darkwalker

Liam said:

Honestly, you’ve done nothing but come on here and whine about the decisions being made about WCU Gaming getting a new server. The new server is much more powerful than the old on a number of levels. CPU, Memory, and HDD. The CPU’s are faster, more efficient, and have 4 cores each. The memory is 4gb of registered ecc ddr2. The drives are going to be setup in a RAID 1 config for security from failure.

 

The old box was a dual opteron machine with 16gb of ddr ram. Opterons have a single core and 512kb/1mb l2 cache. The Intel Xeon chips are 4 core and 4mb of l2 cache.

 

DDR2 is also much faster than DDR memory.

 

Add into the equation that ITS is kicking WCU Gaming off of their current box and thats a pretty good reason to buy a new server.

I’m not trying to whine just stop you from wasting your money. The current server is a dual proc dual core opteron (opterons’s have up to 4 cores with their 2000 model line) 250 2.4ghz with 6 147gb 15k RPM SAS drives in a RAID 5 config for “security from failure” without sacrificing performance. This system can also be upgraded by simply replacing the chips with the true quads that AMD is releaseing. Intel is 2 duals built on the same proc not a true quad. This system speced with this hardware today is still a $10,500 box. So in the end the new server may have faster processors but with the 25% util the server has been running over the past 30 minutes, dosn’t look like your touching the current power. The disk I/O is whats going to kill you, and unless your going to spend the money for the drives, with your spindle count, your not getting around it.

Of course the main problem with the new server is the fact that no one from off-campus will be able to play on it and the latency will go up no matter what the hardware. IT’s not going to make the concessions like they have with the current system. So someone will have to plug it up in their room. Now the campus external firewall will block all traffic that starts from off-campus and tries to access it. IT has also made several policy changes on the packetshaper to prioritize the game traffic from the current server. Without those policies, the traffic will get absorbed in the general ResNet traffic.

IT’s kicking you off the box? They havn’t said anything like that. Sounds to me like they gave you a way to access it through an administrator who won’t try and take down the system for fun and you don’t like it. Not to mention that this web site is run on another server that IT gave you. Considering the fact that the game club was never going to have remote access to the server when they started, I think IT’s been awful nice to you.

OK so now I’m really confused. My friend who was a RCC last year said that the gaming server is a HP DL 385 with dual cores and dual proc. and 16gb of RAM. I went and looked at the spec on HP’s site. That thing is a monster. It’s got AMD opteron’s and it would have to have matched pair ECC Ram. With 16gb that’s $2k for JUST the RAM! The whole thing spec’s out at like $12k! The HDD’s would be 15k RPM SAS (serial attached SCSI). I know you want to buy a quad core dual proc. but I wouldn’t think it’s the CPU cycles that you need to be concerned about. I would guess with the games you all are running, it’s not even touching the processors. Most of these games are I/O and RAM intensive not clock cycle. The HP can hold up to 6 drives. With that spindle count in a RAID array, it would laugh at SATA drives for I/O. What are the specs of the $1800 system? Won’t you be taking a big performance hit to move to it? I’m big into WoW and CS and don’t want the lag. Sounds like your rankings are going to go down. To bad you have to switch. I was thinking about joining the club since it had the best spec’s I’ve seen and it’s part of WCU. But it sounds like ASU is going to have better performance.