Game Server OS

There's one critical question you have to ask yourself:

Are you going to run a commercial server that needs to be efficient and reliable, or should any Joe Blow be able to set up a server for his friends?

I think Linux is a better server because of its opensource (being freeness). I think you should use a Debian base. Im not sure if that has support for UDP though.

- Cheers, Daniel

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Original post by Anonymous Poster All in-house, knowledge of both platforms isn’t an issue because I know people that know both inside and out.

In which case my prejudices make me lean towards *nix.

As the plural of anecdote is surely data, I have seen that it is much cheaper/easier to locate *nix dedicated hosting with shell access than it is for Windows hosting.

Regardless, you should attempt to make your server software as portable as possible to encourage flexibility in purchasing and technology decisions -- what's best today might not be best 10 years down the road, or even by the time you finish development.

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Original post by Ravuya As the plural of anecdote is surely data, I have seen that it is much cheaper/easier to locate *nix dedicated hosting with shell access than it is for Windows hosting. Regardless, you should attempt to make your server software as portable as possible to encourage flexibility in purchasing and technology decisions -- what's best today might not be best 10 years down the road, or even by the time you finish development.

I couldn't have said it better. Platform agnostic design is a step closer to good design, no matter how you cut it.

We ship and support our architecture on Windows and Linux. (RHEL for that Enterprisey feeling)

We find that smaller installations, managed by users or developers, work better on Windows, because that's what people know. Larger, clustered installations with dedicated operations staff works better on Linux, because it stays up longer and is less people intensive to maintain/update in production.

If you don't expect to scale past a single server machine, go with whatever you feel is easiest to develop for and support.

Speed is mostly the same between the two systems, although how you write optimal code for each system is different (IOCP on Windows, kpoll and friends on the *nix variants).

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Original post by MrRage Was wondering if you were to make a UDP Game server if you would considering using BSD/Linux over Windows XP as the OS. I think XP is faster in general and its security has improved over the years. BSD is stable and very secure (if configured correctly, and maintained) but not so sure about its performance. 32bit OS - not 64

Supposedly you can chop out alot of unneeded stuff (customize) from the Linux flavored OS and maximize resources available to your App (something you cant do with Windows). Cost might be another issue if you are setting up multiple servers. Im considering Linux for a server cluster needed by a simulation system Ive been working on (heavy on AI) and I wouldnt want to pay that much extortion money to the MasterOfShoddy (and no Im not a Linux pimp, if it works good enough the money differenece decides the case....)