Organize your own private gaming servers and gather the required equipment.
Organize your own private gaming servers and gather the required equipment.
I'm setting up a NAS and gaming server for myself and friends. The main goals are to use it as an Astrophotography storage hub, a PF sense router, and a Minecraft host. The machine specs are listed here: https://pcpartpicker.com/user/Tanman728/saved/3ZpBvK. I'm upgrading my current build to an i5-13600k and 6950xt. Most likely, I'll be playing heavily modded Minecraft as the primary game. I need to know how many cores Minecraft requires for a low-traffic server and whether mods will increase CPU demands. Ideally, I'd like around 5 cores for Astrophotography since it's very CPU-heavy. Another question is how many cores PF sense needs. As someone new to networking, please share any advice you have. Thanks!
Using VMs usually means sharing cores, which helps optimize CPU usage. It might make sense to allocate 6 or more CPUs for Minecraft and PFSSense. Otherwise, everything seems fine. You probably run a hypervisor on the host, such as EXSI, Hyper-V, Proxmox, etc. Setting up the router can be enjoyable and simplifies taking the whole network offline.
there’s a lot of focus on fast processors. modded versions of minecraft rely heavily on single-core performance. though, I’ve successfully run this setup on an i7 4770 for years. your approach is solid as a foundation. stick with what you have—it’s more than enough for most tasks. note: i initially thought you were upgrading to the 13th generation, but it looks like you’re targeting the 10th gen now. 9900k remains a solid base.
I haven't chosen the hypervisor yet, but I'm sure it will help manage resources for all the different needs we have.
I haven't played Minecraft yet, but I manage everything through Proxmox. I run Docker and Plex inside LXC containers along with some full VMs for setting up and testing Kubernetes clusters. My system is a 12600k with 64GB of RAM, and I’ve secured around 50% off an open-box Mac at a discounted price.
I've been playing since the Minecraft 1.6 days, mixing in several 300+ mod packs. I believe my best score was with around a dozen players, but I once had a 4096x4096 area spawned on that i7—about 100 people worth of chunks loaded. That should also count toward the peak era when that home server ran multiple Gmod servers alongside big modpacks.
Minecraft lacks native multi-threading support in Java, though performance on different platforms varies. For server use, consider moving to a Linux-based distro like Linux Mint to optimize hardware usage. Most official servers run on Linux for good reasons.
there are certain features that get broken off into individual threads: networking seems to potentially grow without bounds as more cores are added—though this is still theoretical. terrain generation is another area where some sources suggest it could be improved, but real-world performance isn’t fully confirmed yet. certain mods often delegate heavier work into dedicated threads, which is fairly common. on the client side, rendering has become quite efficient with multithreading. overall, the so-called "tick thread" remains a key concept that will likely stay as a single-threaded process. (It’s not even in Bedrock, mainly due to practical constraints. While compiled C offers better performance, it doesn’t change much here.) The idea is straightforward: this thread manages all events—block placement, destruction, clicks, mob movement, attacks, loot collection, etc.—so vanilla Minecraft has minimal chances of duplication issues because there’s no need to pass data between threads. Previous efforts to split the tick thread into multiple threads have caused problems, leading to bugs and instability. During testing, I even accidentally triggered a chest loot event while dancing to music, highlighting how tricky timing can be. As for performance impact on the operating system, assuming the scheduler handles things smoothly, the difference is negligible as long as the same Java version is used.