DescentBB

Assuming you have a good clean 3000/1500 connection and a 2.8 gig P4 with half a gig of memory, is it possible to run an 8-player, a 4-player and two 2-player games on one box?

1.5 megabits up? Easily, as far as bandwidth, CPU, and memory are concerned (you also need good latency.)

CPU and bandwidth requirements scale exponentially with the number of players: you would need *more* bandwidth and CPU for a single fully-populated 16-player game than your 8+4+2+2 scenario. A fully-loaded 16-player game at 9PPS with everyone shooting may burst near 1.5 megabits. Level design matters a lot.

You can use 'perfmon' to observe the bandwidth consumption and packet volume.

Another good rule of thumb is to never let your servers sustained bandwidth exceed half of your connections rating. Due to the small packets used by the game, transport overhead (unseen by your performance monitor since it is added at the modem) becomes a large factor. Overhead varies by connection type, but I once calculated it for my SDSL line at 40+ percent.

As always YMMV.

Yea I agree will esa and Starken. It depends much on what levels, what MODs and how many packets you are going to use.

But in general: Your machine can easily handle those 4 instances, but if your connection does - you have to test. I'd say: Usually your 4 servers won't be used at the same time, so it should work good...

Thanks, fellas. I'm sure I'll have more questions later. Right now I'm still waiting for my connection to be upgraded.

If I recall correctly, some of my 14-player servers would gobble up as much as 1.5 megabit each. 100 megabits was the limit, so no bandwidth issues there.