Ryzom

no one seams to know much on this yet. I'm really considering testing for linux 2 gigs ram a dual core. and for a production server at the lowest I'm thinking dual core 4gigs ram.

For a test system I can see a single system being just fine. I'm personally setting up a total of 8 systems to each run various parts of my shard, the system is designed to be distributed and I will be taking full advantage of this. (My DB/Storage server alone is a 4 processor, 32GB machine w/ a fiber channel raid array.) And this is just my test environment. =)

Sizing servers before understanding how things scale is just asking for disaster, not to mention for paying for a lot more (or a lot less) iron than you actually need.

Yeah best way to go if you own a server or have extra PC at home use it for now. Don't rent or buy a server just for this project yet or it will hurt in the end. I have kind of realized this over the last few days.

For example maybe 2 servers are better for example 2 cheaper servers may in fact be cheaper then 1 good server where it be better to split parts of the server up things that use more memory and or high cpu that might not be a critical application to have or can max out most resources without crashing or slowing down to much..

For example Login server and this not using Ryzom but anyways.

Login server that might eat a lot of cpu. Split the world server onto another box and you have a smooth box with the login server separated and not hogging the cpu causing issues to the world server.

Exactly. I just happen to already own a bunch of Linux-based hardware so I'm simply installing the various service bin's across the machines, setting up configs and launching. This will allow me to move things around, and test the load on various hardware configs and different levels of processor/ram/disk. I am also running VMWare ESX so I can monitor the servers load and reprovision on the fly if needed. Obviously all of this will change if I work towards a production environment, but that is not my primary goal here.

Hopefully during my testing I'll be able to come up with baseline benchmarks for each of the services on varied hardware. I'll then be able to throw together some charts for the community to help design your architecture.

Looking forward to your results and recommendations.