What does allocating more RAM to the serverstarter.bat do?

What does allocating more RAM to the serverstarter.bat do?
Does this affect the player cap or is it just used to load the plugins?

 

Allocating more memory to the server makes it run smoother. Think of it as a really tall person trying to get through a really small door, the bigger you make the door, the easier it is for the person to get through. This is the same for memory, the more you give it, then the more it can use as it needs it to keep things running fast and smooth. It also affects the player cap, the more memory there is, the more players can be on at a time.

 

So, according to the 100mb per person rule, in order to host 40 players, I need to set it to 400x Mb in the serverstarter.bat?

 

That also depends on the hardware running the machine and how many and which plugins you're running with it. Depending on the plugin, it can double what each player needs since every plugin is, essentially, watching each action a player performs. If not running any plugins, for 40 players at 100 MB each, it would take 4 GB or RAM. However, that doesn't take the hardware into consideration. If the hardware is good and you're running x64, it may not take as much, though 100 MB per player seems a bit low of a guess in my opinion. But according to most, 4 GB should cover about 40 players, give or take 5. How the server collects its garbage will also make a large impact. Recently I added a bunch of garbage collection options and my test server starts up much faster and runs better.

 

How many players do you think I could run with these specs?
Here are my specs:


Plugins:

 

Personally I would only go 20, maybe 25 max otherwise you'll have a lot of issues.

 

Is there anything I could change there w/o changing hardware to up the max?

 

Proper garbage collection arguments and make sure basically nothing else is running on it. If it's your laptop or desktop that you use as well as host the server on, then the max will be less due to anything that you're doing at the same time, especially if you're playing while running the server. Otherwise all I can suggest is garbage collection and maybe a RAMDISK so data is written to RAM instead. But that only helps with world generation, not actual server performance.

 

yeah, I don't run anything else on it, and its fine for now, as my max is around 20 and the usual is around 12.
What are some specs that would be able to support a 60 player cap? (bandwidth is not an issue)
I've been receiving donations, so I may be able to buy an entirely new computer. (or replace parts)

 

Some specs for 60 would ideally be a quad core CPU running a 64-bit OS with around 8 GB of RAM. Also, if you can, having it run on a *NIX OS instead of Windows would be even better since it's most stable. You can also check out some paid hosting. A cheap Minecraft server host that has pretty nice specs would be http://brohoster.com that has the hardware to allow a lot of players since it has 24 GB of RAM. The only thing they limit is how much is physically stored, so your number of plugins will be limited. Otherwise you can feel free to upgrade your computer and the specs I just gave aren't concrete, but it would ensure that your server will run nice and smooth for your players as well as not needing a lot of repair and maintenance.

 

Thanks for the help.
I'm going to go searching on ebay now