Oracle Free VM Feasibility
I've been looking for a good cloud VM to host a very small vanilla minecraft server (2-8 players), and a seeing Oracle mentioned a lot.
The always free tier sounds too good to be true, and I've seen some people say their CPUs aren't great.
But are there any benchmarks out there that give some measurable numbers to anything? For example, how many players can this VM reasonably support without slowing down the tick rate, and at what render distance?
I'm not against spending money for a better VM, but just wondering if some benchmarks or other measured analytics have been done.
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Ideally I'd want 3 players to handle 15 render distance, but have not seen any numbers online about what that would actually take, cpu-wise. Looking at other VMs like Azure or AWS are also a bit overwhelming since they have so many options.
Is there a standard people use to determine what CPU is needed for a given player count and render distance? And while the aim is to have a vanilla server, I wouldn't oppose switching to fabric with lithium if it has a huge performance boost without affecting any technical gameplay features.
I also haven't seen many people showing the performance impact of render distance since it was split from simulation distance. I'd most likely keep simulation distance around 8 to 10 and render distance hopefully around 15 to 20 unless that's just not realistic.
If there are too many factors here to have any measurable standards, then would anyone know how this compares to realms? We currently use a realm and occasionally run into some slowdown when 3 people are online at the same time, and that's at only 10 render distance. If it is known how much better or worse the free oracle vm is compared to realms, that would be a helpful metric too.
honestly, for 3 players, you shouldn't have an issue, https://tryitands.ee -- oracle cloud is free, so you loose nothing and can migrate to another host if it doesn't work out
it's probably better to use a mod like https://modrinth.com/mod/distanthorizons on both the client and server
When you have higher render distances, memory usage increases exponentially which eventually will cause issues
In theory I could try and see, but oracle has been out of capacity every time I've tried, which is why I'm asking here for other people's experiences.
If you think it can handle 3 players, I'll might as well keep checking for availability, though at this point I'm thinking it's unlikely I'll luck out and click Create the same time someone else frees up their VM. Looking online, it seems like there are people who run bots to create instances as soon as they're available, so it seems like this isn't really a possibility anymore for the average person.
Are you aware of alternatives to this that stay in a relatively low price point? I've been looking around but everything seems to be in the $100+ per month price point for ubuntu VMs with the same specs as oracle always free, and there surely must be far more middle-ground options out there that I'm not aware of.
would recommend bobby on the client more than DH
Bobby is goated. People will have differing opinions on using freecam, but tweakeroo + bobby is incredible QoL
If you do decide to do 15 render distance server side, make sure you drop sim distance to a more reasonable number like 8
do NOT do 15 render server side. There is no realistic need to do so. The client can cache chunks with bobby to render further
or use DH if you desire
make sure you install carpet if your clients use tweakeroo, otherwise features such as ABL will be broken due to the vanilla anticheat
This is just for a small vanilla server and most of us dont use client sided mods either. I personally use both DH and bobby, but would prefer if the server could handle 15 render distance for those who do not use any mods.
The main question is finding a suitable cloud VM service, since oracle seems to be at capacity and unlikely that I'd be able to get a free one.
My research today seems to conclude that general purpose VMs just aren't affordable in the $20/month range without having too low specs for minecraft.
I may consider looking into dedicated minecraft hosts that allow complete control over all server files, but then again, without a standalone VM, I wouldnt be able to use it for my other projects.
Unless anyone has a miracle solution, I'll probably accept defeat and continue paying for realms.
Self hosting would likely be the best solution long-term, but most guides have no sense of security whatsoever, and port forwarding is out of the question in my current situation.
self hosting is sketchy, and I wouldn't normally recommend it
if you are on a budget, consider
VM.Standard.E2.1.Micro (you can get 2 for free) on oracle, and a budget game hosting provider such as servcityI've been using Oracle for hosting a bunch of stuff, the free offering is surprisingly good
For 3 people on a vanilla server (fabric with the usual perf mods installed) with 14 render distance and 8 sim distance we sit around 20 MSPT, it's more than good enough to handle that for us. You definitely need to pregen chunks, it chugs if people go exploring. We don't have particularly laggy builds or anything, the only thing we're sort of careful about is not having huge entity counts
Have you given Oracle a payment method? I had the same thing where there was no availability. As soon as I gave 'em a credit card number I could get whatever I wanted. As long as you stay within the free tier usages you don't get charged
Don't want to take this too off topic but am curious on Bobby vs DH, why the preference for Bobby?
How long ago did you create the free instance? I've given them a card and already had the temporary charge appear on my account. Looking online, many people have said there is no availability, and that other people run bots to spam the create instance button to take all available free instances as soon as they open.
I prefer bobby and DH together since I can run bobby at anywhere from 20-40 chunks to make closer builds look the best, then DH shows everything else up to ~1000 chunks. DH makes a lot of builds not look great if seen from too close.
it's not that an oracle cloud server couldn't do 15 chunk render distance, it's minecraft fundementally struggles and breaks when you crank up the render distance
it's likely fine, but all chunks in the view distance on the server are loaded into memory, regaurdless of if the player has that high of a view distance client side
Yeah the a1 instances are largely being abused and as youβve said, people run scripts to provision one as soon as capacity is available. Thatβs what happens when you have a free offering
I can run much higher than 15 on a local server without issue. What issues are you referring to?
I've legitimately seen people come in here with a view distance of 20 and their server was using ~10gb of memory with like 10 people online
That sounds like it's oracle that cant handle it then, rather than minecraft breaking. The most common player count is around 2-3 so that's not an issue for me.
Though without a good host alternative, the exact details of render distance can wait until later.
Iβve given you an option here
Yes thank you I've already written it down to look into later. Though I didnt see any other always free oracle instances before. Are you saying this free one actually has availability? I'll need to do a lot of research on the minecraft host since the majority of them are sketchy
The shape (e2.1 whatever) is limited to 1 core and 1 gb of ram. Hence oracle can supply a greater number of them
Every always free account can get two
Those will not run Minecraft, but will happily run a small database server or web server if you desire
And because they are less powerful, I think the demand is lower anyway
I mean, it's literally free, try it and fine out
Oh I see what you mean, just using that for the other projects
This is really not helpful at all
Capacity is scarce, Iβve been trying to get one for ages and every single time I tried itβs out of capacity in every single availability domain
people are just hoarding them up even though they have no use for it.
These can run velocity though, although the networking speed is somewhat a limit.
I mean, trying to judge the performance of a game that's known to be inconsistent with performance is quite an impossible feat. I'd say your server would run perfectly fine, but running a public server in general with that render distance could be problematic
A year ago roughly. I saw similar online back then for the fully free account but got instances almost immediately once I added a card, that was the workaround suggested back then. Does your account show as pay as you go? I had to contact them to update my account after adding a card. I've deleted and recreated the server a few times with no issues, most recently a few months ago. Could be I got lucky with the region I chose, Germany Frankfurt