Modded minecraft servers are heavily dependent on single threaded performance. For more vanilla servers paper helps a lot. For forge I highly recommend trying mohist. It isn’t compatible with all forge mods but it works well enough that you can just replace the server jar in many modpacks and see a large performance boost.

The biggest thing that slows down mc servers in my experience is world gen. Pre generating the world and adding a world border can help a lot.

I’ve not done a larger scale fabric server so I can’t offer much advice in optimizing it but the client speed ups available through fabric look very impressive.

If you are running a server without world borders or with a lot of simultaneous players I’d look in depth on what ssd you’re saving the world to. You want dram cache, random write speeds are way more important than sequential. If you can find an Intel optane for cheap they are pretty amazing. The ssd is less important than your cpu and having enough ram to run the server.

Generally an older gaming pc is better than an older server. Again you are targeting single threaded performance. If you are purchasing hardware it might make more sense to go with lower end new hardware than higher end old hardware. It’s all about trade offs for your use case and budget. For a long time I just used my main pc to play games and host servers (ram is cheaper than another pc) but I tinker too much to keep good ‘server’ uptime.

Transcoding can get pretty taxing on a system but any semi modern quad core can handle a few 1080p streams or a 4k stream. Plus you can use a gpu for transcoding. The nice thing is it scales with core count pretty well so older server or workstation hardware works well.

I don’t have any better hardware suggestions than you’ve already been given, but I would recommend avoiding Plex.

I get problems with it pretty much every day. Usually it’s the client stuttering and crashing, but I often get the client connecting to the server, but not getting a list of media back.

I’ve bought a lifetime licence, but I’m looking into switching to Jellyfin because it’s so frustrating.

I’ve gone with Unraid and consumer level hardware (intel i3 12100 and 16gb of standard ddr4 ram) the only “server hardware” I have, is an LSI HBA card that’s in IT mode so I can connect more HDDs.

I’m even used SMR drives in my array, just use a good CMR drive for parity and the biggest SSD you can get for your cache drive and you will be good to go.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

[Thread #225 for this sub, first seen 19th Oct 2023, 16:05] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

I just use my old gaming PC, GPU and all. I self host quite a few services on it and I have yet to find something that puts it into high usage.

As someone who is also looking at building a server for different things then you( mainly nextcloud and a few other self hosted services). if you don’t need more then 2tb of storage look into a used HP mini office PC.

• They are cheap at less then £200 for an older model or even sub £100

• They are a lot more powerful then an SBC like a raspberry pi but without being an electricity consumption monster like a lot of servers

• Some have a 60W PSU so they are dirt cheap to run

• Newer ones have a 2.5 SATA slot and a M.2 slot( including the 60W model I’m looking at getting used). So you can have dual drives for a fast main drive and a backup drive or RAID depending on how you set it up

• They are small and don’t take up much room in your house like a raspberry pi

• If you need more space and it doesn’t have to be super fast you could get a USB NAS for it

So overall they are a really good option if you want something small and you don’t have a ton of money for hardware or electricity but a raspberry pi doesn’t fulfil your performance needs.

Honestly for what you’re trying to accomplish, any PC built in the past 10 years would suffice.

I’d say the bigger issue would be what server operating system you’d want to run. Personally I use UnRaid and I love it, all of the apps you mention and more are available as premade docker templates in the Community Apps plugin. I’ve tried Windows and FreeNas before but I find UnRaid just so user friendly and reliable.

I used to run a Minecraft server with PaperMC on an RPi4, and I would only give the java environment 2G of RAM. It never crashed except when I overloaded it with plugins. The same Pi was also hosting Pihole and Ubiquiti UNMS. As long as you aren’t planning on hosting hundreds of players at the same time, you should be fine with whatever (and assuming you’re doing this at home on residential internet, your network would be the bottleneck anyway). I do recommend PaperMC, it improves the performance and stability of Minecraft and it’s a fork of Spigot so it’s compatible with most plugins.

Also /u/ShellMonkey is correct about used server hardware. You can pick up a Dell PowerEdge for about $200.

Media servers can be pretty demanding particularly when doing on the fly transcoding. Look for refurbished servers, big companies routinely toss perfectly good hardware as part of product lifecycle management. A favorite of mine is called ‘techmikeny’ although their site and search is pretty janky.

I/O performance needs to be considered along with the number of processing threads which really comes into play if you have a lot of virtual machines/containers running. Less than $1000 upfront and you can get well more than you think you need, and have space to improve. I’d say focus on CPU first, it’s easy to add memory and storage later if you buy a big enough box to have extra slots open, but adding CPUs is more of a pain.

Electricity and noise should be a thought too. My largest box is using about 240 watts right now and if you go with actual rack servers they tend to be loud with a half dozen fans running at 6000 rpm or so. If you can stash it somewhere out of your living space all the better.

I started on a raspberry pi and would highly recommend. Great for tons of things to self host.

It’ll run Plex no problem, just forget transcoding.

Don’t get server hardware, use regular desktop/laptop machines as they’ll be more than enough for you. Server hardware is way more expensive and won’t be of any advantage. If you’re looking to buy you can even get very good 9-10th gen Intel CPUs and motherboards that are perfect to run servers (very high performance) but that people don’t want because they aren’t good to play the latest games. This hardware is also way more power efficient and sometimes even more powerful than any server hardware that you might get for the same price. Get this hardware for cheap and enjoy.

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