Hardware Refresh: What We Upgraded and Why
New nodes, faster storage, more headroom. A full breakdown of what went into the rack this quarter.
New nodes, faster storage, more headroom. A full breakdown of what went into the rack this quarter.
Every few months we sit down and look at where our hardware is showing its age. Not just raw benchmarks — actual production behaviour under load. Minecraft servers in particular are brutal on single-threaded CPU performance, and they're not shy about hammering storage I/O either, especially with chunk generation and world saves happening constantly in the background.
This quarter's refresh was the most significant one we've done since we started. Here's what changed and the reasoning behind each decision.
The previous generation nodes were running Intel Xeon Scalable processors. Fine chips, but Minecraft's tick loop is single-threaded and the per-core performance ceiling was starting to bite us on heavily loaded servers. We've moved the new nodes to AMD EPYC 9454P processors. The improvement in single-core boost clocks is immediately visible in TPS stability on loaded Paper servers. Chunk generation times dropped noticeably in our internal benchmarks.
The old nodes had a mix of SATA SSDs and some legacy spinning rust that we'd been meaning to retire for longer than we'd like to admit. The new nodes run entirely on NVMe — specifically Samsung PM9A3 U.2 drives in a RAID configuration. Sequential read speeds are in the 6,500 MB/s range. World saves that were taking 800ms on the old hardware are completing in under 200ms. That's the kind of improvement that directly reduces lag spikes during autosave intervals.
We also upgraded the physical uplinks on the new nodes from 10GbE to 25GbE. For most individual game servers this headroom won't matter day-to-day, but it gives us significantly more capacity per node before we hit any network-level saturation, and it means the mitigation infrastructure has more room to work during volumetric attacks.
| Component | Previous | Current |
|---|---|---|
| CPU | Intel Xeon Scalable | AMD EPYC 9454P |
| Storage | Mixed SATA SSD / HDD | NVMe (Samsung PM9A3) |
| Network | 10GbE | 25GbE |
Existing customers on older nodes are being migrated on a rolling basis with zero downtime. If your server has already moved, you may have noticed the performance improvement — we've had a few support tickets come in that were just people asking why their server felt faster, which is a good problem to have.