[META] Deploying Xonotic using GKE Game Servers?

I know it's shit, but did anyone try to run Xonotic on Kubernetes and Agones?

https://cloud.google.com/architecture/de...me-servers

Wondering about the load and speed. How many players could potentially join such a server without lagging out?

Could this be the next crowdfunded "Eris" server? Would it be easier to manage instead of just a VM somewhere?

Are people interested in something sustainable?

To my crude understanding, you are proposing to host with some kind of Cloud service and Cloud services always run on metered bandwidth or metered CPU. Cloud services have become very popular for developers to use, because they can deploy a site and demonstrate it to the customer at basically at zero cost to them. However once the customer actually starts using the site and it generates a decent amount of traffic, they often pay quadruple, ten or twenty fold the cost they would have been paying with a normal hosting solution (VPS or root server). A normal hosting solution is always unmetered. This is very important for Xonotic, because it eats both lots of CPU as well as a decent amount of bandwidth. So a Cloud solution might easily cost you $200 instead of just $10. There was some guy on Discord claiming that you could somehow get hundreds of dollars of free credit at Cloud services by using certain tricks like switching accounts and using free credit coupons, or something ... so essentially you could host anything for free there and even mine Monero with it. But that sounded kind of shady and questionable to me.


I tested the $3.50 VPS at OVH (Frankfurt) last year and it supports 20+ players (maybe even up to 24 or 28?) without any stuttering or other problems you might be aware of with shit and/or overpriced VPS plans. They also have double the power for $10.50, so at 3x the price. This would likely be able to support 40+ players, so more than any one Eris instance is running currently. I think the $3.50 VPS is totally awesome for any normal Xonotic server. However since Eris is the one exception to the rule, sometimes on the weekend Eris might have 20-30 players at a time, and I think it is very very questionable if this $3.50 cheapo VPS will be able to still handle 30+ players. 20 I believe for sure, maybe, maybe 28. But not 30 or more.

So $10.50 for 40+ players in just a single instance seems quite good. (Though I would really be curious if the $3.50 solution would really cut it just as well).

$21 for two instances however seems a little pricey. Maybe a root server would be better to handle two instances for that money.

But do we really need 3 Eris instances? Most of the time only one instance is used anyway. And then there are so many alternative servers to go to.

I think one is enough, and it comes at the "small" price of $10.50 per month.

Root server prices are $23 for Xeon E3-1245v2 / 32GB RAM (5000 on Passmark), or $18 for half the CPU power half the RAM, both at Kimsufi (same as OVH). Both would be plenty to run one Eris instance. The $23 server should be able to run two. However the Kimsufi data center is in France.

In terms of ping, Frankfurt is not the perfectly ideal place though. Eris is currently at Myloc in Düsseldorf and it is slightly more central to the Netherlands, Belgium, Uk and France. I already checked though ... Myloc has really really high prices, and their VPS craps out all the time causing stutters and lag (Webtopia *is* Myloc). There are no other data centers in the area. Frankfurt is the only alternative, and the quality of service at OVH is excellent.

OTAY, I've just made two servers on Hetzner, one httpd for the map repo and one for the xonotic server.
Downloaded the Eris dump and copied it over, courtesy of Malice. Thank you Malice.
The server is called "Feris votable - Another Freaking Clone"

I made this because that Eris is shutting down, unfortunately.

It is a test. More servers will come.

To my crude understanding,  you are proposing to host with some kind of Cloud service and Cloud services always run on metered bandwidth or metered CPU. Cloud services have become very popular for developers to use, because they can deploy a site and demonstrate it to the customer at basically at zero cost to them. However once the customer actually starts using the site and it generates a decent amount of traffic, they often pay quadruple, ten or twenty fold the cost they would have been paying with a normal hosting solution (VPS or root server). A normal hosting solution is always unmetered. This is very important for Xonotic, because it eats both lots of CPU as well as a decent amount of bandwidth. So a Cloud solution might easily cost you $200 instead of just $10. There was some guy on Discord claiming that you could somehow get hundreds of dollars of free credit at Cloud services by using certain tricks like switching accounts and using free credit coupons, or something ... so essentially you could host anything for free there and even mine Monero with it. But that sounded kind of shady and questionable to me.


I tested the $3.50 VPS at OVH (Frankfurt) last year and it supports 20+ players (maybe even up to 24 or 28?) without any stuttering or other problems you might be aware of with shit and/or overpriced VPS plans. They also have double the power for $10.50, so at 3x the price. This would likely be able to support 40+ players, so more than any one Eris instance is running currently. I think the $3.50 VPS is totally awesome for any normal Xonotic server. However since Eris is the one exception to the rule, sometimes on the weekend Eris might have 20-30 players at a time, and I think it is very very questionable if this $3.50 cheapo VPS will be able to still handle 30+ players. 20 I believe for sure, maybe, maybe 28. But not 30 or more.

So $10.50 for 40+ players in just a single instance seems quite good. (Though I would really be curious if the $3.50 solution would really cut it just as well).

$21 for two instances however seems a little pricey. Maybe a root server would be better to handle two instances for that money.

But do we really need 3 Eris instances? Most of the time only one instance is used anyway. And then there are so many alternative servers to go to.

I think one is enough, and it comes at the "small" price of $10.50 per month.

Root server prices are $23 for Xeon E3-1245v2 / 32GB RAM (5000 on Passmark), or $18 for half the CPU power half the RAM, both at Kimsufi (same as OVH). Both would be plenty to run one Eris instance. The $23 server should be able to run two. However the Kimsufi data center is in France.

In terms of ping, Frankfurt is not the perfectly ideal place though. Eris is currently at Myloc in Düsseldorf and it is slightly more central to the Netherlands, Belgium, Uk and France. I already checked though ... Myloc has really really high prices, and their VPS craps out all the time causing stutters and lag (Webtopia *is* Myloc). There are no other data centers in the area. Frankfurt is the only alternative, and the quality of service at OVH is excellent.

Ok, Ballerburg, I'm also looking at OVH now. Seems to provide some more bandwidth for the same price, a lot actually.

When I get settled I will test an instance and compare.

Thank you for the advice.  Read your blog btw..you're a good man

What about https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/ ?
It has a 4 vCPU machine with 24GB of ram for free forever. Don’t let the 3000 vCPU hour limit per month scare you off, it’s more then you can even use in that time period with the 4 vCPUs.
The only thing is that you have to compile dark places manually for ARM because that’s the architecture they give you (they have 2 equivalent to 1/4 vCPU AMD machines forever free, but that’s only really fast enough for the http map file server)