How many players can my host handle?

Hello,

I'm planning to set up a big city server on my root.
Hardware:
Intel i7 4770 @ 3.9Ghz (4cores 8threads)
VM limited to 24GB Ram
7200rpm HDDs
Debian 7 as OS
200MBit/s up- and download
McMyAdmin for administration

With this Setup the server could hold about 150 players. Theroretically, from what I've read.

So I thought if I use WorldBorder to restrict the world and prevent it from being too big, I could use a RamDisk with about 8GB (16GB server and 8GB ramdisk). I would set up a backup schedule of the world to back it up every half hour to be safe from losses.
Would the server be able to hold more players with this setup? Would you even recommend this even with backups?

I'm not able to add SSDs to my root so this would be the only solution to get more performance.

Edit: I have two maps, one for building the city and one for farming. Both are about 1,3 GB big together, the border has a radius of 3000 blocks in both worlds, so enough for 250 players. The city map will extend because of the buildings, but the size would never grow over the 8GB RamDisk I think.

 

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Alright, let's talk about your plugins. Plugins is what you should be looking out for, because there are some that will eat all your CPU and RAM - which makes your server prone to lagg, crashes or simply not being able to hold the amount of users you get coming to your server. So only go for the good plugins, which are known to be less resource hungry than others!

Another thing is, your disk space/SSD space has nothing to do with fast it'll perform. Yes, SSD's will help the load times. But just remember to keep a good amount of disk space incase your server grows, and don't always keep all your backups on your server, make some externally just incase your server crashes or something happens (if you're on RAID then you should be fine, but don't take risks)

Now since you have hyper threading (which basically splits the process in half so it can process it 2 times faster), it'll allow much more processing and better results for you! But yet again, it depends how much your plugins rely on resources (the ones that are constantly running code). If you try going on your server, get a few people on; and then check how much resources Bukkit is taking with the plugins, you'd get a good guestimate as to if you have some resource hungry plugins. Plugins like CoreProtect and WorldGuard can sometimes get recourse hungry, because it's constantly running for every user. But if you just have the basic plugins, you should be fine.

So I am assuming that you're running basic plugins, unless you get back to us/me as to what plugins you're using; I guesstimate that your server could hold about 200-500 users providing you keep everything running smoothly by managing the plugins and keeping them to a low and only use what you actually need!

 

Thanks for your answer!

These plugins will run on the server:

WorldGuard
WorldEdit
LogBlock
Essentials (only Essentials)
LWC
McBans
WorldBorder
CraftConomy
ChestShop
RegionForSale
PermissionEx
Vault

So it's not necessary to use a RamDisk?

 

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I'm sure this server should be capable of hosting 100 players.

 

Hmmmm my server has 8gbs of RAM with normally 60-70 people on which runs smoothly. I would say you could hold up to 500-600 people but it would get very crowded, BUT That uploading and downloading speed tho.... I would say 100-150 with that internet speed tho..

 

Minecraft needs about 50-100KBit/s to play on a server, so 200 000 / 100 would be 2000 players with that upload speed.. So the bandwidth is clearly not the bottleneck on this one^^

 

200 players min - i can keep 150 players with my 8 gm machine(and of course im using spigot not craftbukkit)

 

DARKZONE well for a yahoo answer I saw it is around 2-3 players per 1mb meaning 345kb/s for that. Plus I entered your specs on canihostaminecraftserver. It says you can only hold 135 people. Also here it says at least .25 mb/s or 256kb/s. Also it depends on how big your world is going to be, or if a lot of people will be running around a lot. I also quote from CptWin "Your biggest usage of bandwidth is going to be world generation and chunks, each block in Minecraft has to be sent back and forward between the server and the client (it doesn't quite work like that, but for simplicity sake).
So if you have a chunk (16x16x256 or Width x Depth x Height), each chunk is at least 65,536 Bytes or 65KB.
Next we will assume you have your render distance set to the default of 10, which means that each player has a radius of 10 chunks loaded at any point, 10x10 is 100 chunks so that would be 655KB.
So in order for each player to receive just the chunks alone (in a timely fashion, about 10 seconds) you would require at least 65.5KBs per about 10 players (Kilobytes per second)."
Sources:
CptWin. "How Much Upload Speed Does Each Player Use on a Minecraft Server?"
Yahoo! Answers. Yahoo!, n.d. Web. 05 Feb. 2014.
JefferyLees. "Minecraft Servers - Bandwidth and Speeds." Web Hosting Talk RSS. N.p., n.d. Web. 05 Feb. 2014.
Dan. "How Much Bandwidth for a Minecraft Server? - Ask Minecraft Addicts." How Much Bandwidth for a Minecraft Server? - Ask Minecraft Addicts. N.p., n.d. Web. 05 Feb. 2014.