I''ve been wondering what hardware would be required to run a good game server. My server needs to handle a game with 50 players. Is a 700 mhz duron enough for processor? is 256mb SDRAM enough? Are any other things important? My connection is a cable modem. The game I will run on it isn''t even complete, but almost I''m assuming the computer is good enough since I think the server will do about the same amount processing as the client. -client(drawing everything and communicating with server) -server(decision making and communicating with clients) I guess it might depend on how the server works and what exactly it has to do, but I guess what I really want to know is what most game servers have. My server will just handle movement and certain movement requests in a 3d world.

It really depends on what you''re doing.

I assume that your game is seperated into a logic and a rendering part. The latter takes up most of the processing speed, and is only executed on the client.
This leads me to the conclusion that the server wouldn''t need _that_ much processing power. After all, it only runs the logic part of the game which doesn''t take up too much CPU speed.

Now as far as RAM is concerned... well, if your game is built like common First Person Shooters, your server might even need less memory than the clients:
The server stores all the players'' locations, entity locations etc...
However, the client stores players'' and items'' locations (well, maybe not of all players...) PLUS models and texture data.

Anyway, unless you''re doing heavy server-side only operations (e.g. AI) on the server, 700Mhz / 256MB should be plenty.

Some other factors:
- connection speed (you mentioned that yourself): You should really measure the amount of data sent for small games (you can do that using simple counters in your code) and then do some maths to try to predict the final bandwidth needed.
- hard drive speed: Well, this may be an issue for an MMO game which needs to access a large database with client profiles. However, from what you said, it looks like you will never access the HDD from your game (apart from loading etc...), so that shouldn''t really be an issue.

cu,
Prefect