Every Minecraft and Rust hosting argument eventually reduces to one question: does a new player cost you a slice of a core, or a share of the main tick thread?…
Read More95th Percentile vs Fixed Bandwidth: Billing Math for High-Traffic Servers
Bandwidth on a dedicated server is sold four different ways, and three of them are designed to look cheaper than they are. A 1 Gbps port quoted at $89 and…
Read MoreGame Server Slot Planning: Tick-Time Cliffs, Working-Set Growth and Network Fan-Out
Slot count is the number game server operators quote and the number they least understand. A 100-slot Rust server and a 100-slot Minecraft server consume hardware in completely different proportions,…
Read MoreTickloop Tuning for 64 and 128 Tick: Deadlines, Jitter Sources and Missed-Tick Budgets
A server that advertises 128 tick and delivers 45 is worse than one that advertises 64 and delivers 63. Tickrate is a promise about how often the simulation advances and…
Read MoreGame Server Save Safety: Atomic Writes, fsync and Restore Drills That Hold
Every game server that has been online for six months has a moment where it saved a half-written world. Not because the disk failed, but because the process was killed…
Read MoreTick Time Percentiles vs Player Count: Measuring Real Game Server Capacity
Game server operators obsess over tickrate, CPU clock and RAM, then publish a number that means very little: average tick duration. A 64-slot CS2 server can show a 4.1 ms…
Read MoreGame Server Cold Starts: Thundering-Herd Player Ramps and the RAM Headroom You Actually Need
A wipe-day launch and a Tuesday evening are two different machines as far as memory is concerned. At 19:00 on a content patch, 300 players retry a full server every…
Read MoreNVMe RAID0 Stripe and Chunk Size for Game Saves: Write Amplification Measured
Two NVMe drives in RAID0 can double sequential throughput or make autosaves slower, depending on the stripe and chunk size you pick. Game saves are not large sequential files; they…
Read MoreMonthly vs Annual Billing for Dedicated Game Hosting: Cash-Flow and Lock-In Math
Annual billing for a dedicated game server looks like a straightforward discount: pay for twelve months, get two months free. In practice the decision is a cash-flow and risk calculation…
Read MoreRust Dedicated Server GC Allocations and Stutter: Tuning for 200-Player Wipes
Rust servers stutter for reasons that rarely show up in CPU graphs. A 200-player facepunch or modded wipe can sit at 25% total CPU and still produce a 400 ms…
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