Gadgetory

waiting what seems like an eternity for games to download is annoying enough to start with but when there are multiple people in the house or office and everyone wants to grab a hot new title at the same time you can run into some serious bottlenecking so we set out to solve that problem once and for all without just spending more money on a faster internet connection and now well not quite now Jake's fixing it but soon everyone in this building will be able to download games from services like Steam at full speed and I'm gonna show you guys how after Jake fixes the machine and I tell you about Corsairs next generation strafe mark to keyboard it features a variety of Cherry MX RGB key switches and eight megabytes of on-board profile storage check it out at the link below if you've been to an organised land event recently you were probably wow by game download speeds that seem like they were from the future or something but unless it was Dreamhack 2018 the events internet speed is probably nowhere near enough to offer those kinds of speeds - even just a couple of people so how do they do it great question and one that can be both simple and complicated to answer so in short those insane speeds are thanks to the event having something called a caching server basically when a game is first downloaded on the network instead of the files just going straight to the downloaders drive like let's say this laptop that used to be here but instead I'll use this hard drive as a prop instead of them just going straight to this drive they are first saved to a separate machine and then kind of relayed to the user so then the next time someone wants to download that same game let's say to this other hard drive instead of pulling it off of steam or you play directly it'll save a ton of bandwidth to the outside Internet by grabbing it off of that same server this will help keep latency down for all of the gamers that are sharing that same connection so the concept is simple but when you get into sending up nginx DNS forwarding dealing with HTTPS and worrying about when to clear the cache the actual deployment can get pretty confusing now thankfully for us there are a ton of different solutions that mostly revolve around the same built in nginx caching solution with the most up-to-date being yeah appropriately named steam cache it's pre compiled for docker making it quick to set up and despite its name there's actually a version of it that supports steam origin Riot Games battlenet frontier Launchpad you play and even Windows Update so it's perfect for your next land or even general home use because I mean who needs epic games launch anyway right Yeah right so let's get started on exactly how it works then shall we for most people standard one gigabit networking along with a couple of along with a couple of raid zero to hard drives will be more than sufficient but come on you guys know how we do so we wanted to plan to allow every single writer here in the office to download games at the same time so that would be about one gigabyte per second of sequential read speeds now that's child's play for today's high-end nvme SSDs like this one but since we also need capacity and that's not what you're gonna get from a single opt-in drive we decided on six raid 0 480 gig SATA SSDs from corsair that we pulled out of that dual machine build rip rip in peices now it should be noted that a single drive failure here would result in a complete loss of all the data on the array but it doesn't really matter since this server is not mission-critical all it's doing is caching readily available games and updates we could easily throw a new drive in and redownload it all the other key specs of our system are at 64 gigs of DDR 4 RAM lots of RAM let's the server cache files in memory for quicker transfers and a 10 gigabit network card so remember even though we want to download from the server at one gigabit we want multiple people to be able to do that at the same time so this one needs a bigger pipe now we're using an X 540 T 2 but that's kind of older because we had it lying around they're actually cheaper options these days from a quanta and a soos so then now that we have a server primed for caching we can get back to the software side of things as I mentioned earlier steam cash comes in the form of a docker container which is kind of like a virtual machine but instead of emulating the entire operating system then with the specific software that we need on top of that docker can run specific software as if on its OS without running an entire separate OS making it a lot more efficient especially if you need to run multiple instances of the same software and we will need to do that since each different service that needs cashing steam origin battlenet etc will run in its own instance now we know all of that was a gross oversimplification so we're actually gonna link a video below with a better explanation of docker if you're into that docker can run on both Linux and Windows but the windows version has to actually virtualize linux kernel on top of Windows so we're gonna stick with Linux we went with a bun to desktop eighteen point oh four because we love reading but hurt comments from the arch and mint fanboys just kidding love you guys but don't worry the guide that we're gonna have linked below will work on pretty much any flavor of Linux that you like now our first step is to get docker up and running once you have it make sure that you run your docker commands either with sudo or by adding your user to the docker group do not run any of this as root please then for our installation we want to cache all of the services that we use on a regular basis here at the office which means that we're going to need six static IPS one for each of them since this OS has a graphical interface it's actually super easy to set up our ip's we just need to navigate to network settings and enter them wha-bam wha-bam just like that I type pretty fast now we can start each of the caching docker containers one by one and then steam cache DNS which will forward all of the URLs that need caching to our server instead of the world wide web then I mean don't worry then if something isn't on our server it won't just fail if the content isn't cached yet it will then get downloaded to the caching server and be forwarded to the downloader seamlessly cool right so theoretically then we should be good to start downloading some games right not quite so we need to set the cache IP as DNS on all the systems we want to use right okay so keep in mind that if you intend to run a solution like this long term it's a lot more elegant to set your primary DNS on your router to the IP of your caching server instead of setting up the DNS settings on a computer by computer basis don't worry any unrelated traffic will go to the usual location okay so we're ready so here's the caching server we've got our Diagnostics panel running and all that and then we've got actually a couple of test victims so first up we've got this guy one of Jake's test benches and we're just gonna do a quick sanity check make sure everything's working this is actually a 10 gig client with an intel octane drive as its boot so go ahead and hit that I want to hit it at the same time as you okay three eight two one go oh boy Brandon you're gonna have to get here on the run 23 seconds here well you got this I'm at two hundred Meg's I'm coming down at 320 Meg's a second sir you're at what - 23 to 23 to 30 - 50 oh wow 300 are you done the game yet since the win five seconds two and done go check go check it kids will be done - so we don't even have to see the actual speed wonder what the fat is disgusting okay so we peaked out at seven point two gigabit seven point two gigabit yeah from the surf show it show Brandon seven point Q so that was the peak seven point two and then it was kind of averaged around six there's another one right there dang flab it doesn't say all right for lulz I'm just gonna do pup G and see if that works oh yeah it is yes so with games like pub G where there's a lot of compression yeah you're limited by your computer so if we look at the cores of this system so this is a nine you know you don't have a huge amount of single-threaded performance so steam will only use a certain amount of cores and it won't bypass that so you'll see us and so we're capped out by our CPU right now yeah decompressing not by our surface if you see here there's two full cores that are being utilized I think it's normally three or four that it'll use man and then past that it won't use anymore to not interrupt the rest of your system right and I think it's more optimized for like four to eight core systems 16 core is a little too much for steam so it's a less impressive demo but it's definitely our best-case scenario and that means that we could have five systems yeah hitting it at this currently seven now based on what we saw there so I guess conclusion time then this may not be a solution for the everyday gamer like many people will only ever download each game play at once then delete it and never download it again and it's a lot more user friendly to just use steam zone backup feature to an as if there's something that you you know think occasionally you might want to redownload but if you have a bunch of gaming aficionados in the house or if you help run a local land gaming organization we would definitely recommend giving it a shot especially if you have an old computer lying around that's just waiting to be given a new purpose speaking of just waiting what are you waiting for try fresh books today fresh books is the small business accounting software custom-built for how you want to work it's the simple way to be more productive more organized and to get paid faster fresh books allows you to create and send professional-looking invoices in less than 30 seconds you can set up online payments with just a couple of clicks and get paid up to four days faster they've got apps for iOS and Android so you can take the entire freshbooks experience with you on the go and you can see when your client has seen your invoice to put an end to the guessing games so for your unrestricted 30-day free trial go to fresh ebooks.com slash tech tips and enter Linus tech tips in that how did you hear about us section we're gonna have that linked below so thanks for watching guys just like or like check out our other videos oh wait this is my tech quickie outro crap also get subscribed we have merch and let us know if you want to see a follow up to this video where instead of like a jank tastic like rat's nest of SSDs in the back of a regular tower yeah and Jake's water cooled test bench if you want to see us like set this up properly let get like every steam in origin game possible cashed onto it and do some cool down maybe we should do like a land center oh I do pretty this would be perfect for that yeah we might need more networking though hmm maybe I see us take it to the next level let us know in the comments below