So I’ve been playing Icarus with the wife and the optimization is hot garbage. Wife is hosting and pulling 10 fps with a Nvidia 3070TI
We enjoy the game so I start doing research. Turns out once you’ve played enough the database on the host just gets too big and chokes out the CPU threads since it can’t use more than 2 cores.
Answer is to migrate your world to a sepf hosted dedicated server. Say no more.
So now I got an excuse (wife approved) to setup a computer as a server and keep it running. I have an old HP SFF i5 16GB RAM with an SSD I’ve reimagined a few times for a home server.
Flashed it with Debian and setup the Icarus server in docker. Runs like a champ.
Bonus points. I hooked up a wattage meter and it idles at 1~2 watts!
I used to run an old gaming computer as a home server and it felt like $30 a month in electricity.
Now I can start throwing more stuff on there once I figure out backup for the game world incase I bork it.
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That idle power consumption doesn’t seem right. That’s less than a Raspberry Pi.
No that’s real, Raspi is even lower. My Lenovo Tiny were idling around 6W without the additional SSD.
RasPi isn’t actually very efficient for what it is.
Yeah, it sounds more plausible like it’s amperes
That would make it way too high at anywhere from 100W to 400W depending on where in the world they are.
Still more plausible than 1W
Not really, most SFF PCs top out below 70W at absolute maximum, 100W-400W at idle is improbable.
For reference, mine uses 7W on average running my home automation and some other things, when it’s actually idling it’s well below that.
Have you thought about running proxmox rather than Debian? I found it to be useful for managing/tracking/backups of containers.
It’s worth noting that Proxmox uses Debian. It’s essentially a collection of Debian packages, and you can install Proxmox on top of an existing Debian system: https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Install_Proxmox_VE_on_Debian_13_Trixie
Proxmox lacks a Docker UI though, which is annoying. One of the reasons I’m using Unraid at home is because it supports KVM, LXC, and Docker, all in the same UI. (LXC is a plugin rather than being available out-of-the-box, but it works very well)
(and no, Proxmox’s new OCI container support isn’t it - that just converts the container to LXC and doesn’t handle upgrades)
Proxmox with community scripts LXCs is crazy
I tried Proxmox but found it way overkill for home use. I run ~50 Docker containers and I love Docker for its ease of use. Proxmox is an order of magnitude more complicated.
Hehe tbh I only run 5 😅 I found it useful when I had to diagnose some cpu hogging off one of the containers and the ease of backups. Even though have not needed it yet.
I eventually intend to start some funny stuff I wanted a full OS for.
If I shift my end goal to run in a container then that would make more sense.
I initially went for Debian because I had a deadline for us to get back to gaming together.
I’ve seen loads of people use proxmax. As a windows admin I wanted a OS as a stepping stone.
I run Brazzite on my gaming rig and mint on my daily driver laptop now. Getting there.
Honestly I left proxmox/virtualization OSes a while back for simple RHEL. I have Docker for most everything and the few things I need full virt for the features Cockpit provides are more than enough. If I ever get back into clustering I’ll look at proxmox again.
Totally fair. I also started with Debian for a Minecraft server, at the request of my partner. I might try out Icarus, is it cross platform?
If you want a webui for the debian server that gives you logs, services, ssh terminal and more then I can recommend checking out Cockpit
https://cockpit-project.org/If you decide you want to you can install KVM/Qemu on the debian host to get into full virtualization that way. The webui can be used to configure and manage the VMs too with https://github.com/cockpit-project/cockpit-machines
edit: Cockpit also has a Docker manager, though I feel it isn’t full featured yet. I mostly used it to stop and start dockers from my phone.
https://github.com/chrisjbawden/cockpit-dockermanager
Now I can start throwing more stuff on there once I figure out backup for the game world incase I bork it.
Step 1. Find out where the docker image you run saves the volumes
F.e. https://github.com/mornedhels/icarus-server saves here:
Volumes
Volume Description
/home/icarus/drive_c/icarus Server config files and saves
/opt/icarus Game files (steam download path)Step 2. Find a backup tool you like, f.e. https://docs.borgui.com/
Thanks for mentioning the game, saved it to my wishlist and hope to grab it for some co-op gaming come autumn. :D