> As a hobbyist part of me wants the VM abstracted completely (which may not be realistic). I want to say “here’s my game server process, it needs this much cpu/mem/network per unit, and I need 100 processes” and not really care about the underlying VM(s), at least until later. The closest thing I’ve found to this is AWS fargate.

You can’t have on demand usage with no noisy neighbours without managing the underlying VMs.

I used hathora [0] at my previous job, (they’ve expanded since and I’m not sure how much this applies anymore) - they had a CLI tool which took a dockerfile and a folder and built a container and you could run it anywhere globally after that. Their client SDK contained a “get lowest latency location” that you could call on startup to use. It was super neat, but quite expensive!

[0] https://hathora.dev/gaming

Ok, the idea was that what we really want is "ease of use" and "cost effective".

In game development (at least the gamedev I did) we didn't really want to care about managing fleets or versions, we just wanted to publish a build and then request that same build to run in a region.

So, the way I originally designed Accelbytes managed gameservers was that we treat docker containers as the distribution platform (if it runs in Docker it'll have all the bundled dependencies after all) and then you just submit that to us. We reconcile the docker image into a baked VM image on the popular cloud providers and you pay per minute that they're actively used. The reason to do it this way is that cloud providers are really flexible with the size of their machines.

So, the next issue, cost!

If we're using extremely expensive cloud VMs, then the cloud providers can undercut us by offering managed gameservers; worse, people don't compare devex of those things (though it's important to me when I was at AB); so we need to offer things at basically a neutral cost. It has to be the same price (or, ideally cheaper) to use Accelbyte's managed gameservers over trying to do it yourself on a cloud provider.. That way we guarantee the cloud providers don't undercut us: they wouldn't cannabalise their own margins on a base product like VMs to offer them below market rate.

So, we turn to bare-metal. We can build a fleet of globally managed servers, we can even rent them to begin with. By making it our problem to get good costs (because that pays for development), we are forced to make good decisions about CapEx vs OpEx, and it becomes "our DNA" to actually run servers, something most companies don't want to think about- but cloud costs are exorbitant and you need specialists to run them (I am one of those).

The bursty nature of games, seems like it fits best in a cloud, but you'll often find that naturally games don't like to ship next to each other, and the first weeks are the "worst" weeks in terms of capacity. If you have a live service game that sustains it's own numbers: that's a rarity, and in those cases it's even easier to plan capacity.

But if you build for a single burst, and you're a neutral third-party: you have basically built for every burst, and the more people who use you, the more profit you can make on the same hardware. -- and the more we buy, the better volume discounts we get, and the better we get at running things, etc;etc;etc.

Anyway, in order to make effective use of bare-metal, I wrote a gvisor clone that had some supervisor functionality, the basic gist of it was that the supervisor could export statistics of the gameserver, such as number of connections to the designated GS port (which is a reasonable default for player count) and information if it had completed loading (I only had two ways of being able to know this, one was the Agones RPC, the other was looking for a flag on disk... I was going to implement more), as well as ensuring the process is alive and lifecycling the process on death (collect up logs, crash dumps, any persistence, send it to the central backend to be processed). It was also responsible for telling the kernel to jail the process to the resources that the game-developer had requested. (So, if they asked for 2vCPU and 12G of ram, then, that's what they get).

It was also looking at NUMA awareness and CPU affinity, so, some cores would have been wasted (Unreal Engines server for example ideally likes to have 2 CPU Cores, where 1 is doing basically everything, and the other is about 20% used- theoretically you can binpack that second thread onto a CPU core, but my experience on The Division made me think that I really hate when my computer lies to me and plenty of IaaS providers have abstractions that lie.

I wrote the supervisor in Rust and it had about a 130KiB (static) memory footprint and I set myself a personal budget of 2 ticks per interval, but I left before achieving that one.

I could go into a lot of detail about it, I was really happy when I discovered that they continued my design. It didn't make me popular when I came up with it I think, they wanted something simple, and despite being developers, developing something instead of taking something off the shelf is never simple.

Also, they were really in bed with AWS. So anything that took away from AWS dominance was looked at with suspicion.

Even if that weren't the case, lead times for tasks will always increase with more utilization; see e.g. [1]: If you push a system from 80% to 95% utilization, you have to expect a ~4.75x increase in lead time for each task _on average_: (0.95/0.05) / (0.8/0.2)

Note that all except the term containing ρ in the formula are defined by your system/software/clientele, so you can drop them for a purely relative comparison.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingman%27s_formula

Edit: Or, to try to picture the issue more intuitively: If you're on a highway nearing 100% utilization, you're likely standing in a traffic jam. And if that's not (yet) strictly the case, the probabilty of a small hiccup creating one increases exponentially.

There are OS tunables, and these tunables will have some measure of impact on the overall system performance.

But the things that make high-utilization systems so bad for cycle time are inherent aspects of a queue-based system that you cannot escape through better tuning, because the issues these cause to cycle time were not due to a lack of tuning.

If you can tune a system so that what previously would have been 95% loading is instead 82% loading that will show significant performance improvements, but you'd erase all those improvements if you just allowed the system to go back up to 95% loaded.

Why wouldn't you want unit files instead of much larger init shell scripts which duplicate logic across every service?

It also enabled a ton of event driven actions which laptops/desktops/embedded devices use.

TIL. Didn't know I can get paid to maintain my PC because I have a background service that does not run as my admin user.

  [Service]
  Type=simple
  ExecStart=/usr/bin/my-service

The thing to me is that services sometimes do have cause to be more complex, or more secure, or to be better managed in various ways. Over time we might find (for ex) oh actually waiting for this other service to be up and available first helps.

And if you went to run a service in the past, you never know what you are going to get. Each service that came with (for ex) Debian was it's own thing. Many forked off from one template or a other. But often forked long ago, with their own idiosyncratic threads woven in over time. Complexity emerged, and it wasn't contained, and it crrtainly wasn't normalized complexity across services: there would be dozens of services each one requiring careful staring at an init script to understand, with slightly different operational characteristics and nuance.

I find the complaints about systemd being complex almost always look at the problem in isolation. "I just want to run my (3 line) service, but I don't want to have to learn how systemd works & manages unit: this is complex!". But it ignores the sprawl of what's implied: that everyone else was out there doing whatever, and that you stumble in blind to all manners of bespoke homegrown complexity.

Systemd offers a gradient of complexity, that begins with extremely simple (but still offering impressive management and oversight), and that lets services wade into more complexity as they need. I think it is absolutely humbling and to some people an affront to see man pages with so so so many options, that it's natural to say: I don't need this, this is complex. But given how easy it is, how much great ability to see the state of the world we get that SysV never offered, given the standard shared culture tools and means, and given the divergent evolutionary chaos of everyone muddling through init scripts themselves, systemd feels vastly more contained, learnable, useful, concise, and less complex than the nightmares of old. And it has simple starting points, as shown at the top, that you can add onto and embelish onwards as you find cause to move further along the gradient of complexity, and you can do so in a simple way.

It's also incredibly awesome how many amazing tools for limiting process access, for sandboxing and securing services systemd has. The security wins can be enormous.

> Because last time I wrote systemd units it looked like a job

Last, an LLM will be able to help you with systemd, since it is common knowledge with common practice. If you really dislike having to learn anything.

Fascinating. Last time I wrote a .service file I thought how muhc easier it was than a SysV init script.