[Bryson]

Also, 1.5 should come out next week. Bullet points include:

Weather! Snow, rain, lightning. Expect more mob action during the days... And possibly all your buildings burning down. Woo.

Booster and brake minecart tracks. No more kludges with doors and extra carts. No word on if the laggyness will go away, though, so there still may be disapproval from the server admins.... If not, mass transit, here we come!

Stats and achievements.

So many new toys!

[turtle]

New CPU is in! Pics to allow you to be a part of the change.







It was fun!

Burning in now....thought you might like the update though.

[Kickaha]

You fool! You forgot to install the speed holes!

[Brad]

Almost there, guys! I ran both cores solid for a while, and the temp sensors reported it staying comfortably cool. Looking like a successful install! Turtle is tweaking a couple of BIOS settings now, but we should be back up in just a few more minutes.

Also, thanks again T for taking the time out tonight to do this. I'm sure everyone else will appreciate it too!

[turtle]

We are live!

Come one come all and see if you can really stress the server. I'm not going to be on, but have fun while I'm hanging out with my Mom who's visiting.

Thank you again to all who donated! It really is appreciated.

[Elysium]

FYI, Brad, just on the outside chance you may decide to do some map trimming along with the 1.5 update I figured I'd let you know that I've set up shop at the base of the northern desert for sand mining again.

Stupid rink roof ate all my glass.

[Brad]

Server down! I'm making the plastics! upgrading to 1.5!

[Brad]

And now we're running server beta 1.5_02!

[drewprops]

And it rained!!!


...

[Bryson]

No rain while I was online earlier

[Bryson]

Is it worth investigating an SSD for future expansion? Even a small one would be almost as good as the RAMdisk, without the huge cost and terrifying volability, surely? And a 60GB drive woul be less than $100, with more than enough room for lots of world expansion.

Thoughts?

[turtle]

I think it would actually work very well. I can still leave the current drive too meaning the backups can be copied over to it. Really, we could go with anything that is SATA II. I have two drive slots so we might even be able to live with a Seagate hybrid drive. More storage than needed there though. A plain SSD would be better IMO.

Tom's Hardware reviews are favorable for this drive, or here if you wanna support AN. Of course, we'd need to throw in something like this IcyDock too.

[billybobsky]

Is there any chance we could get a sense of what the IO requirements on the ramdisk have been when the server was busy? I am not saying the SSD isn't going to be better than a conventional HD, but I am slightly concerned that the order of magnitude hit in IO speed (processor demands be damned since we've got more than enough of that) of the SSD vs RAMdisk may actually bring us closer to the HD experience of before -- ie an almost unusable shit storm (ah the good old days).

[SpecMode]

Really, it comes down to random-access timing rather than throughput speed; it's the fact that a HDD drive head is having to jump all over the place to load chunks when you've got people all over the map. Even if an SSD isn't as fast throughput-wise as RAM, you eliminate the drive head as a bottleneck. Of course, you'd want to go with a drive/controller combo that can handle lots of IOPS, and that won't experience degrading performance over time (i.e., go with a SandForce drive).

[Brad]

I'll try hooking up iostat or sar some time this weekend. Though, it'll only give useful information if several players are on at the same time, putting proper IO load on the system.

[ThunderPoit]

You know, weather wands and TNT are a great way get a good IO load going

[turtle]

Wondering, so I'm running a stock MC server on Beast for my family to use the pre-release and had me thinking about if it handles the server better than Lenny does. Sure it's an i7 920 over clocked to 3.3GHz with 6GB of RAM and running on the SSD... but it has the Mac OS has Grand Central Dispatch (Beast is still 10.6). Would that handle Java better across cores? Just wondering because I'll hack up Lenny if it means he can run both cores for the game.

[Bryson]

Threw in some SSD monies. I like exploring.

[Brad]

Originally Posted by turtle Mac OS has Grand Central Dispatch (Beast is still 10.6). Would that handle Java better across cores?

Nope.

[turtle]

What do you guys think about getting something like this to put the Server at SATA III?



Brad, my thought would be leave the boot OS on current drive but run the game off of the SSD completely. Do the backups to the HDD as they currently are. This would minimize file moving and keep the world on the fastest location. Thoughts?

[Bryson]

WOW! $0.37 off!

[turtle]

I bring good tidings of great cheer!

[turtle]

So I'm going to have to work with Brad on the exact timing of getting the server running the new drive. While I can get the drive in and move the files over, the scripts are still going to have it load into RAM instead.

On that note, when's the best time to take down the server for everyone? In game Brad and I talked about Sunday night. Everyone good with this?

[turtle]

We are up and running on the new SSD! Thank you to all of you who gave. I will post the list later.

Before


After

[turtle]

So see, there's all these bad guys trying to get into my stuff and I'm tired of going through all these log pages and such. My router has to be rebooted once a month or so at the least. I'm kinda ready to move on from this.

So I'm building a router now and will need to put it in place in the near future. This might bring some extended down time during the configuration.

My plan is to build it and do most of the configuration on my bench in a mock network. Then after everything is mapped and ready, replace the router with my new one. This should theoretically make the down time just a short period.

However this might not go as planned and might result in longer than normal outages while it's ironed out and configured. I might just make this happen tomorrow night, but not sure. My plan is to minimize the time the game is missed by all. I really want it done before the newest world drops.

Either way, consider this a warning that it's coming and I'll post before the actual start of work.

[turtle]

So, the switch is imminent. Finishing up the port forwarding settings now. Have a few more things to do before I feel it's ready for production. You know, things like blocking China, Russia, Nigeria...

[turtle]

So right now Lenny is the only thing on the outside of my new router and all is well. I'm going to pull the plug and make the switch in the very near future. I will be sure no one is online in the game when that time comes.

Brad, port is the same but internal IP is different. Shouldn't be an issue, but just an FYI.

[turtle]

No one is on now.....

Switching!

[Brad]

*twitch* *twitch*



Everything going OK? When you're back online, I have an updated plugin to install.

[SpecMode]

Heh, I was about to post the same thing. Server is showing up as unreachable.