Recommended Server Specifications for Asset Server/Cache Server

Hi there!

Same question 5 years later.

What are the recommended Server Specifications and the minimum Server specifications for Cache server / assets server ?

Thanx

This was the first link that showed up when I was googling for the same thing, and there was no real answer. I think the answer is "it depends." I work on a half dozen large unity projects (hundreds of MB+) and am often switching mobile platforms. The asset server I am using is a 10 year old Dell XPS gaming rig with an i7 at 2.8GHz - 4 physical cores (8 hyperthreaded) and 9 gig of tri channel memory. I keep my unity cache on a 7200 rpm hard drive - I don't want to wear out an SSD for this. So, all this being said, the cache server is really just a fancy web server, and I think the most important thing is to make sure your machine can handle quite a bit of disk traffic in bursts and that it's connected with a fast ethernet (hard wired 1000BT or faster) to your development environment. I've seen teams use non-local (out of the building) unity cache servers and the results were typically disappointing. To give you an idea of speed - to do a "switch platform" on a new project, where I'm rebuilding all assets, it usually takes between 20 and 30 minutes. When I'm just downloading from the cache server I discussed above, it's about 5 minutes.

The asset server can run multi-threaded, so it works well in a large team environment, but when there are a lot of people pulling from it, performance does degrade. (more than 3-4?) I think typically the machine runs into I/O bottlenecks at that point - it's shuffling a lot of data from disk to network and vice versa. If you're going to support more than a couple of folks, I recommend a beefy machine.

I have a new Raspberry Pi 4 that I just purchased for a NAS project, and I'm about to try running the cache server on that. I definitely wouldn't try running a cache server off of a 3 - they don't have the horsepower or the connectivity they need. The new Raspberry Pi 4 has a lot more memory, a 1000BT built-in ethernet connection, and USB3 ports for connecting external drives to. I'm currently using it for a time capsule replacement. I bet it would scream as a unity cache server - it's entirely possible that it's faster than my 10 year old dell gaming rig.

Jef