So, I've been researching things like the Rpi 2 and ODROID mini computers, and I've come to a decision. I want to get an ODROID. I want to use the ODROID to run a minecraft server, for at least 8 people at a time.

So there is the ODROID C1+, for 35 dollars 1gb or ram. http://www.hardkernel.com/main/products/prdt_info.php?g_code=G143703355573

Then, there is the ODROID XU4, for 77 dollars with 2 Gb of ram. http://www.hardkernel.com/main/products/prdt_info.php?g_code=G143452239825

Which one should I get? Is the price difference worth the ram and things? Keep in mind I want to run a survival minecraft server.

I would say the better one, because it would allow you to expand.

Sorry for the (slight) necropost.

If you decide to run a Minecraft server, I highly suggest you optimize it with Spigot (really your only alternative to vanilla, as of yesteryear).

The best bit of information you can give us is how many players you expect to host?
But I vote for $77 one. More RAM, speedier CPU.

I am not familiar with minecraft but 8 people is not a lot. I know more about HTTP servers and the Odroid could easily handle 1000s of requests at the same time. If you need powerful hardware for only 8 people then something is wrong.

Oops, I missed that. I think you should be good on 2GB

Keep in mind that there are a multitude of factors that can impede your performance, plugins being the big one and activity. As long as you have lightweight plugins and your members all work together to create an efficient economy, you'll be fine.

What I mean is that if everyone creates there own farms, you may have problems if (for example) 3 users are online since the server would have to load and do the logic for those farms. If there was only one farm for the 8 of you, and 3 of you are online then the server only needs to do the logic for one farm. Allowing the server to process other events.

What kind of computations are involved in this farm thing? From what I know about programming I would expect the odroid to handle 1000s of video-gamers not struggle with 3. I googled mincraft farm and minecraft and it appears to be a grid based system. A farm appears to be nothing more than some blocks in said grid are able to hold user defined crops.
Since minecraft is closed source I do not know how said "farm" is implemented however I can guess. This could be implemented as follows:

Code:

This should only take 8 bytes of ram per farmable area in said grid.

Just to verify Alex: Are you saying that 3 players of minecraft could bring down an octa core computer with 2gb of ram. If so something I suspect that something is wrong. Also is my understanding of what it takes to implement farming correct?

Well, you aren't wrong. That is the technical version of a farm. However, on our own server we have more complex farms involving redstone logic and tons of other stuff. Outside of farms we have item sorters that sort items into an array of, easily, 36+ chests.

There are farms for all sorts of stuff:
Iron: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DduMKLkhDTo
Gold: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wicw1Ua4KEI
Ghast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6t4Bx_uETq4
Enderman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lM-ra3-hxNk
Blaze Rod: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DALVI52iqn4

These may seem simple, and they are. There's hardly any logic involved with the construction of these. The logic comes from the redstone and the scale at which you build these farms, and thus the number of mobs it spawns in (the bigger you make it, the more you make the more mobs there will be). In our MC 1.8 server we had huge gold farms, spanning dozens of Nether Portals in each town. We could noticeably see an impact on our server when one or two of these farms were running. We're running on 2GB of RAM for Minecraft, I forget what our CPU is. Might be an 8-core as well. But this is server grade, not mobile (Intel Xeon vs Samsung Exynos).

But again, back to the logic. Farms in and of themselves are quite calm. The issues come when they are abused by either allowing them to spawn in hundreds of mobs or involve complex logic to sort items. The redstone circuitry in the game is capable of simulating all sorts of logic gates: or, xor, and, not, etc.You have pressure plates and trip wires that can be activated by any number of mobs and items can be transported by water streams from a farm to a nearby sorting machine.

It's easy to look at Minecraft and see a simple and low requirement game. But depending on how into the game you wish to play, the more it demands. Without really knowing what type of play style Unicorn is going for it's hard to adequately say what would work best. I'm just taking prior experience from running our server and applying it here. We can easily run 10 users at a time but issues happen when a few of those users abuse their farms by allowing those farms to spawn in too many mobs or activate complex logic machines. Both of these exist on our 1.10 server. You might find pictures over in the corresponding Screenshots thread or in videos users have shared.




I answered part two above, part one is not entirely what I was saying.



You can have 8 people on the server, sure no problem. Just be careful when the game demands more resources so it can properly path a bunch of mobs spawning in a farm, even if they are being "delivered" somewhere by a stream of water to either fall to their death or to be killed by the player, that mob still needs to calculate a path; the game is still going to try and control that mob.



If all players band together to create the farms they need as a group, that can go a long way in reducing lag. But, again, depends entirely on the nature of the server. If it's PvP, there could be issues. If it's a Survival server where they want to work together, great! If it's a creative server to just mess around in, there would be zero issues unless the plant tons of TNT - froze my laptop for about 15 minutes doing that years ago, 4GB RAM and a dual core though.

Thank you for taking the time to explain this Alex. I now understand some of the complexity involved that may be faced by a server.

Haha!

This topic is 1 year and 28 days old

Since then I have not bought an ODROID, but the hard drive on my parents i5 4gb laptop died, and they didn't bother to get a new HDD, so I used that to run a minecraft server, with a 16gb flash drive. I actually don't anymore, but it is there if I need to host something.