I'm looking to buy a 'real' server for axtime, and I'm also wanting it to run off the 12V battery.

I have a friend who is knowledgeable in such things insisting that I get something with ECC, but it doubles the cost of the server compared to just buying a NUC. It's also an Atom, which has much less single-threaded performance compared to new CPUs. So that brings up a few questions.

1. Have any of you had issues with servers crashing randomly? I have, and I used to chalk it up to bad power and the Windows Tax, also cheap, old machines. Probably a little of all three.
2. How much CPU power is actually needed? It seems my single core Celeron 900 from 6 years ago can do it fine while running Linux, but struggle greatly while running Windows. According to CPU Boss these CPUs have the same single threaded performance as the ECC Atom. My 5 year old i5 is a boss at handling RM.
3. Is RM actually multi-threaded? Being a Node.js app I was assuming not, which means single threaded performance matters more than number of cores.

Thanks everybody!

Error correcting ram? Way overkill for RM IMO.

I've been using the same dog old Dell D830 laptop from 2007/08 for 3 years now as my RM "server" and it handles it very well. The secret sauce? Slapped in a small cheap SSD and I run no anti-virus software.
Check out these amazing specs!!!
Core2 Duo @2.2oGHz
2GB ram
128GB SSD
win7 64bit
I should slap in another 2GB stick as chrome usually consumes most of the available ram, but again it's not causing problems so meh.
This laptop plus a 17" mac are my 2 main T/S machines. I'll often have my ipad and my personal macbook connected as well. I used this same laptop back when we were doing the public wifi live timing which meant 30+ devices were also connecting to the "server".
The only crashing I've ever had was when there was a very odd and obscure bug in the code that Chris tracked down last year. Once he updated the code, we've been solid ever since.
At our 1st event this season we had 3 cars on course with a 20s release rate and observed no performance issues. My timing people didn't like that pace so we bumped it down to 30s releases after lunch :-)
A great free tool for digging into how much resources diff apps use is https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/processexplorer.aspx
I believe both node.js and mongodb are not multi-threaded, but I'd have to go research.

Those are killer specs! :D

That's a quality machine right there, much better than our budget machines. Our budget machines have some issues, that's for sure.

I agree, ECC is total overkill. My club is very concerned with losing data, machines dying mid event and so forth. A side effect of Axware crashing, and the machines being the kind of machines they were.

I'll let you know what I get, I'm pulling hard for an embedded server in our timing trailer, but we'll see where that goes.

Cullen

If I had a trailer I'd totally go for something like a NUC as well! I'd think anything with an i5, 4GB ram, and SSD would be sweet!