I want to run 10 instances of Massplanner 24/7

Kansept said:

What's the best way to do this?

10 VPS

A dedicated server with partitions

Or should I just buy 1 beefy VPS? MP-Admin said I can get threaded connections up to 200 or 300 if my system can handle it.

ANY information about amping up Massplanner would be appreciated!

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Noah Hawryshko said:

Whelp, someone's rolling in the dough

The best way to have 10 concurrent instances of massplanner open at one time is to figure out the maximum number of virtual machines you can create and run massplanner on at full power and without any lag, and then to buy only that many servers. For instance, if your server can support at most 4 massplanner (1 real 3 in a virtual machine) without any trouble than buy 3 VPS's, put 4 on the next one and put the last 2 on the third one.

The key is figuring out that magic number of MP instances on 1 VPS and then buying only as many as you need to get to your desired amount of instances.

Be warned: make sure you test them with all instances of MP at full power, because if you don't stress the system to its limit you won't have a good idea what it would look like under load. If you under anticipate the load, you'll end up with crashes and bugs of every kind. MP is not nice to RAM, even if your paging file is enabled, so make RAM allocation top priority.

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Kansept said:

Lol thanks for the info!

Can you explain the paging file to me?

Also, what's to stop me from buying a dedi with 64 GB RAM and just allocating that acrossed 10 VMs?

Wouldn't that be more cost effective than paying for 10 VPSs monthly?

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Noah Hawryshko said:

EDIT: That was longer than I wanted it to be.

The paging file is just a feature in windows that artificially extends RAM when you've used all of it by using your available disk space and storing the extra RAM information there. Because it uses the hard disk, it's slower than than it would be had all the RAM not been used up, and MassPlanner likes to crash once your RAM usage is so high that you starting using the paging file. Just make sure you have more than enough RAM.

You can buy a dedicated server and do exactly what you've said, but you need to do the numbers yourself to make sure it is the cheapest solution. I think the problem will arise in process cores. Whne running dedicated servers, the bottleneck resource is most often processor cores. Because you cannot share a processor core with a VM, you need to assign at least 1 physical core to each VM, but that would put a very high strain on each machine unless you're buying a dedi with 2 processors because as far as I know, the maximum amount of cores available in commercial dedicated servers is only somewhere around 15.

Off the bat, you'd need at least 3 cores for your host VM, so now we're down to 12. This means that you'll only be able to assign 1 processor core to most VM's, which is not enough for a host OS and a MassPlanner running at 100% load.

Your only option to run without hiccups is to either split the load between 2 VPS's, you don't need to pay for 10, you just get 2 and put 4 VM's in each of them. That or get a dedi with 2 processors. That'll give you at least 28 cores so you'd be good to go with 2 processors, but those servers are so expensive.

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davids355 said:

You can run a dedi and then set up your own vms using hyperv. But if you run 10 copies of mp won't the mp licensing be expensive?

Why can't you run one copy on a dedi and have loads of accounts set up on it?

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