Obviously you should get your developers to run in-house stress testing of the application.

This will mean setting up a large number of clients (or modified clients) to test it.

I think that the cost of the server hosting is going to be a tiny proportion of your budget. Paying the staff to maintain the application, administer the servers etc, is going to be much bigger (not to mention your office costs etc).

So don't worry about it, it will get dwarfed by the cost of everything else.

Mark

Quote:Original post by xJOKERx
specs for the server I am inquring about ?

• Intel P4, 3.2GHz, HT, 800MHz Bus, 1MB Cache
• 160GB RAID rated Server-Class Hard Drive
• 1,024MB Dual-Channel DDR400 SDRAM
• 3,000GB Monthly Transfer
• 100Mbps Non-Capped Network Connection
• 5 IP Addresses

If you have a perfectly crafted server architecture and did not have to worry about collision (ie a 2D game) than you would be able to fit around 1000 on that machine because of the slow CPU architecture and low amount of RAM (possibly less due to RAM). So I would say you could do it with maybe 500-700 of those machines.

Quote:
Lets say you have 500,000 players..

Also just FYI you would need to have more subscribers than Lineage + Lineage 2 + World of Warcraft + Final Fantasy XI + Everquest 2 combined before you start to worry about 500,000 concurrent players. For an indie such as yourself you should actually be looking more towards the 500-1000 concurrent users number, and even that is high.

Quote:
or is it still to difficult to tell ?

If you are asking these questions you aren't even close to having the game finished and most likely aren't even started. The server hardware and bandwidth is not even a concern at this point as you have absoultely nothing. Go and build the game and once you have a working version than you can worry about hardware.

No offence but if you think 500,000 concurrent players can fit on a single machine maybe you should try making a different type of game first?

I've never even heard of 500,000 users concurrently playing. Even if it was just a chat server!! I thought WoW had at max about 2,000 concurrent users on each server/world.

Darrell Bircsak

42

When I login to EVE online, Tranquility generally has somewhere from 5-10 thousand people online. That's the most I've seen in any online game, but I somehow doubt they have only a single server machine behind it...

The person who needs to answer this question is Raduprv. Someone point it out to him if he hasn't seen it :D

Also my friend hosts here and they're fast (hence the name maybe?):
http://www.fastservers.net/

I've personally never used them but their prices are awesome. Bandwidth is SO cheap now-a-days it's laughable how much we used to pay.

Also, you'll likely need a server on both coasts unless this is going to be West/East coast only game. I don't care what you're doing, fast twitch or not, 300ms IS noticable.

500 thousand players online? I wonder...