Minecraft server on raspberry pi cluster

Question

Can i run a minecraft server on a cluster of 4 or 8 raspberry pis (model B+), and use all core and ram for the minecraft server?

Answer 1

With some reservations, the answer is probably "No".

That is not to say that you can't make a cluster of raspberry pis (because you can), and not to say that you can't run minecraft on such a cluster (because you can), but rather that currently there is no implementation of a minecraft server that would actually benefit from such a setup. That is - the performance wouldn't increase.

What minecraft needs is relatively few cores that run on very high speed and a lot of common memory.

I run a minecraft server on hardware built for an htpc. Such a setup can probably be comparable in pricing to an 8 node raspberry pi-cluster, and work a lot better for this usecase.

• Dmitry Grigoryev: +1. From what I remember, Minecraft has a single thread active most of the time. It will benefit rather significantly form a second CPU core (so the game is not interrupted when the garbage collector runs), but you'll see practically no benefit from extra CPUs. Needless to say, garbage collector is not something that can be offloaded to another cluster node.