A Land Far Away

Just thought I'd mention something I'd seen missing from many proposals. We need to be able to read in the proposals what kind of server your planning on hosting the module on. If you don't know yet (and I'd almost hope you don't, build times and hardware prices being what they are) maybe just put something in there about how much your planning on spending. Naturally 4 gig of RAM is probably going to be a requirement.

The base system for TCL right now is a P4, 2.53ghz, 1 gig Ram. I can and will add more Ram once I see the final specs.

Good heads up. It wasn't specifically asked for in the proposal format but I can see its relevance. I can't imagine people aren't thinking about this though even if it isn't spelled out in the individual proposals.

Rather than making this a "mine is bigger than yours" show-off, I'd rather get back to this when we see what the standalone server requires, and what the game is capable of.

I am quite sure that any serious contender for the first spots can dish up whatever required hardware necessary to be in the race. Moonsea surely will...

My guess for a standalone dedicated server would be 2.5-3.0Ghz + with 2GB memory should be more than sufficient. 4GB would be stupidish, as no process in 32-bit Windows can access more than 2GB. You can not use 3GB+ without being specially programmed for it. ( /3G & /PAE switches + AWE ) But in the event that this is required, I'm sure everyone will be able to provide what's needed.

Baalster

HDM-Baalster wrote:My guess for a standalone dedicated server would be 2.5-3.0Ghz + with 2GB memory should be more than sufficient. 4GB would be stupidish, as no process in 32-bit Windows can access more than 2GB. You can not use 3GB+ without being specially programmed for it. ( /3G & /PAE switches + AWE ) But in the event that this is required, I'm sure everyone will be able to provide what's needed.

Baalster

Its my understanding that windows XP allocates 2 GB to process address space, and 2 GB to kernel address space. Since we'll probably want all of nwserver in physical memory, wouldn't that necessitate more than 2 GB of RAM? I didn't know the /3G and /PAE switches required different binaries, damn If thats the case, I guess we'll just have to hope NWN2 supports those, or we get a 64-bit binary eventually.

Anyways, I didn't mean expected server hardware should be mentioned here, but rather in the proposals themselves. Its not as much of a matter of whether or not servers can meet some minimun requirement as it is letting the proposal review team get a feel for how many players and areas the approved servers can support. If we are limiting our guarenteed live servers to 7, we need to take into account how large of a world the servers who make it to live can create. Oh, and naturally bandwidth should be mentioned too, this could either be a non-issue or a huge one depending on how OE decides to handle walkmesh downloads.

Of course, I still strongly hope we'll wait until the game has been live for at least a few weeks before finallizing the selection of starting proposals. I can't imagine why we wouldn't, but the existing NWN2 guidelines don't allow that.

Also, someone correct me if I am wrong, but I believe the 2 GB limit is per process, and that windows 2003 server could potentially allocate much more than this to NWN2 if multiple servers are run on the same machine. Meaning if people didn't mind buying a ton of ram and splitting up their mods, it would be possible for NWN2 servers to be much larger (though I suppose given the amount of time needed to create outdoor areas in NWN2, this would not be much of an issue in the first few months of building).

Ronan wrote:Also, someone correct me if I am wrong, but I believe the 2 GB limit is per process, and that windows 2003 server could potentially allocate much more than this to NWN2 if multiple servers are run on the same machine. Meaning if people didn't mind buying a ton of ram and splitting up their mods, it would be possible for NWN2 servers to be much larger (though I suppose given the amount of time needed to create outdoor areas in NWN2, this would not be much of an issue in the first few months of building).

Windows 2003 can allocate alot more memory (Data Center version an insane amount of it), but the normal professional/home edition cannot.
It's limited to 2GB per process, but since Windows doesn't allow memory to be shared between processes, you normally implement on Windows as one process with multiple threads. This is the way we implement our software on Windows. All background processes are implemented as threads. All server processes handling user connections becomes new threads inside the same memory space. Around 1.7GB you can expect to see memory problems, mainly due to memory fragmentation.

So NWN2 server, its connections etc will be working inside one memory space, and hence is restricted by the max process memory address space that exists for whatever Windows version you are using.

Now if we get a Linux version, it's a different ballgame. Each process can be large, and we will have multiple processes and not one enormous one.

So it's important also to remember that the amount of memory you can use also is restricted by the version of Windows that you use. It can add to the cost of the system.

Operating system Maximum memory support with PAE
Windows 2000 Advanced Server 8 GB of physical RAM
Windows 2000 Datacenter Server 32 GB of physical RAM
Windows XP (all versions) 4 GB of physical RAM*
Windows Server 2003 (and SP1), Standard Edition 4 GB of physical RAM*
Windows Server 2003, Enterprise Edition 32 GB of physical RAM
Windows Server 2003, Datacenter Edition 64 GB of physical RAM
Windows Server 2003 SP1, Enterprise Edition 64 GB of physical RAM
Windows Server 2003 SP1, Datacenter Edition 128 GB of physical RAM

* Total physical address space is limited to 4 GB on these versions of Windows.

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/pl ... AEdrv.mspx

B.

Ronan wrote:Of course, I still strongly hope we'll wait until the game has been live for at least a few weeks before finallizing the selection of starting proposals. I can't imagine why we wouldn't, but the existing NWN2 guidelines don't allow that.

I think that is a wise decision. Much can change in a matter of months in the world of hardware and broadband. The new CPUs from Intel may change things around somewhat. Inexpensive yet very powerful dual core. Memory prices are very low, and you get good bandwidth thrown at you if you approach vendors about the possibility of becoming a customer.

B.

Good info Baalster. Thx.

I was under the same impression as Ronan as regards memory. If NWN2 server uses up it's theoretical 2GB of physical memory all by itself, then we're going to need additional memory for other Windows processes. The last thing we want in the way of performance is a system starved for RAM, and seeing how cheap 2GB sticks are, I can't see why anyone would hold back.