Running KSP on a server, is it possible

[Aghanim]

You see, I have created a nice interstellar vehicle that have 64000 kethane fuel converted into xenon that are piped into 2 SM-FFR engine, placed ISV Venture Star style (or Valhala, if you wish). The problem is I want to see my ship accelerate until its fuel tank are empty to test its capability and to see if this vehicle can truly go interstellar distance not just on maths and paper, yes I know there is no other star system available right now. So, my plan is to run KSP on a cheap server rented somewhere, use VNC to start the KSP and load files, and the rest is to use Telemachus to operates it to the end. With that, I wouldn't need to worry much about my KSP running overnight for several weeks, I could go to school and do my life, and check Telemachus for any progress, just like playing any other facebook game. However, is it even possible to run KSP on a server?

[Mazlem]

You don't need a server, just another computer. A server you'd find online and rent wouldn't be meant to play the game, and it'd be way more expensive than this project is worth (unless you *highly* value it). I'd find another computer for free/cheap and use that.

[Aghanim]

You don't need a server, just another computer. A server you'd find online and rent wouldn't be meant to play the game, and it'd be way more expensive than this project is worth (unless you *highly* value it). I'd find another computer for free/cheap and use that.

I could use my main computer and use it to run KSP and do anything else on my laptop, if only I could convince my entire family that running a PC 24/7 wouldn't waste energy and make the computer blow up at any time

[Technical Ben]

They think it might blow up at any time? Can you pay for the electric? (Should be pennies).

[Aghanim]

They think it might blow up at any time? Can you pay for the electric? (Should be pennies).

My family has experienced a computer blows up, and now they think that running a normal household PC 24/7 will make it broken, same with using hibernation and sleep

I had a moment when I am out from my 18 hour download spree, my mom tell me to shutdown the computer to let it rest for a while (really!)

They also think that a normal fridge magnet could ruin electronics, cellphone radiation could create cancer and paralysis, laptop radiation could decrease sperm count and that hoax y stuff

Edited October 2, 2013 by Aghanim

[Epthelyn]

If you want to go interstellar distances, you make a rocket capable of 'escaping' Kerbol's SoI and turn on 100,000x warp for 14 seconds, where 14 seconds would roughly equate to the 14 days involved.

In other words,

WHY?!

[Garek]

Well, KSP can "run on a server". The question is, what kind of server? KSP runs on Linux, so you shouldn't run into problems with the OS in general. The problem is that KSP is fairly demanding on RAM/processor time and it's a desktop application, not some kind of WebApp you could throw into a Tomcat. Of course there are rentable servers that can handle it, but I don't think you want to a) obtain one set it up and c) pay the rent (that kind of server isn't cheap, especially because you can't rent it for a weak or two, but at least a month if not more). I would suggest asking someone you know who can run his/her computer for the required time without getting into trouble to help you out, that will probably be both less complicated and cheaper. I mean, I would do it, but I don't trust my PC to handle KSP "in the background" and I need it to do stuff.

[Kerbart]

(...) I want to see my ship accelerate until its fuel tank are empty to test its capability and to see if this vehicle can truly go interstellar distance not just on maths and paper, yes I know there is no other star system available right now.

(...)In other words, WHY?!

I like whacky projects and encourage people to go for the most crazy things, but here I have to agree with Epthelyn...

• It's all a computer simulation and part failure is not (yet?) implemented in the game. If you can can escape planetary SOI you can get as far as you want, provided you have the fuel (which you do). There's no reason to assume not, unless you run into debris (in interstellar space?) or the kraken and neither really has to do with your ship
  
• We know that relativity (be it general or special) has not been implemented in the game. So the question can I break the (for the game rather arbritary) speed of light can beforehand answered with "yes" (and it's been done already I think)
  
• No matter what it's a simulation so it's always "on paper"
  

Now let's look at the more practical hurdles... Let's say you are aiming for the speed of light, and let's say that somehow you manage to get a full 1g out of your ion engines (which would be amazing). With c = 300,000 km/s and 1 g being 0.0098 km/s² you can see the first problem... it will take about 30,581,039 seconds to reach that speed (again, by virtue of absence of relativistic effects). That is 8500 hours or nearly a year (minus a handful of days). And unless you intend to impact with the crater the size of the solar system you will have to slow down as well; another year. That's two years of non stop acceleration/deceleration, and you will travel about 1 light year in those two years, which by interstellar standards is nothing; you will need at least an additional 2-3 years of travel to visit nearby stars.

Of course in the Kerbal universe you could imagine things are a lot closer. But still...

[kiwi1960]

I actually DO have a server in my home, its running win7 and its pretty slow.... dual core 1.6Ghz.... but hey, I get it to answer my phone, that stays on 24/7 ....

[Technical Ben]

Wait. You have a dual core 1.6Ghz that can talk to people and answer your phone? Wow!

[FITorion]

I have 3 computers at my place that stay on 24/7... They even have battery back ups so they'll stay on through a reasonably short power outage.

Keep your computer on. Run KSP in windowed mode. Minimize it and continue doing whatever you want on the computer while it runs in the background. Smack anyone who says this will break the computer up side the head.

[Psychoholic]

I have 3 computers at my place that stay on 24/7... They even have battery back ups so they'll stay on through a reasonably short power outage.

Same here. But i'll bet the difference is that we don't live under somebody else's roof that makes odd rules to follow.

[Arran]

Servers dont differ much from hardware as the common desktop PC, most common mistake of most..

Biggest difference of professional servers compared to Desktop PC's is redundance, dustfree enviroment, and backup power supplies in case of sortages..

But some nutty gamers have their PC's on a level build that can compete or even are better build as Professional Servers, and i seen compagnies run Servers that where of lesser quality as a wel build gaming rig.

Just make sure there is sufficient cooling, and that the PC doest stand in a dusty enviroment, and is connected onto a fusebox, with a working termal protection, and you should be save to run it 24/7..

Only reason to hire a Server in a datacentre i could think of, is bandwidth, for heavy duty server application for example a Arma sever that could hold 64+ players for example..

But for your example, a server hiring would just be a waste of money.. And that money you would spend to hire it, you easely could then donate to whoever pays the bill as compensation for the electricity, what will be much lower as the cost of hiring a server

[SRV Ron]

KSP is nowhere near as demanding as a typical FPS game. Fact is, I used to let a computer run for days generating a single mandelbrots long before the days of the now more powerful PCs. One individual as a test, ran an Amiga 40 days straight to generate one picture in an extremely math intensive magnification.

Such calculations take far less time, minutes instead of months.

Save the server rental time,Find an inexpensive computer, load KSP on it. You can turn the settings down. Let it run for the several days and see what happens.

[samstarman5]

Well this thread took a weird turn. First we were discussing the merits of running KSP constantly on a separate machine and then the 60's hit me. And I was born in the 70's. Now I have an overpowering desire to take a rocket to Woodstock.

Dedicating a machine for KSP sounds like a worthwhile task. Squad and the many modders have only scratched its potential as far as I am concerned, and you might just discover some new mod ideas yourself when you won't have to worry about that itch to take Ezio or Sam Fisher on a new adventure. Just make sure you watch your budget. A broke game player is a dull game player. I am feeling rather dull myself not being able to hop into the Eve Universe.

[Aghanim]

I didn't plan to decelerate any soon, and SM-FFR afterburner fueled by kethane converted xenon can get to 1 g, if only I have KSP on my linux computer, it have 6 GB ram, currently I play KSP on my laptop and it drive the memory consumption to 96%

[Pds314]

Computers DO NOT cause damage to themselves simply by being left on. I am a software engineering major, I know quite a few computer engineers, I know basic physics and common sense, there is no way for a computer to be damaged by being left on if it is properly cooled (as any computer you didn't build yourself would be). In fact, the most common source of software-damage to a computer is using it actively for purposes of installing software from the internet. (AKA malware/viruses)

As for power, laptops running at full blast consume about 50 watts on average. (may be more for 15.6" and larger laptops costing at least $1100 and containing dedicated graphics, but any laptop will consume under 90-120 watts, because these are the common size adapters used to power them.

In fact, my rather beefy laptop (i7-4700MQ, 3 GB GDDR5 770M graphics, 16 GB of RAM) used only 35 watts during KSP idling with a large spinning SSTO space-plane at 4x physical time warp.

So, assuming my laptop is at least as much of a pig as yours, which is a near-certainty, you use 35 watts for running KSP at really high settings and some browsers and various diagnostic tools in and Win8.

So you probably use less than a Kilowatt hour per day. 10 cents a day.

You could run KSP for a week and a half before you consumed $1 worth of electricity.

Tell them that.

Seriously, for that matter, show them this post. Computers don't need to rest after periods of 18 hours, they need to rest after periods of 18 seconds.

Hibernate uses precisely no power, it saves the data to your hard drive, you could remove the battery and hibernate would still work.

Standby/sleep uses only a tiny amount of power, I have a pc at home which has a battery life of 6 minutes due to manufacturing issues, its battery life numbers in hours when in sleep/standby mode. It therefore uses less than one watt during sleep.

In fact, servers are basically the same as any other PC, and they are often left idle for years to no ill effect.

The only way computer components typically fail from overuse is over-heating, Room temperature is about 21 Celcius (70 Fahrenheit), Computers typically "blow up" (not an actual term anyone but you uses) at 95, 100, or 105 Celcius inside.

To be safe, I don't recommend allowing the PC to reach 90, but this shouldn't be a problem. Most computers operate at around 55-70 C under intense load. Processors typically have hardware installed to prevent the processor from reaching the point at which it will fail.

Keep in mind that 100 C is not the same as 100 F, 100 C is 212 F, If your computer is badly overheating, the processor would be able to boil water before it typically breaks.

One very useful tool is Piriform Speccy, it is a free program which monitors the system temperature and such. You/your parents can download it on the computer and it will tell you how hot (among other things) various parts of your PC are.

My computer got to 46 Celcius during the run, it is now, 25 minutes of running afterward, 47 Celcius. Basically, it will never get anywhere within sight of 100 C because it is bleeding off heat into your house. (don't worry, it is equivalent to half an incandescent or two florescent light-bulbs worth of heat.)

In terms of energy, you consume (at least) 2,000 Food calories (2,000,000 regular calories) of energy in a day.

One calorie heats up a gram (which is one milliliter or cubic centimeter, perhaps 20 or 30 drops) of water by 1 degree Celcius. (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit)

One calorie is 4.184 Joules.

One joule is one Watt used in one second.

So basically, you burn about 9000 kilowatt seconds in a day in food.

or 2.5 Kilowatt hours.

Of course, for you, food needs to be in the form of complicated things like veggies and hamburgers and bread, for a computer, anything that generates electricity works.

But still, a laptop generates neglegible heat, does no damage to itself, will not "blow up," from being on, and will only cost a few cents to be left on for a day.

Another comparison:

Cars use a ridiculous amount of power, even leaving an average 30-MPG highway car running on the highway for an hour uses about 272,000,000 Joules.

leaving it at the same RPM for 1 second still uses 73,300 joules.

this is equivalent to what your laptop uses in about 35 minutes.

So your car is using over 2100 times more power than your laptop.

A quick trip to your friend's house 5 miles away will cost you 1/6th of a gallon of gas, which is about 22,666,666 joules.

Your laptop would have to run KSP continuously for over a solid week to consume that much energy.

Not to mention, if you ever plan on coming back to your house, you are gonna spend another week worth of power.

TL;DR: You can't damage a normal computer by leaving it on and the heat, electricity and pollution are negligible. I speak as a software engineering major with background in computer hardware and software.

[Pds314]

Wait? 1 G out of ion engines? impossible. They weigh 0.25 tonnes and only provide 500 Newtons of thrust.

The engine itself has a 0.2 TWR on Kerbin, 1 G would be impossible.

[Pds314]

Oh, also, speaking as an expert on radiation (well, expert by your parent's standards):

Cellphone radiation is thermal-band, e.g. heat. The only way it can harm someone is by melting them.

A cellphone-shaped piece of wood at room-temperature emits 2/3rds as much radiation as a cell-phone mid-call.

A computer isn't damaged by magnets. A hard-drive can be damaged, but only under extreme circumstances. A CRT monitor (a giant box) can be discolored by magnets, but permanent damage would be unlikely to say the least.

In general, you can set a hard-drive magnet near a laptop to no effect at all.

A laptop emits only thermal radiation, heat, as well. And 90% of said radiation is simply due to it being a big thing at room temperature.

By comparison, a human being emits many, many times the radiation of either.

[Kasuha]

Computers DO NOT cause damage to themselves simply by being left on.

I don't agree with that statement.

Everything is aging. If you put heat stress on it, the aging goes faster. Small flaws and material imperfections initially negligible become bigger and may eventually make your computer inoperable. Air molecules diffuse into integrated circuits and oxidize them. The more delicate the technology, the sooner it will happen. The more stress you put on it, the sooner it will happen as well.

There are computers designed to run continuously. They are either designed for server rooms and constant supervision, or are seriously underclocked and contain no moving parts. Normal personal computers are better switched off when not used.

[Aghanim]

Wait? 1 G out of ion engines? impossible. They weigh 0.25 tonnes and only provide 500 Newtons of thrust.

The engine itself has a 0.2 TWR on Kerbin, 1 G would be impossible.

Its not an ion engine, its SM-FFR, http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/25203-SM-Fission-Fragment-Rocket

I don't agree with that statement.

Everything is aging. If you put heat stress on it, the aging goes faster. Small flaws and material imperfections initially negligible become bigger and may eventually make your computer inoperable. Air molecules diffuse into integrated circuits and oxidize them. The more delicate the technology, the sooner it will happen. The more stress you put on it, the sooner it will happen as well.

There are computers designed to run continuously. They are either designed for server rooms and constant supervision, or are seriously underclocked and contain no moving parts. Normal personal computers are better switched off when not used.

And for me that implies.....better cooling? Submerged PC? My school uses normal PC for its resources server

Computers DO NOT cause damage to themselves simply by being left on. I am a software engineering major, I know quite a few computer engineers, I know basic physics and common sense, there is no way for a computer to be damaged by being left on if it is properly cooled (as any computer you didn't build yourself would be). In fact, the most common source of software-damage to a computer is using it actively for purposes of installing software from the internet. (AKA malware/viruses)

As for power, laptops running at full blast consume about 50 watts on average. (may be more for 15.6" and larger laptops costing at least $1100 and containing dedicated graphics, but any laptop will consume under 90-120 watts, because these are the common size adapters used to power them.

In fact, my rather beefy laptop (i7-4700MQ, 3 GB GDDR5 770M graphics, 16 GB of RAM) used only 35 watts during KSP idling with a large spinning SSTO space-plane at 4x physical time warp.

So, assuming my laptop is at least as much of a pig as yours, which is a near-certainty, you use 35 watts for running KSP at really high settings and some browsers and various diagnostic tools in and Win8.

So you probably use less than a Kilowatt hour per day. 10 cents a day.

You could run KSP for a week and a half before you consumed $1 worth of electricity.

Tell them that.

Seriously, for that matter, show them this post. Computers don't need to rest after periods of 18 hours, they need to rest after periods of 18 seconds.

Hibernate uses precisely no power, it saves the data to your hard drive, you could remove the battery and hibernate would still work.

Standby/sleep uses only a tiny amount of power, I have a pc at home which has a battery life of 6 minutes due to manufacturing issues, its battery life numbers in hours when in sleep/standby mode. It therefore uses less than one watt during sleep.

In fact, servers are basically the same as any other PC, and they are often left idle for years to no ill effect.

The only way computer components typically fail from overuse is over-heating, Room temperature is about 21 Celcius (70 Fahrenheit), Computers typically "blow up" (not an actual term anyone but you uses) at 95, 100, or 105 Celcius inside.

To be safe, I don't recommend allowing the PC to reach 90, but this shouldn't be a problem. Most computers operate at around 55-70 C under intense load. Processors typically have hardware installed to prevent the processor from reaching the point at which it will fail.

Keep in mind that 100 C is not the same as 100 F, 100 C is 212 F, If your computer is badly overheating, the processor would be able to boil water before it typically breaks.

One very useful tool is Piriform Speccy, it is a free program which monitors the system temperature and such. You/your parents can download it on the computer and it will tell you how hot (among other things) various parts of your PC are.

My computer got to 46 Celcius during the run, it is now, 25 minutes of running afterward, 47 Celcius. Basically, it will never get anywhere within sight of 100 C because it is bleeding off heat into your house. (don't worry, it is equivalent to half an incandescent or two florescent light-bulbs worth of heat.)

In terms of energy, you consume (at least) 2,000 Food calories (2,000,000 regular calories) of energy in a day.

One calorie heats up a gram (which is one milliliter or cubic centimeter, perhaps 20 or 30 drops) of water by 1 degree Celcius. (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit)

One calorie is 4.184 Joules.

One joule is one Watt used in one second.

So basically, you burn about 9000 kilowatt seconds in a day in food.

or 2.5 Kilowatt hours.

Of course, for you, food needs to be in the form of complicated things like veggies and hamburgers and bread, for a computer, anything that generates electricity works.

But still, a laptop generates neglegible heat, does no damage to itself, will not "blow up," from being on, and will only cost a few cents to be left on for a day.

Another comparison:

Cars use a ridiculous amount of power, even leaving an average 30-MPG highway car running on the highway for an hour uses about 272,000,000 Joules.

leaving it at the same RPM for 1 second still uses 73,300 joules.

this is equivalent to what your laptop uses in about 35 minutes.

So your car is using over 2100 times more power than your laptop.

A quick trip to your friend's house 5 miles away will cost you 1/6th of a gallon of gas, which is about 22,666,666 joules.

Your laptop would have to run KSP continuously for over a solid week to consume that much energy.

Not to mention, if you ever plan on coming back to your house, you are gonna spend another week worth of power.

TL;DR: You can't damage a normal computer by leaving it on and the heat, electricity and pollution are negligible. I speak as a software engineering major with background in computer hardware and software.

Finally someone comes up with a really nice proof of why computers doesn't blow up.... Of course currently I'm playing KSP on a laptop, I still need to find a way to cool a 90 deg C rig

Its sad that they didn't sell Kill a watt in my country, do you have an idea to make it from scratch?

Oh, also, speaking as an expert on radiation (well, expert by your parent's standards):

Cellphone radiation is thermal-band, e.g. heat. The only way it can harm someone is by melting them.

A cellphone-shaped piece of wood at room-temperature emits 2/3rds as much radiation as a cell-phone mid-call.

A computer isn't damaged by magnets. A hard-drive can be damaged, but only under extreme circumstances. A CRT monitor (a giant box) can be discolored by magnets, but permanent damage would be unlikely to say the least.

In general, you can set a hard-drive magnet near a laptop to no effect at all.

A laptop emits only thermal radiation, heat, as well. And 90% of said radiation is simply due to it being a big thing at room temperature.

By comparison, a human being emits many, many times the radiation of either.

Its really sad that I live in a country where everyone take any health stuff like that radiation completely without stopping for a moment that it is might be wrong... My grandpa believe in a brochure that say cellphone could cook egg, my friend believe in using laptop while it is charging will irradiate you and make cancer, my grandma believe that putting cellphone in a pocket will cause paralysis and standing near microwave is bad, my family thinks that blackberry have more radiation then other phones, there are a lot of ads in TV that supposedly claimed to protect you from that radiation

Edited October 3, 2013 by Aghanim

[magnemoe]

I don't agree with that statement.

Everything is aging. If you put heat stress on it, the aging goes faster. Small flaws and material imperfections initially negligible become bigger and may eventually make your computer inoperable. Air molecules diffuse into integrated circuits and oxidize them. The more delicate the technology, the sooner it will happen. The more stress you put on it, the sooner it will happen as well.

There are computers designed to run continuously. They are either designed for server rooms and constant supervision, or are seriously underclocked and contain no moving parts. Normal personal computers are better switched off when not used.

Any personal computer of an reasonable build can be run continuous for years, has done this with a lot of them, in most offices I have been people don't bother to turn off their computers, they just let them go into sleep mode unless some programs keep them awake.

This does not cause any issues.

Main difference with servers is that they are designed to be able to reliable run at full peak for years, focus on reliable as they can keep running if a fan fails, even disks and power supplies are redundant. No servers are not supervised closely unless they are all owned by the company running an large data center, they supervise them to catch issues so they can come back and running quickly so they don't lose computing capacity.

Regarding life of computers, yes it some wear of chips however they easy last for decades, fans are the parts who breaks most as they are cheap and has moving parts. Now if the cpu or graphic card fan stop the pc shuts down, 10 years ago the cpu could be so hot it got destroyed but this don't happen anymore.

Main benefit of switching off the computer is to flush the memory. for saving power sleep mode works just as well.