I recently saw an article on Habré and decided to write about my experience of participating in such a network. It so happened that I was one of the first participants in the program described in the article. And I'm not a gamer, but just the owner of several productive PCs, the power of which is used by the network.
To make it immediately clear what I'm talking about, my servers are used by gamers connecting to the network of the cloud gaming service. The article mentioned above mentions SONM, Playkey and Drova. I tested the service from Playkey and now I will try to talk about the nuances of a distributed network and work in it.
How the network works
I will briefly describe how it all works. The cloud gaming service is looking for owners of powerful PCs who are willing to provide the computing resources of their machines for money. When a player connects to a cloud service, it automatically selects the server closest to the user, and the game starts on this machine. As a result, the delays are minimal, the gamer plays and rejoices, the cloud service and the server owner receive the money paid by the gamer.
How did I get into all this?
My experience in IT is about 25 years. For many years I have run a small private enterprise that specializes in the development of navigation systems. I love games, but you can hardly call me a passionate gamer. The company has about two dozen powerful machines, the resources of which are far from being fully used.
Somehow I began to look for an opportunity to download them for the benefit of the company, that is, to receive additional income. I saw several foreign and domestic services that offered to rent out the resources of their PCs for money. Most of the proposals are, of course, mining, which did not attract me from the word at all. There were 99% fakes in this area at one time.
But I liked the idea of loading the servers with games, the idea turned out to be close in spirit. At first I applied for beta testing, it was accepted immediately, but the invitation to participate came in a year and a half.
I was attracted by the fact that only hardware was required of me, and on one physical server it was possible to run several virtual machines, which I did in the future. Everything else - installation of specialized software, configuration, updates - the service took over. And that was great, because I don't have much free time.
After deploying the system, I tried the game on a distributed network from the player's side (connected to my own server, which was several kilometers away at the time of the game). Just compared it to playing in the cloud. The difference was very noticeable - in the first case, the process could be compared to playing on your own PC.
Equipment and networks
I tested the work of a distributed network on different equipment. As for the PC, these were workstations based on Intel processors from i3 to i9, with RAM modules of different sizes and frequencies. The computers are equipped with HDD and SSD drives with SATA and NVME interfaces. And, of course, Nvidia's GTX 10x0 and RTX 20x0 series graphics cards.
To participate in the beta testing program, I used 4 servers based on i9-9900 processors with 32 RAM/64 GB, placing 3 virtual machines on each. In total, we got 12 relatively powerful virtual machines that met the program’s criteria. I placed this equipment on a shelf one meter wide. The cases were well-ventilated, with powerful cooling systems and dust filters.
The network equipment used was also different, the bandwidth varied from 100 Mbps to 10 Gbps.
As it turned out, most home routers with a bandwidth of up to 100 Mbps are not suitable for a distributed network. Actually, even normal networking with such devices is a problem. But gigabit routers with 2 or 4 core processors fit perfectly.
This is what a server for three virtual machines looks like
Server load
I became a member of the distributed network program even before the pandemic. Then the computers were loaded by about 25-40%. But after, when more and more people switched to isolation mode, the load began to grow. Now the load of some virtual machines reaches 80% per day. We had to reschedule test and preventive work for the morning hours, so as not to create inconvenience for the players.
With the growing popularity of the service, the load on me and my colleagues has also increased - after all, you need to monitor the operation of virtual and physical machines. Sometimes there are glitches that need to be fixed. However, so far we are coping, everything is going well.
I see the loading of my virtual machines in the admin panel. It shows which cars are loaded and how much, the amount of time the player spent, which game was launched, and so on. There are quite a lot of details, so you can get stuck for a couple of hours studying all this.
Maintenance
As I wrote, it is not without difficulties. The main problem is the lack of automated system monitoring and notification of server owners about problems. Hope these features will be added soon. In the meantime, I have to look into my personal account, tracking the parameters of the equipment, monitor the temperature of server components, monitor the network, etc. Experience in the IT field helps. Perhaps someone with insufficient technical background may have problems.
True, most of the difficulties were resolved at the very beginning of participation in the testing program. It would be nice to have a detailed setup manual, but I think it's a matter of time.
The most interesting - income and expenses
It is clear that this program is not SETi@home, the main goal of PC owners is to earn money. The optimal solution for this is a powerful computer with several virtual machines. The share of overhead in this case is much less than if you use one physical machine. Of course, in order to raise a virtual machine, and then run a gaming service on it, you need technical knowledge and experience. But if you have the will, you can learn.
Power consumption is much less than in the case of mining. I know what I'm talking about, because at one time I tried different options for mining digital coins, although not for long. Here are the average power consumption figures according to the tests:
- 1 server (i5 + 1070) - one virtual machine ~ 80 kWh / month.
- 1 server (i9 + 3*1070) — 3 virtual machines ~130 kWh/month.
- 1 server (i9 + 2*1070ti + 1080ti) — 3 virtual machines ~180 kWh/month.
At the very beginning of the beta testing program, payment for machine resources was purely symbolic, $4-10 per month per virtual machine.
Then the payment was raised to $50 per month based on one virtual machine, subject to the continuous operation of the virtual machine. This is a fixed payment. The service soon promises to introduce per-minute billing, then, according to my calculations, it will turn out to be about $56 per month for one virtual machine. Not bad, even if you consider that part of the income is eaten up by taxes, bank fees, as well as electricity bills and service providers.
According to my calculations, the payback of the equipment, if purchased exclusively for the gaming service, is about three years. At the same time, the life expectancy (including physical wear and tear and obsolescence) of computer hardware is four years. The conclusion is simple - it is best to take part in the program if you already have a PC. The positive thing is that now the demand for the service itself has grown. The company plans to introduce a new per-minute billing, as I mentioned above, so the payback period is likely to decrease in the near future.
Thoughts on and prospects for the service
I think a distributed gaming program is a great option for gamers with powerful PCs who can recoup their own hardware costs. They don't need cloud gaming themselves, but if they have an expensive machine, why not recoup some of the costs or even recoup the equipment in full? In addition, the option of participating in the distributed gaming program is also suitable for companies like mine, where there are capacities that are not used at 100%. They can be converted into money, which is especially important in the current crisis.
Distributed gaming is a kind of cloud smartbox that is available to a wide range of consumers. It makes it possible for owners of powerful machines to receive rewards by providing resources to third-party users. Well, gamers, in the end, do not experience problems with cloud games, since the servers are located a maximum of a couple of tens of kilometers from them, and not hundreds or even thousands, as is often the case with users of most cloud gaming services. And the larger the distributed network, the higher the quality of the game.
In the near future, cloud and distributed gaming will coexist and complement each other. In the current environment, when the load on gaming services is growing, this is an ideal option. The popularity of games and gaming services will continue to increase in the future after the pandemic is over, so distributed gaming will gain momentum.
Source: habr.com