Server hardware - Tegra2 based nettop box fast enough?

[thewickerman]

Hi everyone!

Me and a few folks are used to play WoW on my LAN. We are roughly 8 - 10 players.

In the past time I used to run Mangos and the mySQL database on an older tower (AMD 4200+ with 2,2GHz dual core, 2GB RAM).

That one is quite loud, big and consumes a lot of energy.

Now I've just came across this awesome gadget:

CompuLab Trim-Slice

A fanless nettop box running an ARM Cortex based Tegra2 with 1GHz and 1GB of RAM.

It's not out on the markets jet, but I wonder, if this would be fast enough to host Mangos?

Lets say we are 10 man playing (client 3.3.3a), having vmaps enabled and running both mangos and the database on a debian squeeze(ARM)?

I'm looking forward to read your comments!

sincerly

[Diablox]

Is it even possible to compile mangos for ARM?

I think it could work with grid unload if you can compile and run.

[thewickerman]

Here it says: "MaNGOS is available for Windows (32-bit and 64-bit), and all platforms where GCC 4.3 and the autoconf toolchain is available."

GCC and autoconf ports for ARM are both avaiable on debian squeeze, so I guessed I would be able to compile mangos.

Do you have other expieriences?

[Lynx3d]

If it runs in little endian mode, it probably can be compiled (if all 3rd party libraries work too, that is).

For a mere 10 players pretty much anything above a pocket calculator should be enough nowadays

I'd be more concerned about the 1GB RAM and OS compatibility.

[antiroot]

I know a x86 arch does not equal arm, but i've got my server with an 1.8ghz celeron underclocked to 1.2ghz and the processor can handle it just fine (only 4-5 testers/developers use the machine), but like Lynx3d said RAM maybe an issue especially with vmaps or if you wanted to try any of the in development map projects like mmaps

[Mister D]

I run mangos (both login and world server) and mysql on a Pentium 3 933 MHz with 512MB of pc133 SD-ram, with full vmaps, on windows XP, and both CPU use and memory use barely register with 2 players. Only when both players log in at once or move to another map at the same time is there a significant spike in CPU use, to about 15%, no lags at all. If CPU use goes up linearly with increasing amounts of users I should be able to handle about 12 players simultaniously logging in or switching maps with no lags, more with small lags. When going from 1 to 2 players I didn't see much of an increase in CPU or memory use, so more may be possible, depending on scalability.

As I understand it ARM has fewer instructions per clock than the old Pentium 3, and the CPU and memory use might not scale well with increasing player numbers. It looks like your ARM based server has an SSD, which will probably speed up database lookups and loading of maps, so you can offload maps that are not in use to save some memory, reloading them will not be a problem with a good SSD. I only use half of the memory your server has and I've got plenty, so I think your 10 person server just might work.

Edit:

I just read that it's a dual core CPU, that's even better, you could probably make the world server use one core, the database the other, and the login server whereever there is less CPU usage.