Testing maximum numbers of players

[Mogoloko]

Hi all,

My wife is a secondary school teacher here in Spain. A few days ago, she went to a conference, and a speaker spoke about Minecraft EE. She's very interested in use it in her classes. When she told me, i suggested to try some open source alternative, and we discovered Minetest. I'm web developer and gamer too, so i'm also very excited with the idea.

In a few hours we had some basic but great ideas, but we needed technical support about minetest servers. Basically, we need to know how many users (more or less) can play in a server over LAN. And external players connections (server 16GB, 10Mb/s up, 10Mb/s down)?

So we decided to search in the net these question, but we've not found anything.

Wouldn't be interesting if the community organize different tests in different servers, and publish the results?

For example:

Server: wwww.myserver.net
Computer: i5 8GBRam
Spped: 10/100 Mb/s
Max-players: 20
Result: No lag


Thanks

[KCoombes]

You would also need to standardize the mod installations, or track only vanilla minetest game servers, as the mods can and do add to the lag.

[Mogoloko]

Yes, i'd be fine.

Anyway, even if each server which make the test use differents mods, the feedback would be very interesting, and would help to get an idea of what you can reach.

[DI3HARD139]

I've hosted upwards of 75+ players over 7 servers (2 with over 270 mods and the rest lightly modded (20ish mods)) and used around 4-6Mb/s of a 13Mb/s connection. The amount of mods loaded onto the server will change the bandwidth requirements. Most bandwidth consumption will come from a client that hasn't connected to the server before. Mods that use the most bandwidth and/or system resources are mapgen mods, mobs, technic, mesecons and pipeworks. Check my signature for my server specs.

[Mogoloko]

Thanks DI3HARD! Your reply gives me hope!
We'll starts some tests in a few weeks. We'll host a wifi lan game, without mods, in a classroom (30 students).
The first thing we want to know is if we can succesfully play Minetest with 30 players but in a wifi network with over 200 students connected.
Second step would be the same test but with two classrooms (60 students).
Finally, repeat the same testsbut with external connections (no lan).

I'll post the results here.

Thanks a lot!

[Errol]

Please keep us posted, Mogoloko. I'm also interested in how heavy a load the servers can take. :)

My server is not on a lan, but on Digital Ocean. I'm curious to see how many people I can host, and 75+ makes me hopeful as well.

[Mogoloko]

I'll do, Errol. We have another member in the project: another teacher (History of art) from the same high school. So we'll be able to test with 2 classrooms over the same server.
We'll start to do the first test in early June.

[iZacZip]

It depends on how much space your RAM/Memory disk can hold.
I've been on server that can only hold round 12 players,
On the other hand, one that can can hold 64+...
So, really - there's no exact point that a server can hold.