Minecraft server with 0.02% CPU utilisation

Ok, well it maybe be a bit "clickbait"-ish ... but the information below is certainly factual. The scenario we wanted to confirm was the steady state operation of the Vorteil unikernel. So as we showed in a video last night, we compiled Minecraft onto Vorteil which allows anyone to run it ... well ... anywhere.

So the scenario is as follow:

• Deployed a Minecraft server with 1 CPU and 1024 MB of memory, running on a Vorteil kernel into Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Within GCP we had to configure the VM with a g1-small profile (1 vCPU and 1.7 GB memory ... so way more than what we need).

NOTE: I called it "dev" ... I know ...

• Started the VM in GCP and let it run for 2 days - without anyone connecting to it and letting it run at steady state waiting for a connection.
• We also deployed a Minecraft server onto a CentOS Google Cloud machine image. We gave it the minimum configurable size, again within GCP we configured it with a g1-small profile (1 vCPU and 1.7 GB memory)

• Again, started the VM and let it run for the 2 days.

So the results are in!

First let's look at CentOS. The graphs below show CentOS running:

There are spikes in usage throughout the day, but it normally averages out at 3.07%.

As expected, Disk operations are minimal, but there is still activity on the VM regardless. Can probably be attributed to the OS doing "stuff" (there are actual technical details on the operating system swap, interrupts etc ... but way out of scope for this article)

Now let's look at Vorteil:

It averages at 0.02% CPU utilisation! This is even better than what any of us expected! Looking at the disk operations:

Let's overlay each of the 2 metrics, first CPU:

... and now Disk operations:

I'll just leave this here ... regarding storage utilisation:

The Vorteil image is ACTUALLY only 458MB in size ... but the smallest disk which can be provisioned with GCP is 1 GB ... we can fit about 20 instances of the Vorteil application into a single CentOS instance!