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[Experiment Has Ended] Looking for Foundry VTT owners who would like to help me test Foundry VTT hosting

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JochenL

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I am looking for community members who are Foundry VTT owners and who would like to help me test Foundry VTT hosting.

I want to gauge how many instances can be hosted on one node, how much storage space is needed, and what the hosting costs are.
You don't need to pay anything but you need to bring a Foundry VTT license.

This should run at least until the end of May.
The file quota is 4 GB at the moment.
We are running Foundry 0.7.9.

Please send me a PM so I can set up an instance for you.
 

Toasty

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I'm struggling a bit to understand what you are trying to accomplish.

I've got a Foundry VTT license, so I can help. But I'm not sure what you are asking from us.

Do you just want us to setup a Foundry VTT instance? Or, are you expecting us to then play games with that instance?

Are you just trying to see how many instances of Foundry VTT can be installed on a host, or are you trying to determine how many simultaneous games can be run on a host without impacting performance?

The way Foundry VTT is designed is as a "thick client"; most of the code is javascript running in the player's browser. Only a small part, the shared database and a little synchronization and data cleansing code, is running on the server. So a relatively low-powered server can run several Foundry VTT instances simultaneously. And the number of clients should not appreciably increase the workload on the server; the work is distributed and is performed mostly locally on the player's browsers.

In the case of running Foundry VTT locally, you are generally using an Electron wrapper, and are running both the Foundry VTT server and client on the same system. That definitely eats up CPU (my laptop fan starts really getting loud). But most of that load is from the client and Electron, not the server.

In addition, the load on the server is affected by whether you are using it as an A/V Relay server as well. Foundry VTT supports WebRTC, and using that can affect performance, and subsequently the number of concurrent instances of Foundry VTT that can be run on a server.

So, it is important to understand what the scope of the experiment is.

1. Do you want us to just setup an instance? Don't need to run a game, just setup the instance.
2. Do you want us to use this to run games? (If it is only available until end of May, these will have to be one-shots; I wouldn't want to switch to it temporarily for my campaign, it's too much work.)
3. Do you want people to run games concurrently? Then we need to setup people and times to run the games. And players will need to understand an experiment is underway, and performance may become poor during the game.
4. Do you want to have A/V integration enabled in Foundry VTT, or simply use Discord for A/V?
5. What is the performance criteria? Max CPU utilization? Performance lag in sending updates to clients?

Setting up an instance to actually run a game can be a lot of work. You've got to upload characters, scenes, items, and journal entries, as well as various assets such as pictures, battlemaps, and audio. And you have to realize this system is going to go away in a few months.

Another direction to consider is to contact Atropos (the developer for Foundry VTT) and ask him if he happens to have a test harness available that would stress your system and multiple instances. He might even be willing to provide you with test Foundry VTT licenses for temporary use. Couldn't hurt, and might save you a bunch of headache.
 

JochenL

CL Byte Sprite
Staff member
Adamantium WoA
Wizard of Story
Wizard of Combat
Gamer Lifestyle
Borderland Explorer
Or, are you expecting us to then play games with that instance?
This one! :)

Are you just trying to see how many instances of Foundry VTT can be installed on a host, or are you trying to determine how many simultaneous games can be run on a host without impacting performance?
The latter one.

1. Do you want us to just setup an instance? Don't need to run a game, just setup the instance.
2. Do you want us to use this to run games? (If it is only available until end of May, these will have to be one-shots; I wouldn't want to switch to it temporarily for my campaign, it's too much work.)
3. Do you want people to run games concurrently? Then we need to setup people and times to run the games. And players will need to understand an experiment is underway, and performance may become poor during the game.
4. Do you want to have A/V integration enabled in Foundry VTT, or simply use Discord for A/V?
5. What is the performance criteria? Max CPU utilization? Performance lag in sending updates to clients?
1. The instance will already be there, you just need to add your worlds and systems.
2. Yes, please use it at games. One-Shots would be a nice start.
3. Concurrent games would be great but not required right now. I just want to see initial load and depending on the data I want to plan further.
4. I am using A/V via Discord. What are people using normally? I am not sure. on Roll20 WebRTC seemed unstable.
5. On the server-side I am looking at CPU and memory utilization. On the client-side I would like to hear about any problems/lags.

Another direction to consider is to contact Atropos (the developer for Foundry VTT) and ask him if he happens to have a test harness available that would stress your system and multiple instances. He might even be willing to provide you with test Foundry VTT licenses for temporary use. Couldn't hurt, and might save you a bunch of headache.
Good idea, thanks!
 

Toasty

Member
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Wizard of Story
Ok, thanks.

By the way, for you info, I am currently running a single instance of Foundry VTT on AWS using a t3.micro instance type, and I use WebRTC for A/V integration. Performance is great with 5 players, no lag, even using WebRTC for A/V (and we are all using video). This is running Amazon Linux and Apache as reverse proxy with SSL, using Node 12 and Foundry VTT v0.7.9.

Note that running the Discord client and a Foundry VTT session in my browser on my laptop taxes it very heavily; my fan is constantly running. These are both heavy clients. So I tend to shy away from using Discord at the same time as Foundry VTT client.
 

JochenL

CL Byte Sprite
Staff member
Adamantium WoA
Wizard of Story
Wizard of Combat
Gamer Lifestyle
Borderland Explorer
I am running all instances on a Kubernetes cluster behind an NGINX ingress. The current four instances are forced on a tiny B2s machine with 2 vCPUs and 4 GB RAM. CPU utilization for this node is at 11% and memory utilization at 33%. Average and maximum do not differ greatly.

I want to experiment with dynamic scaling and need some baseline data before that.

Why all this? If that is feasible and people are interested this could become a perk for Platinum Patrons/Wizards of Adventure.
 

JochenL

CL Byte Sprite
Staff member
Adamantium WoA
Wizard of Story
Wizard of Combat
Gamer Lifestyle
Borderland Explorer
We have collected the necessary data and decided not to offer this as a perk for Platinum patrons as the interest is too low and the cost too high; it does not scale at the moment.

Would you please secure your data? Let me know if you depend on it at the moment or if you are OK with shutting it down.

I am planning to switch off all instances mid to end of July.
 
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