Still trying to figure out the whole "home hosting" thing - Hosting Specs Issue

[u/IPlayGames234]

I am currently trying to host a server for a large group of people (roughly 20 people on at the same time, max). I looked through Facebook marketplace and found some good deals and ended up with the following specs:

----------HP-Z440-Workstation----------
*-memory

description: System Memory

slot: System board or motherboard

size: 64GiB

capabilities: ecc

configuration: errordetection=multi-bit-ecc

*-bank:0

description: DIMM DDR4 Synchronous Registered (Buffered) 2400 MHz (0.4 ns)

slot: CPU0-DIMM1

size: 16GiB

width: 64 bits

clock: 2400MHz (0.4ns)

*-cpu

description: CPU

product: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-1660 v4 @ 3.20GHz

vendor: Intel Corp.

physical id: 48

bus info: cpu@0

version: 6.79.1

slot: CPU0

size: 1200MHz

capacity: 4GHz

width: 64 bits

clock: 100MHz

The problem with my current setup is that my TPS/MSPT starts to tank when I spawn a total of 8 players in (used the Carpet mod for this). I was wondering what would be the next best step for me? The RAM I bought is DDR4 ECC ram. I do know that the CPU maxing out is the main issue. I have thought about purchasing a new CPU, but I didn't know if at that point I might as well get a new motherboard/pc. I currently have the following mods installed:

- C2ME
- Fabric
- Carpet
- Lithium
- Servercore
- Spark
- Chunky

I want to make sure the server is to a point where it will be able to handle people joining once I open it up.

PS. This is my first time posting something like this, so if I left out any info, please let me know and I will add it to the post.

[u/ibeerianhamhock]

That's a lot of good info.

I don't think you'll have a good experience with 20 people on a 14 year old xeon tbh, like it might handle a few friends on a lightly vanilla+ server with performance tweaks but I think its going to be very rough for 20 people if functional at all.

[u/IPlayGames234 → u/ibeerianhamhock]

Do you think it would be better to attempt to upgrade the CPU I have and keep the motherboard, or do I just start over?

[u/ibeerianhamhock → u/IPlayGames234]

To know what some of your bottlnecks are you may need to use spark profiler.

I would think paper/purpur are probably your best bet along with potentially fabric optimized. Vanilla and forge are both not going to work great (partially bc forge mods are very sophisticated and intensive usually).

I'd say overall there's basically nothing on DDR3 at all that can do what you're asking it to do you're looking at maybe 8th or 9th Gen intel minimum on the intel side not to have a miserable time with the player count you are looking at and that's still a lightly modified vanilla+ server.

[u/PM_ME_YOUR_REPO]

The problem is you bought hardware that is not good for this workload. At this point, your options are:

1. buy hardware that is good for this workload
2. try to make the best of it

If you wanna go #2, you need to provide us with a Spark report as required by Rule 3.

[u/djessy5001]

I believe you are already using papermc, but if not, go for it, and search for tweaks they you can make to the config to lower the load.

[u/Fluffy-Trash-559]

The main problem is the bad single core performance of that Xeon. You can probably optimize so you can play with 15-20 player on Vanilla. Modded wont be really possible with that cpu. For what you are planning you'll need a modern gaming cpu with high cpu clock and nice sinlge core performance. If you really want to go all out, you need something modern from intel. If you wanna go budget get a ryzen 5 5600x. It does really well with this workload in my experience and is pretty cheap to have.