Player concurrency is never a flat line. It spikes at patch launches, weekends, and evening primaries, then falls away for twelve hours. Sizing a machine for the peak means paying…
Read MoreRemote Hands vs Smart Hands for Bare-Metal Game Hosts: SLAs, Pricing and Escalation
Renting bare metal means you own the software problem but not the physical one. When a disk fails, a PSU trips, or a RAID battery throws an error at 3…
Read MoreCCD and Cache Locality: Why Two Threads on the Wrong Cores Cost 15% TPS
On modern AMD and Intel server CPUs, core numbering is not flat. AMD EPYC and Ryzen parts split into Core Complex Dies (CCDs), each with its own L3 cache slice…
Read MoreSave Compression Tradeoffs: LZ4 vs Zstd on Game Servers, Measured
Every game server that persists a world eventually compresses something: a save snapshot, a backup archive, a rotated log. The default is almost always gzip, chosen for portability rather than…
Read MoreBare-Metal Firmware and BIOS Tuning for Lower Game Server Latency
Most latency guides stop at the kernel. Below the kernel sits firmware, and a surprising share of avoidable game-server jitter originates there: C-states that let cores idle into wake-up penalties,…
Read MoreGame Server Log Retention and Forensics: Storage Sizing, Sampling and Incident Reconstruction
Game server logs are usually ignored until the day you need them: a duplication exploit, a mass item-loss complaint, a ban appeal you cannot adjudicate. By then the relevant window…
Read MoreModpack Memory Ceilings: Why 16 GB Stops Working at 180 Mods
“How much RAM for a modded server?” gets answered with a number — 8 GB, 16 GB, 32 GB — as if mod count and player count were interchangeable. They…
Read MoreBackup and Restore Windows on Game Servers: RPO, Save Freezes and Storage Maths
Every operator knows they should take backups. Far fewer have worked out that a backup has a window — a real duration during which the server behaves differently — and…
Read MoreSSD Over-Provisioning for Game Servers: Spare Area and Endurance Math
Enterprise SSDs slow down when their spare area is exhausted, and game servers write far more than typical workloads. Over-provisioning — leaving unallocated NAND beyond the drive’s advertised capacity —…
Read MoreMinecraft Paper vs Fabric vs Forge: TPS, CPU, and RAM Hardware Comparison
Paper, Fabric, and Forge are not interchangeable. They load mods differently, tick differently, and stress CPU and RAM in different places. If you size hardware for the wrong server software,…
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