Noisy

Nice work. I can see a lot of skill and effort has gone into this. FWIW the value I see in automating the install is that it reduces the effort to deploy to the cloud (e.g. AWS EC2) such that it doesn't matter when you burn the instance (including disks) when you're done. To that end if you could get it fully turn key that would be pretty nice. It also means that if this is the primary use case, then supporting updates and the like becomes moot and you can focus your effort on improving the basic service. Re automating the entry of the server account credentials, xdotool might be the go e.g.: xdotool search --sync --name "DCS Login" windowactivate xdotool type "$username" xdotool key Tab xdotool type "$password" xdotool key Return I've just finished a powershell implementation for the automated install of DCS Server intended for the user data parameter of AWS EC2 instances https://github.com/jimvella/ready-room-selfhosted. Your Linux approach would shave off some cost though by avoiding the windows license, assuming that you don't need a more performant instance to offset the performance overhead of linux and wine - I'm looking forwards to what you find out re performance.

Cheers. It’s still going. it’s proven over time to be a great way for my squadron to run missions. Other folks have found value in it as well, so it’s turned out so far to be sustainable.

Cheers, maybe. I've been thinking about discontinuing it. I've been hosting missions for the Flying Kiwis for about a year and it's worked well. I think we average around 15 pilots a session. But beyond that there hasn't been a lot of interest / I'm not great at advertising. The average bill I'm getting from Amazon atm is about $60/month, which isn't too bad compared against renting a physical server 24x7 (and the Flying Kiwis have graciously passed the hat around, so I'm out of pocket less than this). But if I we're my own customer I think it would be closer to $20/month ... 4 weeks * 3 sessions * 3 hours * $0.56 ~ $20. The difference is in the fixed costs, primarily hosting the webservice and the game data. The game data, which is close to 100GB these days costs a few bucks per AWS region per version per month. Because installing DCS onto SSDs is necessary for performance and SSDs are always given to you as blank disks when starting an instance, DCS basically has to be installed from scratch each time. Ordinarily it takes DCS around an hour to install itself, mainly due to the torrent download as well as having to uncompress once downloaded. Maintaining the uncompressed game data in the local datacenter, as well as just copying the map the required for the mission shortens the install to a few minutes. So starting an instance, installing DCS, and starting DCS is kept to about 10min with this approach. Although a drawback is that I need to update the game data for each datacenter each time a new DCS version comes out. Otherwise the direct costs for hosting are the instance cost (https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/on-demand/), the disk cost (negligible), and the outbound data cost. Outbound data is a function of number of players and mission size, but doing the accounting would need more work / hard to apply in a pre-paid model - so I'm hoping the the figures I've chosen will cover this, I guess I'll find out with time. Anyway I still had fun just putting all this together. Any issues or suggestions please hit me up here or discord. Edit: I've written up a guide for DIY AWS hosting as well if you would rather take that approach https://ready-room.net/blog/2020-12-01-host-a-dcs-server-in-aws/

https://ready-room.net/ is my hobby project. Upload a mission and have it run in AWS Sydney or AWS N Virginia for ~0.50US / hr.

Based on experience disks have been the bottle neck rather than cpu or memory, so I would consider upgrading to an SSD. Perhaps 16GB of memory according to the specs, but usually when I check the memory the server is using it sticks to around 8G / it won't use surplus memory anyway. Otherwise I think the best advice is to just run with what you have, and peer into task manager to see what resource you're running short on.

I have the same issue on AWS. The best approach I could come up with was to have some gui automation to essentially type this in when starting DCS.

Yes please. Like bswift I've had some success with windows gui automation, but would much prefer a command line interface.

Just to expand on 316HornetBall's response, I've recently put together a guide to running DCS on AWS https://ready-room.net/blog/2020-12-01-host-a-dcs-server-in-aws/

No worries. I prefer the simplicity of a single timer, but here it is DCS_Stopwatch_with_os_time.zip

DCS_Stopwatch.zip This one just has the one timer. Based off of srs's overlay.

Bit of a long shot, but If cpu and memory are ok, it might be worth taking a look at disk performance. I run my missions these days in the cloud, and early on when I used network storage I noticed pauses that we're correlated with spikes in disk activity. Throwing ram at the problem didn't help, the server seems to continue to access the disks irrespective of how much ram there is (I tried 128gb). I resolved by switching to local ssd storage instead of the network storage.

Hi Folks, Please share how you measure your server's performance. The best approach I have atm is to graph the network traffic over time and look for gaps. Ideally I would prefer a direct objective measure that I could query from the server e.g. server frames. Maybe its already in the WebGui? I don't know. Anyway I would very much appreciate your insight. Cheers.

You're welcome to try my hourly service hosted from aws Frankfurt https://ready-room.net

Yes, you can contact me at https://discord.gg/hURRqGP

No worries, I'm not the best communicator. Yes, I suppose it is a server hosting deal. Its intended for hosting a specific mission for a few hours at a time though rather than something that is always running. This is because I'm in turn using aws ec2 for the hosting at on demand pricing. If you did need a 24x7 server, I'd recommend not using ready-room.net since you can get better pricing direct from Amazon if you can commit to a 1 to 3 year period (and you wouldn't need the automation of ready-room.net since you would only set it up once). Each time a mission is run, its on a separately provisioned virtual machine (aws ec2). You pay for what you use: you choose the size of the vm, how many hours you want it for and where and when you want it run. When its starts, DCS Standalone server is installed and updated, optionally an SRS server, and the uploaded mission. Its not too difficult to do this yourself directly with Amazon, but it is tedious. A good guide on how to do this on azure is https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/azure/host-a-dcs-server-in-azure/m-p/334031 The most significant cost for me to host a mission is the hourly ec2 cost, so my pricing model is to ask for a margin over what I need to pay Amazon for that, and hopefully this covers the rest of the expenses and I wont make a loss. The cheapest ec2 I'm offering is 't3.medium' for 0.18US/hr. But it's quite expensive to process small transactions (I'm using stripe.com, but I think paypal would be similar), so I'm using a credit system where you can buy $5 (USD) at a time. Update: 20-2-15 The least expensive is now an 'i3.large' for 0.56US/hr. I've since learned that DCS is quite sensitive to disk latency, so for better performance, types without local SSDs or enough ram for a ramdisk have been removed.

Hi Folks, I'd like to share my project https://ready-room.net You can upload a mission file and have it run in a local Amazon datacenter. I've been running missions this way for the last few months to reduce the average ping for my local squadron. Being able to just run for a few hours at a time rather than 24x7, its inexpensive. Cheers, Noisy