Now that the 720 plan as been bumped to 1GB Linode's $40/mo plan has reached the minimum recommended requirements for a Source Dedicated Server running TF2. I'm thinking of getting another 1024 and using it to run a "dedicated" TF2 server. But I was wondering if you guys could give me some input.

1) TF2 servers are fairly CPU intensive. Is is okay to run such a thing 24/7/365? Not just from the license, but as a good VPS citizen.

2) Anyone have any experience running a TF2 or other Source server on their Linode? How was the performance/ping/lag? What size Linode did you use? How many players did you support?

3) Anyone want to kill some fellow Linode operators?

I run 2x L4D servers, 2x L4D2 servers, and 1x TF2 server off of my 360
(still a 360, needs a reboot to become a 512).

The CPUs that linode throws at you are more than sufficient. The biggest issue I've had is the disk space.

Idle, the servers take next to no CPU. When I spawned something like 1,000 zombies in L4D, the CPU shot up to about 30% on a single core (of four).

You should be absolutely fine running them.

(If you want to host multiple servers, be sure to look into the forking option -- helps with memory, restart times, crash recovery..)

Ping times are great. My game server is out of Houston, and I'm located in Utah. Average ping times of low 60ms.

On a 360? Most impressive.

_________________
Disclaimer: I am no longer employed by Linode; opinions are my own alone.

It is all about the fork option. It also helps that these are all private servers for friends, but I've had a good ~20 player TF2 match and a 4v4 L4D2 match going at the same time without issue.



This does exactly what you think it does. Starts a server, loads all of the assets, and then forks two processes off to do the heavy lifting. Shared RAM for all of the game resources, a different process for each server, and suddenly you see how I pulled it off.

Of course, with shell escaping, that command becomes something like..



.. but it is a small price to pay. :)

edit:
When it is all running, it looks something like this: http://pastey.net/137895-jwo8

Very interesting. Even with your forking setup I really am amazed you can run all of that on a 360.

I decided to give it a shot with a 1024 and so far the results are great. I'm in northern California, so I set up a linode in Fremont. I'm not even trying to run multiple server processes right now. But if I do, at least I know the proper way now.

The initial results are great. My ping is 25-30 and I've seen several random people with pings in the 7 to 9 range (!). The most people I've had on at once was 6 and that barely scratched the processor (~12% on the graphs).

I'll report back when I get a real stress test with 32 players.

I was able to run two SRCDS (CS:S) instances at the same time with 2 x (32 vs 32) (thats 128 AI) at the same time and only peat at about 70% usage.

On the other hand when i first got my Linode I was using UML and the performance was terrible with SRCDS, something with Xen seems to have fixed that issue 10 fold. Its great and I've been happy with it. I plan on setting up my own TF2 server again soon.

Hi guys,

I'm tempted to run a game server on my Linode also, but it's only if I can... from what I'm reading it sounds like it's well possible... I run a website off my 512 Linode currently using Nginx, phpfpm & MySQL, and there seems to be plenty of resources left. All my Linode graphs are barely registering on average (CPU hovers around between 2-6%).

I'm curious about the memory (RAM) footprint though... the existing stuff I have running seems to consume most of the memory, but I assume it's a matter of convenience as I have optimised MySQL to behave nicely and having nginx also is good for memory usage. So how much would a standard L4D2 server take up in terms of memory?

Thanks!