[clug] peformace of Containers vs virtual machines

George at Clug Clug at goproject.info
Sat Feb 3 08:52:25 UTC 2018


Bob and other Container experienced people,

My family loves playing Minecraft, particularly Feed The Beast (FTB)
mod packs like Infinity and Direwolf 20.
https://www.feed-the-beast.com/
https://www.feed-the-beast.com/projects/ftb-presents-direwolf20-1-12

At home we use a Debian KVM lib-virt server (32 GB RAM, i7) to run the
FTB server, while using Windows for the client computers.

On the windows clients these mods can use up to 12 GB of RAM and do
not like running in environments with less than 8 GB.

The FTB server only consumes about 3GB but it tends to max out the
virtual CPU resources. This causes lag in the game, and the
FTB/minecraft server complains about not being able to keep up.  I
have tried adding more cores, and/or CPUs but this has not helped. 
Maybe there is a way in virt-manager where I can allocate more CPU
resources by using other means?

The Debian server exists for our family to play networked games,
naturally we tend to play only one game at a time, sometimes this will
be a vanilla minecraft, other times FTB, other times Ark Survival
Evolved, etc. 

Bob,

Do you think I would get better performance from using Containers? 

As I am using Debian, which container system should I install ?  

Doing a search on the internet there seems to be Linux Containers
(LCX) and Docker.  Are these things the same? or are they alternative
container systems?  Is one the management system for the other?  (I
should not be so lazy in asking and just do some reading)
https://wiki.debian.org/Docker
Docker [1] is a solution for the management of lightweight process
containers. 
https://wiki.debian.org/LXC
Linux Containers (LXC) provide a Free Software virtualization system
for computers running GNU/Linux.

I have never bothered using Containers previously. I have enjoyed
using Virtual Machines and previously these have been adequate. Sadly
heavily modded minecraft servers tend to consume lots of CPU
resources.

Comments, please...

George.







Links:
------
[1] http://docker.io/


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