Server host that supports Gregtech?

1st Official Post

    Im running into an issue with getting help from a hosting company if i install GT.


    When I asked on the FTB forums why no packs had GT in them, the story i was told was that IC2 was not the defacto 'base' of a pack anymore. Jadedcat told me that thermal expansion is now the best fit to base a pack around, as so many other mods (where are they?) support RF, and mods are moving away from MJ and EU.


    Ive used creeperhost for months, and now run a custom ftb pack where i removed a bunch of mods from DW20, and then added a couple mods including GT.


    Creeperhost now tells me that they will not help me with issues I have, as I have installed custom mods.


    So I was wondering, does anyone know of a host that will offer support for a custom pack that includes GT? Because it appeears that anywhere I go, if i put GT into a world, I will not get any help from the support people there. Two other hosts I emailed said they do not support custom packs. Only FTB default packs. Right now I have a 4GB, 3 core server from creeperhost that runs at 12 TPS with just 4 people on... and none of us have even gotten past just having a multifarm and a few generators and some basic machines. Any host can just ignore all responsibility now that I use a custom pack, and blame eveyrthing on the mods I installed. Apparently it doesnt matter than the mods I installed are all from other FTB packs... its the pack is not exactly how FTB set it up, I cant get help.


    Anyway, any tips would be greatly appreciated. :)

    • Official Post

    They should still allow hosting of custom packs, just not user support for it, which you can probably deal without.

    • Official Post

    What you want is just a hoster which offers you at least 2 dedicated physical cpu cores or even a complete machine. The cpu should be Intel, ideally last gen and high frequency, like the xeon processors targetting workstation use or desktop core-i7. Single thread performance is key for minecraft servers.


    The hoster can't do much about performance anyway besides providing decent hardware and not overcommitting on mc server instance per cpu core count.


    You as an admin can use tools like OPIS from ProfMobius to locate where slow setups are on the world, educate your players about what's causing issues and tune your mod+config selections to avoid issues. The worst are entities, avoid mob spawners, keep the number of smart mobs down (golems etc.), transporting entities (including dropped items) with water or even through portals. Use personal anchors instead of normal always-on chunkloaders or better none at all. Don't have excessive redundant machinery. Avoid fast travelling (like MPS flight) while you are not alone on the server.


    If this doesn't suffice I have a mod in development which can generate more sophisticated data about performance issues, but it isn't really user friendly yet.


    Before someone mentions thermal expansion as a "solution", TE is only insignificantly more efficient, but it has continuously had severe bugs in its conduit code since the beginning, causing memory leaks and sporadically performance bugs bringing servers to a halt.

    SirusKing - yes you are right, I meant just Support.


    Player, thanks for the tips, I am taking notes. :) I do use Opis, but right now cant see any issues, but again, creeperhost will always blame the mods. Its also hard to know what kind of specs a server needs to have to run this game, no one really seems to know. Some people tell me a server with 4gb ram is overkill for 4 players, others tell me its not enough.


    I do try to restrict chunk loaders, had to compromise with my group at world anchors only, 4 hours use per Ender PEarl.


    Also player, wanted to say that on a Direwolf20 video, I saw you type up on the chat that 'free item teleportation ruins the game'. That affirmed my own thoughts, and now thanks to finding out how to accomplish that, im having more fun at minecraft than Ive had in months. Our whole group would like to thank you guys (everyone who works on ic2 and the addons) for keeping it more challenging and interesting than most other mods, we really would not keep playing modded minecraft without IC2. :)


    And thanks for the help.

    • Official Post

    Opis doesn't catch everything, even /forge tps won't. It's only easily possible to locate time spent directly in the regular TileEntity and Entity update methods, but some processing happens globally.


    FC 1 is running with 6 GB, 2 GB may barely do it, 4 GB should suffice. The extra is important to symptomatically work around memory leaks and to keep enough memory for lazy garbage collection (memory freeing/management).


    The player count isn't really something influencing memory requirements a lot in a heavily modded server, a player is just a large chunkloader there. If those overlap a lot, overhead by player count is small.
    Every loaded chunk is about 200 kB, a player can load up to 441 chunks at default view distance, thus about 87 MB worth of chunks when there's no overlapping. You'd need dozens of players at the same time to have more impact than general mod leakage ;)

    • Official Post

    Btw. Creeperhost doesn't explicitly state that the cpu cores you rent are actually physical, they may be logical cores (hyper threading) and thus subjected to performance influence by other instances. I also don't see anything about which CPUs are being offered, could be some slow AMD manycore CPUs...


    Advertising 3 TB/month as "Data Transfer Unlimited" sounds quite fishy to me, that's well below what various other isps offer as limited packages, even in this price range.

    again, thanks for the help. We kind of suspect Creeperhost is overloading their servers. The weekend was the worst, and now it runs somewhat better. We are looking for a dedicated server, and ill look for the specs you noted.