Absolute mininum server requirements

[Raptor]

I know a similar question has been asked before, but I don't know whether the answer came from an actual ventrilo support person who has tried running ventrilo on slow computers, or if it came from some random person who pulled a number out of thin air.

What are the absolute minimum requirements to run a small ventrilo server (10-15 players)? The only mention of hardware requirements on the ventrilo web site is very brief and vague:

"The server CPU utilization under most conditions won't even register, so a fairly low level computer should be more then sufficient."

I have a 486DX/66MHz with 24 MB RAM running NetBSD 2.0.2. Is this considered "sufficient," or does someone need to add some more specific hardware requirements to the ventrilo web site? ;)

Ventrilo, sshd, and possibly a minimal Apache httpd installation would be the only things running on this machine. I know from past experience that it is possible to make software run on machines significantly slower than the minimum requirements state, as long as those machines are configured to perform only a couple of very specific tasks. I would very much appreciate hearing from anyone who has run the ventrilo server (or any other voice chat server) on 486- or Pentium-class machines 100 MHz or slower.

Thanks,
Rob

[Raptor]

Correction, I now have 32 MB RAM in my 486DX 66 MHz speed demon. I found a bag full of 8 MB SIMMs and replaced the 4's that I had in there before. :D

[tbenoit]

I don't consider that description vague at all, really.

A common server on our boxes will use less than 1% of the CPU and less than 1% of RAM.

I think you would be able to host a server on yoru 486 without any CPU/RAM performance issues.

[Brandon]

You should be fine. I successfully hosted a 8 slot vent on a 386 with 32mb of ram. Just try to turn off any unecessary processes, that may slow down the vent.

[Raptor]

Thanks, guys!

tbenoit, I thought it was vague because percentages are always relative relative to the sample size or some baseline and I didn't see any mention of how fast the boxes were. These days people call 1 GHz slow! ;) Given the architecture differences, 1% of a 2 GHz P4 or Athlon CPU's processing power would translate to significantly more than 20 MHz worth of a 486's processing power.

I reverted to NetBSD 1.6.2 because 2.0.2 was too new to run the latest ventrilo binaries. The nice thing about NetBSD is that it comes with practically everything turned off. So far I have only turned on sshd and ventrilo, and it seems to be running pretty smoothly.

Thanks again,
Rob

[Patrick]

I second Tim's response.

I guess a thanks goes to Flagship for creating a decent server version. Awww, nevermind. :p