Spring RTS Engine

Linked to from SpringRTS Organizational specification forum thread.

For transparency reasons I want to document here my involvement in the hosting of springrts services.

The springrts.com website as well as the lobby server, a springfiles-mirror, the semprini autohost and the replays website are hosted in kvm VMs on a root-server that a friend of me and I rent. The server is this one: https://www.hetzner.de/de/hosting/produ ... erver/ex40 and hosted in Germany.

The costs (600€/y for rent, 180€/y for additional IPs and backup space and 50-200€/y for occasional upgrades and hands-on-fees) are primarily payed by us. In other VMs there are services for friends and political/non-/semi-commercial groups. If they can share some money we ask them to give us 5€/month, if they cannot, no problem. We understand our money and administration time (he's a sysadmin too) as our support we can share with projects and people we like.

So if the springrts community does have 60€/y, I'd take it as a share for a [mixed/multi-]community-supported server. If it doesn't - no problem: until now it was already part of my donation to this and other projects. So no pressure - get the donation thing sorted out and I'll see the result.

Currently I do not have a login on the lobby & web server VM. I do not administer it in any way. I do administer the replay site, other VMs and the host. The only other person with a login to the host is my friend, for who's moral integrity I can vouch - if that would mean anything to you :P

abma and hoijui do know my irl identity and have my phone number.

First off I would like to thank you for hosting everything for us (which you are doing for free), and for providing the necessary transparency about it.
Secondly, I apologize in advance for what might sound ungrateful, but I'd like to voice my opinion and possible concerns with regards to this.
With the previous server we had the issue that there might have been certain commercial (not Spring related) projects running on the server that was payed (fully?) by Spring donations. I'm not sure if that was true or not, but I wouldn't want the same thing to affect us on the new server.
With 60e/y being a really small amount, what kind of performance can be guaranteed by it, if any? I don't think the Spring community would have a problem pitching that much and more, but the question is what we would get from it.
I think it works really well for the proposed cost right now, but it would be a problem if we had performance drops because some other projects started using the machine more. It's a hypothetical, but we would have a responsibility towards people donating to explain the situation.

I totally agree with you.

Regarding commercial users:

dansan wrote:In other VMs there are services for friends and political/non-/semi-commercial groups.

The so called "semi-commercial groups" are self organized working collectives of 3-5 people working for non-commercial projects on a pay-so-we-can-barely-live-from-it level. Their anti-capitalistic ideals makes me want to support them. I still consider them "commercial", but you can now imagine the "impact" their websites/mail have on the server :)
I wouldn't take more money than the cost - but that is not the case: ~50% of the rent is still paid by us personally.

Technical: the springrts lobby/web VM is by far the biggest, most CPU, RAM, I/O bandwidth and network bandwidth demanding VM on the host, 2nd is the replay-site. RAM and disk space are dedicated: no overcommitment is done, but disk-I/O and memory bandwidth is shared ofc. All VMs have a max of 4 (of 8 total) cores and using CPU-pinning, care is taken that not a single VM can overtake the whole server. Additionally the host has the 1st core dedicated to himself. The main concern is the shared disk-I/O. If two DB-heavy VMs would compete for that, we'd have a problem. Luckily that is currently not the case. If it'd become a problem, one of the VMs would have to be moved. When abma (or others) become concerned about it, measures will be taken. Abma has done a really great job at moving the VM the last time!

gajop wrote:With the previous server we had the issue that there might have been certain commercial (not Spring related) projects running on the server that was payed (fully?) by Spring donations. I'm not sure if that was true or not, but I wouldn't want the same thing to affect us on the new server.

there is a huge difference: the private/commercial(?) stuff on the old server was using the same vm. it was not possible to say what used the resources how many. after a LOT of investigation, i found out that >50% of the resources inside the vm was used by not spring-related stuff. on dansans server spring stuff runs in its own vm which allows to monitor how many resources are used by each "project".