I did some testing this weekend and found that compiling a dedicated UE4 server instead of using the UE4Editor to run listen servers is significantly faster. The spin up time for a server instance went from 12 to 14 seconds using UE4Editor to less than 2 seconds with the compiled version! It is too bad that you have to compile the UE4 engine from GitHub to be able to build dedicated server instances though (also to build for Linux).
I did some testing with Amazon AWS. Surprisingly I was able to get 3 dedicated UE4 server instances running on a t2.micro and only use 38% of CPU. Each map server took 95 MB of RAM and as I added players the RAM was only going up by around 500K per connection. The t2.micro is Amazon’s weakest server and is available in the free tier, so you can try it out for yourself at no cost. Next time I will try a larger scale test using a more powerful AWS server. Here is a screeshot of it running on a t2.micro:
This weekend I also was able to get the World Server portion of my system running on Linux using Microsoft .NET Core. This means that you can run the system on cheaper Linux servers instead of more expensive Windows servers. Thanks to @Smartay for letting me use his CentOS 7 server to try it.
This week I am finishing up the Persistent Inventory system and I should have something to share soon.