Minimum Requirements for Headless server

[robopilot99]

Recently I have introduced several of my friends to Factorio and they are enjoying it greatly. I also have several older computers laying around and have been playing with idea of setting up a dedicated headless sever. I have done similar things before and believe I have the technical knowledge to make it happen but the machine I have in mind is REALLY old. What are the absolute lowest specs required for a headless server running a medium-size world with 2-3 players?

[DaveMcW]

Why don't you set up a server and tell us if it works?

The game is limited by the core CPU speed and RAM speed of the slowest machine. So you might drop below 60 FPS quite quickly.

[robopilot99]

Well, after an afternoon of tweaking I was suddenly reminded that the machine I was trying to run the server on is a 32 bit machine (the headless builds are 64 bit only). I'll try to think of something to do but in the meantime feel free to post if you can answer the original question.

[robopilot99]

Found the command-line-option documentation. I guess I'll try that tomorrow.

[tehroach]

Found the command-line-option documentation. I guess I'll try that tomorrow.

I was thinking of doing something very similar, but on an Amazon EC2 free server (if specs permit)

Would you please tell me where you found the CLI documentation?

Thankyou

[robopilot99]

Well... my little adventure came to an end with an "invalid instruction" error. I guess it turns out trying to run Factorio on a 20-year-old i686 machine isn't supported. As for the command line documentation that can be found on the wiki https://wiki.factorio.com/index.php?title=GameClient

[tehroach]

Well... my little adventure came to an end with an "invalid instruction" error. I guess it turns out trying to run Factorio on a 20-year-old i686 machine isn't supported. As for the command line documentation that can be found on the wiki https://wiki.factorio.com/index.php?title=GameClient

WOW dude a 686, that is insane!
What are the spec's on that?

I remember getting my 686 as a kid (it was a fkn !BEAST! at the time) and all my friends were Green with Envy at the time.
- 32Mb EDO RAM
- 160Mhz CPU, 40Mhz FSB
- 1.2 Gb HDD 4200RPM
- 2Mb Diamond Stealth ISA graphics

I was weighing up the pros and cons of using my old Q6600 Vs a Virtual Box on my i7 and generally the Virtual Box wins.
My Q6600 specs
- 4Gb DDR2 800Mhz RAM
- 2.4Ghz x4 CPU, 800Mhz FSB
- 6 x 160Gb HDD 7200RPM
- ATI HD5770 1Gb

The Visualization generally wins for me for two main reasons.
- 1 - I just can't seam to get my hands on any good value DDR2
- 2 - Dickin around with an extra box and screen.

At a LAN the Virtual Box is the way to go, as I can easily allocate the VM 3 vcores and 8Gb RAM without any side effects on my base machine,
but at home either way I always run into the same trouble, the 120 Kb/s (1059 kbps) upload of my ADSL connection. Hence the reason that I am going to give the Amazon EC2 option a try.

And in your predicament I think that a VM would be your best option too
you can check it out here Amazon EC2.
https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/

When you sign up you get 750 hours free (WARNING! Only on the nano or micro) and if you have an email address tied to a University you can get an extra $100 (but you have to apply for this),
which roughly translates to
- 10750 free Nano VM hours,
- 5750 free Micro VM hours,
- 2500 for the 1st tier small

Unfortunately I just don't think the Nano (512Gb Ram, 1 Vcore) is going to cut it
as just booting a headless (Windows) server on my machine uses more than 1/2 Gb RAM, before players even join about 600Mb with 1 player joined.

Any way thanks for the link, the -h is definitely the command I was looking for, as a bit of a noob I was trying /? and /h lol

Do you know any where that has a verbose config file that I could download?

[SyncViews]

I found my T2 Micro EC2 instances (not used or tried for Factorio) have very limited sustained CPU, but the short term/burst performance is pretty good (ideal for small web servers and the likes, since most sites are not getting 100's of page hits a second to maintain high CPU usage anyway). If you only intend to play for a few hours a day, the accumulated CPU credits might give you enough CPU for long enough, you would have to try (on the plus side, even if you already used the free trial, creating an instance to try something out for a few hours with no further obligations is really cheap).

Alternatively, again if only playing for limited parts of the day, you can create a bigger instance, but leave it suspended when your not playing, which would give you some good savings for a basic on-demand configuration.


Factorio server can run on a headless Linux VM fine, so the memory overhead is a lot less than for desktop systems, so you might be OK in that regard with Micro or above.

[tehroach]

Thanks for that info SyncViews.

Setting up the server on EC2 is still on my todo list, as I am still just mucking around with the settings etc on a local VM,

However I ran into another potential problem of ping time
- even though my local upload speed is crap (ie time to make a coffee every time someone joins), my ping time between my friends is well under 32ms, hence I can set the lat on Factorio to the minimum, which I have found is very important if you like using vehicles.
- where my ping time alone to Sydney (our closest EC2 server, 3000km away) is generally somewhere between 70-100ms.

So I have come to the conclusion that LANing is definitely the optimal configuration for this game (currently)

[SyncViews]

Yeah, this game really hates latency right now. Hopefully the developers will continue working on it, since up to about 200ms is not so unusual.

Most of these services are of course not really intended for this use, although does seem the infrastructure over your way isn't as good, 3000km is a long way (and 70-100ms is actually pretty good considering).

There are other providers similar to EC2, e.g. Microsoft Azure VM's and Google Cloud Platform. Ive never used them though so dont know what the specs and pricing works out as, but maybe one of them, or the many other similar providers out there have a nearer data centre.


That Q6600 should be enough I think. You already have 4GB RAM, would be more than enough? You can treat an old desktop system as a server, and put it in a corner out of the way (do remember ventilation though ). No need for a second screen etc, once you install the first OS/hypervisor.
If you think you want more than one setup/OS (or any other VM feature), start with ESXi (free). Then you can install whatever VM's you want on top,
Then for Linux/Window's etc. you have all the same options as with EC2 etc. e.g. MS Remote Desktop, SSH, etc. If you need Windows and dont want to pay for a pro/server licence, there is software like Teamviewer that gives you a Remote Desktop like capability.

You can also get a DNS name so you dont have to hand out an IP that might change. DuckDNS is a free dynamic-DNS server, and provide a simple service to update within a few minutes of your IP changing.

[tehroach]

Cheers for the links, I will definitely be checking them out.
Thanks

The old Q6600 still has a lot of power really and I am pretty sure that it would be ample for the task,
however my i7 2600K is generally doing nothing; even when I am working flat out on it.

So the local VM is just easier to setup and manage,
and virtual space is abundant while physical space not so much

As for the extra long distance from major infrastructure, I guess that is one of the cons of living in the most isolated Capital city in the world.

[robopilot99]

The suggestions about getting an AWS box sound promising. I looked at the pricing and it sounds very doable if I can keep the server off when I'm not using it and I can convince a few friends to help fund my efforts. For those curious my i686 machine I mentioned earlier had 1G of RAM a 1.5 Ghz processor and hardware accelerated graphics. I actually ran a Minecraft server on it for a few months. It was crashy lagy and everything else but I managed to have some fun with it. I've been looking for something else to do with it ever since.

[tehroach]

@robopilot99 are you sure that is truly an i686 and not a Pentium 4 in an i686 case?

1.5Ghz is crazy fast for a 686, I remember roasting mine at 240Mhz lol, probably should have put a fan on it.

[pagep]

Hey guys

I will share our experience.

Virtualized environment.
1x CPU 1.8 GHz
2 GB ram
SSD disk
Debian 8

The map is getting bigger and bigger. Currently around 30 MB.
Memory consumption for the factorio server is close to 500MB
But the CPU is not handling it well. 1 user connected cca 50% cpu, 2 user 70% 3 user+ 80-100% - one of our friends has shitty computer so even when there was 5 ppl we are limited by him and not the server so hard to tell the cap. When we started the server and there were just players nothing more we hardly hit 50% cpu.

I think we have a lot of stuff going there. hundreds of machines, 2k flying robots, 15 trains, 3k inserted, 200 assemblies etc

But if you are planning medium size map for 2-3 ppl these settings would be probably fine.


PS: I think that Factorio has amazing performance regarding the fact how much stuff is going on in there. If I compare it with similar games, Factorio is really well written. Even with multi-platform support!!!

[bman212121]

If you're playing stock game then you would probably be okay with a Q6600 or E6600. The server loves CPU so I don't know that I would attempt it with a slower processor than that. Give the VM at least 1GB of memory just for the server, 2GB if you have it. (Above whatever it takes to start your OS)

If you want to attempt to play with a couple of people using Bob's mods, you'll probably want to run the server on that i7. I run mine in a vm on an i5 3550 and can max out a cpu core and start causing the game to slow down. There are so many more things you need to build when using Bob's, so you'll have a ton more stuff on the map. I had around 8K inserters and had around 1 million entities. (Can see if you use F5 button while in game to bring up debug) I'm pretty sure at that time the server was using a bit over 1GB of memory just to run the factorio process. The game map was right around 12MB.

Since we were about done with this map I decided to expand it "slightly". I walked around the perimeter of the map that you can see when zoomed all of the way out. The map download is now around 60MB. There are 3 Million entities currently on the map, and the memory usage on the server is around 2.5GB. CPU usage is actually down right now in the 50% range, probably because most of the stuff on the map is idle. Only 300K of the entities are listed as active. I won't be too surprised if it gets close to 100% when I start trying to wipe out all of the enemies. (Note the server only uses 1 core, but it does help some to have a second core on your system simply for system tasks and general usage so access to the system doesn't slow to a crawl when you're using all of the cpu)

So just for reference I'm having good results right now with:

2 vcpu on i5 3550
4GB memory
2 HDD RAID1
Ubuntu server 14.04 LTS

I don't think disk speeds are that important, about the only thing might be when it's preparing the map for peers or saving the map to disk.

[robopilot99]

I did end up setting up a server on a free tier AWS box and it is working quite well. I never have more than a few friends on at the same time and currently haven't built up a very large map, but so far performance is good. My verdict is that this definitely appears to be a workable option for someone interested in getting their own server and isn't scared of having to do a few configurations. Feel free to reply here if you have any questions about setup/performance.

[SyncViews]

Hey,

What does the AWS CPU Credit usage look like after a few hours of play and a decent coop base? Is it stable or would itrun to zero if played a long session?

That was my other concern since the base performance is a lot slower on t2.

[tehroach]

Hey,

What does the AWS CPU Credit usage look like after a few hours of play and a decent coop base? Is it stable or would itrun to zero if played a long session?

That was my other concern since the base performance is a lot slower on t2.

When you sign up, you get 700 hours per month for the first year on eligible servers, which is more than enough to run one 24/7 for that first year.
If you are a student you might also be eligible for student sup of $100

These servers are only small 512Mb and 1Gb RAM
They are also subject to available resources, as they kind of float around and are not dedicated to any particular piece of hardware.

The one that my friend setup ran quite well on a medium sized map with 3 or so players and lots of trains,
ie driving cars was joyful and lag-less and I did once play all day, about 6hours straight without any noticeable degradation.

As for price, IMO it is a great option to get your feet wet on.
Because, if you make sure that you check all the free options, you can get your first year free.

[SyncViews]

Yeah, sorry, maybe was not clear. I have a bunch of AWS servers (mostly web hosts), and was interested in specifically how the "CPU Credit Balance" stat on a T2.micro node looks like after a long play session as not had the opportunity to test anything much (and well out of free tier), e.g.:

aws_cpu_credits.png (8.74 KiB) Viewed 12989 times

You can find the defaults such as those under EC2 -> Instances -> your instance -> Monitoring Tab.

T2 performance drops off a lot when the credits run out (they are the "burstable" AWS node type).

[tehroach]

Yeah, sorry, maybe was not clear. I have a bunch of AWS servers (mostly web hosts), and was interested in specifically how the "CPU Credit Balance" stat on a T2.micro node looks like after a long play session as not had the opportunity to test anything much (and well out of free tier), e.g.:

aws_cpu_credits.png

You can find the defaults such as those under EC2 -> Instances -> your instance -> Monitoring Tab.

T2 performance drops off a lot when the credits run out (they are the "burstable" AWS node type).

Understand where you are coming from now

Unfortunately, I don't have the stats for the server CPU credits as they are on someone else's account.
however, I am not sure how useful they would be anyway, being that it was during the times of 0.12.x

IMO,
I would say that they would only really be good for small numbers of players, who play on the weekend, where their pings are greater from each other than to the AWS server or when no player has an upload speed >100kbytes/s (1024kbps)

I think the AWS's viability is going to be on a case by case basis,
I would always recommend giving it a go due to the price,
but it is not going to be for everyone.

ie
My server case consists of up to 4 players, with a very symmetric topology, 2 pairs of 2PC's connected via LAN and 10km of WAN (only 2 Telstra nodes between)

So in this circumstance, I have found it easier to run the Factorio Server on a VM on my PC,
because I can still provide uploads at about 160kb/s to my friends at <32ms, w/4cores and 16gb RAM (without affecting personal performance)
While my closest AWS can provide uploads nearly 2x at around 300kb/s, it comes at the cost of ~100ms, w/1core and 1gb RAM

However, I do play with people from the east coast of Aus and NZ ~3-5000kms away and found the AWS a good solution.
But these people tend to want to do it themselves.

So, unfortunately, I am really not going to be of any real assistance to you because we are probably in the same boat.