Tycoon Zone

The Server That Powers Tycoon Online

As long time players will remember, Tycoon Online suffered a series of server problems back when I first took over operations of the game. I greatly underestimated the server capacity needed to run the game, and I also made the mistake of relying on a service provider that used cheap, generic hardware.

I have since purchased my own server from Dell. Dell has had their share of bad publicity for customer service problems for consumer-grade PCs, but they actually do a lot better for their business customers.  Here are the basic specs for the server:

• Dell PowerEdge 1950  (Rackmountable, 1U server)
• Quad-core Intel Xeon processor, 1.6 GHz
• 8 GB memory
• 4 x 36GB serial attached SCSI 2.5″ form factor hard drives, hardware RAID 1+0
• CentOS 5, LAMP architecture

The server was designed with speed and reliability in mind. The quad-core processor sets the stage for a high-speed system, but the biggest speed boost here is probably the memory. With 8GB memory, the OS automatically caches the most frequently read data in memory, avoiding time-consuming random-access disk seeks. In the case of Tycoon Online, this is mostly the database tables and indexes.  Reading data from memory is lightning fast compared to reading from disk, so this change alone probably accounted for the greatest improvement in speed over the old game hardware.

Writing to disk is still time consuming, though, and you can’t safely cache disk writes — at least not with the hardware budget I have. And Tycoon Online is very write-intensive compared to a typical database application. So I opted for a RAID 1+0 setup using serial-attached SCSI 10K RPM disks to get the writes as fast as I could.  Also, with RAID 1+0, I get data redundancy that protects me from a disk failure.  I wanted to keep to a 1U server, so I opted for the 2.5″ form factor disks (that is the same form factor as hard disks used in laptops and iPods).  When I placed the order for this server, Dell only offered these in a 36GB capacity, so I only have 72GB effective storage for now.  That’s plenty of storage for the game, but it does mean I need to keep an eye on the log files.

I’ve been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux at various jobs for several years now, so I feel right at home with CentOS.

The server has a slot for a second CPU if I ever need it. And it has redundant power supplies, just in case one fails.  Right now, both Apache and MySQL are on the same server. Given the capacity of this server, that’s fine for now. As the game grows, these will eventually be split to run on separate servers.

In another article, I’ll write about some of the other steps I have taken to ensure the game keeps running, including MySQL replication, and the data center I chose.