[fUn] Hard Drive space - How much Usage should be expected?
Posted: Sat Aug 20, 2016 04:48I'm almost ready to start hosting my own Minetest server through my home ADSL connection. It will have 7GB of RAM, 160GB Hard Drive space and some ~2GHz processing speed. The OS will be a command-line-only installation of Ubuntu (or similar) so that we don't have to have so many background processes running. It will be backed-up and restarted daily at some time when we don't expect many (or any) users to be online.
Also, I have a PCI-E RAID card that can be used for storing the same information on several drives, even though I only have 1 (possibly 2, not sure if the second one is borked) mostly-good hard drives and one that has a whole bunch of bad sectors (but it can still store a few dozen GB before it dies all the way) - this may become necessary to use, if the storage space consumed by the server gets too close to the limit of a single drive.
For whatever reason, I don't know how much storage space I should expect the server to use-up before I can afford to buy more drives with higher capacity. Say for example, a whole bunch of people start playing on the server, and the disk space usage rises exponentially - this would be catastrophic if all the disk space gets used up and the world corrupted when more information can't be stored, or pretty much just as bad if the disk space gets almost totally used up and a custom script monitoring said disk space kills the server to "save the world" so-to-speak.
So, let's say (worst case scenario; of course they would have to create a bot just for this purpose) a single player can stay on the server (for sake of simplicity in the calculation, it can process data as fast as it comes in) for the whole time it is up (approx. 23 hours and 45 minutes each day) and run around the world constantly (at default "fast"-mode speed), causing the server to generate and store new chunks as fast as the player can visit them; we take this "rate of disk space consumption" and label it X (it's in units of KB/min. or MB/min. or GB/hr.). Now, how many players online at the same time (each causing X rate of disk space consumption; number of players * X), would it take to overrun the ~155GB (total minus ~5GB for system files and the server stuff) disk space, within the time-span of nine months (for simplicity's sake, 30*9 days)?
After said time span of (approximately) nine months, I will probably be able to buy several drives with many TB of capacity each, so disk space will no longer be a problem (until the developers figure out how to get around the ~62,000^3 nodes limit problem, which is inevitable since there are more efficient ways to store that big number for each coordinate)
I'll go ahead and do some of the math to make this easier:
approx. amount of time the server is online, over 9 months
hours: 6,412.5 (6412.5)
minutes: 384,750 (384750)
Since I don't have experience with a user making a bot to control the player-entity and run it around the world loading new chunks as fast as possible, would someone with knowledge in that department please donate the number-value for the amount of disk space consumed per minute or hour, so I can finish this calculation (and discern if it would even be a feasible mode of attack on my server)?
Thank you for your patience reading this and understanding my position and the accompanying dilemma.
tl;dr: GB/hour is the new KM/hour
Also, I have a PCI-E RAID card that can be used for storing the same information on several drives, even though I only have 1 (possibly 2, not sure if the second one is borked) mostly-good hard drives and one that has a whole bunch of bad sectors (but it can still store a few dozen GB before it dies all the way) - this may become necessary to use, if the storage space consumed by the server gets too close to the limit of a single drive.
For whatever reason, I don't know how much storage space I should expect the server to use-up before I can afford to buy more drives with higher capacity. Say for example, a whole bunch of people start playing on the server, and the disk space usage rises exponentially - this would be catastrophic if all the disk space gets used up and the world corrupted when more information can't be stored, or pretty much just as bad if the disk space gets almost totally used up and a custom script monitoring said disk space kills the server to "save the world" so-to-speak.
So, let's say (worst case scenario; of course they would have to create a bot just for this purpose) a single player can stay on the server (for sake of simplicity in the calculation, it can process data as fast as it comes in) for the whole time it is up (approx. 23 hours and 45 minutes each day) and run around the world constantly (at default "fast"-mode speed), causing the server to generate and store new chunks as fast as the player can visit them; we take this "rate of disk space consumption" and label it X (it's in units of KB/min. or MB/min. or GB/hr.). Now, how many players online at the same time (each causing X rate of disk space consumption; number of players * X), would it take to overrun the ~155GB (total minus ~5GB for system files and the server stuff) disk space, within the time-span of nine months (for simplicity's sake, 30*9 days)?
After said time span of (approximately) nine months, I will probably be able to buy several drives with many TB of capacity each, so disk space will no longer be a problem (until the developers figure out how to get around the ~62,000^3 nodes limit problem, which is inevitable since there are more efficient ways to store that big number for each coordinate)
I'll go ahead and do some of the math to make this easier:
approx. amount of time the server is online, over 9 months
hours: 6,412.5 (6412.5)
minutes: 384,750 (384750)
Since I don't have experience with a user making a bot to control the player-entity and run it around the world loading new chunks as fast as possible, would someone with knowledge in that department please donate the number-value for the amount of disk space consumed per minute or hour, so I can finish this calculation (and discern if it would even be a feasible mode of attack on my server)?
Thank you for your patience reading this and understanding my position and the accompanying dilemma.
tl;dr: GB/hour is the new KM/hour