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The Servers

We recently upgraded our old Xeon servers to brand new AMD Opterons 242's and so here is our new server specification.

CPU

We started off using Intel Xeons 2.4 and now we are running Dual AMD Opterons 242's. This recent upgrade was dual to many benchmarks and reviews we have read over the last few months about these Opterons and their performance over Xeon's. Xeons are quite old now and these new AMD Opterons are brand new CPU's from AMD with some of the latest technology ready for high demanding servers. Almost every benchmark I have seen showed the 2.4 GHZ Opterons to far out perform a 3.06GHZ Intel in almost every aspect. It is for this reason that we decided it was better for the company to upgrade to this new line of servers. To see what I am talking about, see this review here which was one of our main resources for the upgrade.

RAM

The servers are running 2 GB ECC Registered RAM PC2700 (DDR 333). We use 2GB so there is ample room for data and no chance of bottle necks thought the server to keep it running at 100%. There is a quicker form of DDR which is DDR 400 but we currently have no problems with DDR333 and we will continue using it for the near future. If we do start noticing performance problems with the server then we can upgrade to DDR 400, but for the minute, the server's run great how they are, as the old saying goes, "don’t fix what aint broke".

Hard Drives

Currently, we have two 80GB Hard drives in our servers. We feel this is adequate to hold the Operating system, game files and have enough space for clients to put gaming files into. They run at 7200RPM and are IDE. The 8mb of cache ensures our Hard Drives have enough cache space to be able to hold data while transferring and moving. This ensures no bottle necks in the server when transferring data. The first Hard Drive is only an OS hard drive though and only contains the files used for Windows and the Virtual Memory. This is so we can have as much virtual memory space as we can and if the Operating System has a problem we can format it, and not lose all of your game files. Once the OS is loaded, the C drive is not access as much as the D drive is which has all the game files on it, this means accessing the virtual memory is quicker as there is less data going from motherboard to Hard drive.

Operating System

Here at Deadly Hosting we use both Microsoft Server 2000 and 2003. When I tell people that I am using Microsoft Server and not Linux, some are surprised and think we are making a mistake. I myself might have agreed with them a few years ago, but not now. There have been a lot of debates in the past weather MS Servers are actually better then Linux, and when it goes to web servers, I tend to sway over to Linux, but with game servers I never hesitate to use MS Server as an operating system. When it comes to running games it is in our experience that MS Server is the most reliable and best for running games. A lot of people will disagree with us here, but we have found that for gaming servers it provides the best memory allocation, stability and efficiency. To make my point a bit firmer; Nearly all games are released on the Windows platform and so the server's are going to be made for windows, a few months later the Linux version is usually released but I feel not as much work goes into this release and usually has bugs which makes the overall running of the server, not as efficient or stable as a Windows based version. This can be shown with Doom3; about 2 months after Doom3 was released, the Linux server release became available so no hosting company running on Linux could put up at Doom3 server which could of been quite a lot of money lost, the same also happened with Call of Duty: United Offensive

NIC’s (Network Interface Card)/Network Cards

Deadly Hosting uses dual Gigalan network cards. This means we have two connections that’s we can have running at anyone time. What does this mean to you? Well not much really, apart from when it comes to the thing games love...LAG. One network card can only take so much, once it goes over this, a bottle neck occurs, this causes lag if it gets to big. If there are 2 cards running at the same time, it means a bottle neck is less likely. All of your gaming traffic is going though one card, but your gaming traffic is not the only traffic our severs have to deal with. To ensure our server is running efficiently, and is also actually running and not down, fire for example, we have to monitor it, this can be quite a lot of traffic sometimes and we don’t want it to interfere with your traffic, so we have a separate card to do this. It’s also what’s known as a 'Loop Back Device' which means it’s connected to the network overview center which is where the technicians keep an eye over all the servers. Quite complicated stuff these dual cards, but it all comes down to one thing, Better gaming, less ping times.

Connections

Not a part of the server, but it lets you connect to your server, so just as important. Our servers are hosted on multiple OC-48 connections with a huge OC-192 backbone. What the hell am I on about? Well first I will explain our main connection. Our server has not 1 main connection, but multiple, which is like have 5 internet connections to your house, joining them all up and then connecting them to your computer. OC-48 runs at approximately 2.488 GB per second, and we have multiple, so although our data doesn't’t travel any faster, if 1 line is currently bottle necked is has others to go down. Which again, means less chance of LAG, quicker ping times. So if we have this huge line, why have a backbone. Well OC-192 is approximately 10 GB per second, yes I no fast, but this line doesn't’t connect directly to our sever. This is the line that connects the network end points together and is the line the traffic uses, so not to clog up our main line.