Server on EC2

[thunderrump]

I had some free time yesterday, so gave this experiment a go:

Amazon Web Services provides free hosting of a micro Windows instance for a year if you're a new customer. The micro instance only has 1GB of RAM, so I had my doubts the server would run, but I was pleasantly surprised. It runs perfectly fine in Win Server 2012 without exceeding any limits.

It's been stable for almost 24h, peak memory usage hasn't exceeded any thresholds. You only have to get your hands a little dirty following the instructions from the tripwire wiki and take note of the following caveats.

Caveats:

• Only 3.3GB free after installing the server, future expansions may exceed what the free server provides in terms of HDD space.
• Incoming bandwidth is free, but you're limited to 15GB outbound per month or it's $0.09/GB (You shouldn't hit this limit unless you host map data from the server, but something to keep an eye on.)
• EC2 management is not for beginners. If you're cozy playing with cloud services and sysadmin, give it a go. But there are several "gotchas" that could bite inexperienced users.

I mainly just wanted to let people know this is an option and works well with the current state of the game.

 

[Zeneroth]

I also tried this out as well since yesterday and been running since. But then later on today we played on Hard difficulty for a few round and the 3rd round the server start getting latency spiked up. I noticed that it happened when there are a lot of enemies spawned. Wave 5 to be specific. After clearing the wave then the lag was gone.

So I checked afterward on my EC2 and found that KF2server was sitting at around 750mb of RAM. Due to it running on Windows server (which uses a lot of memories already) so I think it went over the RAM capacity of 1GB thus causing lags and such.

I'm not quite sure why the first few matches we have no issues with it though. We actually get to wave 7 without any lags before. And after the instance manual restart, we are running fine again. So maybe we might need a schedule auto restart the instance every 24hr or something? Or maybe finding some ways to actually reduce the RAM usage so we can squeeze it into that tiny 1gb? Will disabling the WebAdmin reduce that a bit more?

 

[thunderrump]

Did you go Win2012 or something else? I'm running vanilla out of the box (no customization). Snagged steamcmd, installed server and running with web admin.

Disabling web admin will get you a little back, but I've been running on hard as well without issue so far. I'm sure there are services you can disable to reduce your memory footprint.

 

[Zeneroth]

I was using the win server 2012 r2 base AMI. It worked fine for the most part though but as I said there is one time it lagged out for us. It might not happen a lot but I would prefer it to be more stable. Will experiment more after work today as well.