Do you think this would help the server, at all?

Minecraft
1

I don’t really know who to ask, so I thought I’d start here. This isn’t a MineOS question, it’s more of a hardware question.

Currently one of my servers (MineOs Turnkey) is a Pentium Dual Core 1.8ghz CPU. It’s been mostly fine, but it can be a little laggy at times. I never thought much of it, perhaps that’s just how Minecraft is when there are chunks to create. But I was doing some checking around last night and it seems that I can upgrade that to a Core 2 Duo for not much money. Is it worth it? Does it do anything? The box has 4 or 6 GB RAM, I can’t remember at the moment, does the CPU do all that much once the server is loaded up?

Thanks for any insights you might have.

2

I cannot attest to whether or not that particular upgrade will be useful for your current setup, but there are a few things you can do–with particular access to the server–that could tell definitively.

From the command line, use the top utility. When there are players (hopefully enough that it is representative of real play), check to see what the load average is. If the load average is less than 2.0, then you’re fine where you are.

Load average is the amount of work all your cores have, in total. With a dual core, you can handle a capacity of 2.0–anything above that and there is more work than can be handled timely…

Of course, if you were to move to that Core 2 Duo, it’s still going to be 2.0 which is your load average max, but presumably it’d be able to get more units of work done per second, and therefore the same workload might be less than it’s equivalent 2.0 on your Pentium Dual Core.

This is just a rudimentary check, but should be a good guideline for whether or not you should bother upgrading your CPU.

3

Awesome info, thanks so much, I will do that!

4

FYI - I got a chance to test it. Fortunately, I have two very similar computers for servers, both running MineOS. One is a Core 2 Duo, the other is a Dual Core (they aren’t exactly the same, but pretty similar).

Anyway, the Dual Core, with a few users, is showing upwards of 40-50% CPU load in top, whereas the Core 2 Duo shows a load of about 10%, that’s enough of a test to get me to upgrade the CPU. Thanks for the info!