Minecraft

[fleshpulse]

Hey there

The memory usage depends on mod and plugin setup, but an estimate of about 100MB/slot is fairly accurate assuming the players are not grouped together, but your milage will vary. With no players (and no initial heap) my test server sits at about 950MB, this is with 20 plugins, 2 mods (Mo' Creatures and RP2), with logging of all actions to sql and a high res online map. I run the main server with -Xms4G, setting the initial heap to 4GB and I have not been closely monitoring actual memory usage. Generally you specify the min and max heap size to the JVM on launch to improve garabage collection and performance.

Note that this is a development version of MCPC+, not craftbukkit or vanilla, so memory use will vary. A clean install of a bukkit server with 0 plugins and 0 users uses about 300-400MB.

With a moderate plugin setup you could probably get 20-30 in about 4GB. Certain plugins are memory hogs, like dynmap, anti-cheat and block logging. Especially while generating new chunks. Go with 6GB if you want to be comfortable with settings. You can also generate your world up to a border in advance to reduce resource use during play.

My main concerns have been the bandwidth usage and disk access. I would recommend setting up a sql database rather than using flat files.

Feel free to PM if you have any questions. For public servers people generally run bukkit or modded servers and not the vanilla from Mojang.