is needed for a server that can 20+ people on it.

Minimum requirements for a *NIX server are posted here:
http://crossfire.real-time.com/requirements/index.html

Recommended specs (again, for a *NIX server) would be something along this line:

Processor: 1GHZ to 1.3 GHZ processor (ie: Pentium III or Pentium IV, AMD 2100+ or better is preferred)
RAM: 1GB
Disk Space: 10GB or more (which is about 2x what you'll probably need for OS and the Crossfire server itself)

If this is a server that you want available on the 'Net; then you'll want something faster then a 384/384 Kb (down/up) connection.

As always.. more & faster is always better.

Don't worry about money, I know how much it costs, I have hosted mmorpgs before.

As you can see, it's pretty much a home workstation (available off the shelf) with some RAM upgrades.

[Leaf]

well, atm, good disks

From testing, disk IO has yet to appear to be a resource bottleneck.

another thing to consider is that if your going to be using meteor swarm, it creates uber lag. youll need something fast enough to handle it, leaf might know the most though...

Standard, "IME, YMMV disclaimer.."

Meteor swarm itself barely causes a blip on CPU utilization, it's when players or monsters (ie Hanuk) spam cast meteor swarm that you'll encounter server lag as CPU utlization maxes out.

[Aaron]

well, on my local server, one counts as spam, and cause lag, 2 makes it really bad, anything more makes it unusable.

p2, 450 mhz, 128 megs ram, linux with 2.6.13 kernel

[cavesomething]

but then you are running with 128MB

try running malloc sometime when the server is running, the amount of memory allocated to objects & co, is probably close to that even after only a few maps.

[bort]

I really think internet connection makes the life blood of CF playability. =p

Has anyone tried a server on Fiber Optic (Fios?)