Stress Testing a 200-Person Gaming LAN with a Custom Cache Server

Building the Ultimate Gaming Venue

• 🎯 The video details the creation of "Smash Champs," a state-of-the-art badminton club that also houses a high-performance esports and gaming venue.
• ⚡ Infrastructure includes high-speed fiber optic networking, on-site dedicated servers, and substantial power capacity to support large gaming events.

The Challenge: Network Stress Test

• ⚠️ Before the "Whale Land" event for over 200 gamers, the team needed to stress-test the installed network infrastructure.
• 💡 The primary concern was how the system would perform under heavy use, particularly with game updates consuming significant bandwidth.
• 🛠️ A custom caching server was designed to mitigate internet bandwidth limitations caused by large game updates.

Caching Server Hardware and Design

• 🚀 The caching server utilizes Kioxia CM7 Gen 5 NVME SSDs for extremely fast read speeds (14 GB/s) and high IOPS.
• 💻 A Silverstone RM23502 Mini rackmount case was chosen for its compact size and 5.25-inch bays, adapted for U.2 SSDs.
• 🧠 The system is powered by an AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D CPU on an ASRock Rack Epic 4000D4U motherboard, chosen for its PCIe Gen 5 lanes and cost-effectiveness.
• ⚡ A dual redundant ATX power supply (FSP Twins Pro) and a 25 Gbps dual-port Nvidia/Mellanox ConnectX-6 NIC were integrated.

Software and Network Configuration

• ☁️ LANCache software is the core component, storing downloaded game files locally to serve them to attendees, thus saving internet bandwidth.
• 🐧 Flatcar Container Linux is used as the minimal operating system, ideal for running Docker containers like LANCache.
• ⚙️ Configuration is managed via a text file, allowing for repeatable and easily maintainable setups.
• 💡 A workaround involving covering PCIe lanes with tape was used to force the NIC to operate at 8x lanes, achieving approximately 16 GB/s.

Testing and Results

• ✅ The caching server successfully handled simultaneous game downloads from multiple users, with download speeds far exceeding the total internet connection capacity.
• 📊 The caching server showed minimal impact on individual user download speeds, demonstrating the effectiveness of the system.
• 📈 The CPU usage on the gaming PCs became the bottleneck, indicating the network infrastructure had significant headroom for the planned event.