ELI5: How do servers work exactly and how do we make servers faster/more responsive?

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ELI5: How do servers work exactly and how do we make servers faster/more responsive?

Comments

  1. DMmeNiceTitties Avatar

    Servers are just computers somewhere else that are accessed remotely over an ip address. So if I have a computer at home that I add an minecraft server to and give out my ip address and port number (Read: don’t actually do this IRL unless you want to expose your ip address to strangers). Congratulations! I now have a functional server.

    Now, to make a server faster, you’d have to update your computer. Think RAM, disk space, processor, etc. Another thing to include in this would be internet speeds. Doesn’t matter how beefy your rig is, if your internet upload speed is topped off at 10 mbps, then your speed is limited by that.

  2. MoonLightsssss Avatar

    Why did I think you were talking about servers in restaurants 😭

  3. spiritual84 Avatar

    They’re just computers without monitors.

    We make them faster or more responsive like how we would with our home computers: more CPU, more RAM, better disk, better internet. Though the one difference is that for a server, internet upload speed is much more important than download speed.

  4. vxsqi Avatar

    Servers are basically computers, like your own personal one for example. I upgrade the ram, which can be ludicrously high such as 128GB. I might also want to upgrade the storage space so I can store more web files, images, databases, etc. Then, I’d want to upgrade my processor because I want the server to think faster, execute hundreds of operations at the same time since we have multiple people connecting to our website.

    But, how does the server host, or make the website visible to all of us so that we could simply search a web address from the otherside of the world? Servers are connected to their own ip address, which is then port-forwarded to a domain, basically the website address- think of it like a street name.

    For the server to run, it needs to be connected to a process or environment that will keep it “live”. You can even port-forward yourself with applications we have today such as nodejs.

  5. aperson975 Avatar

    Servers are a role/job that computers do – they just do tasks to serve others(clients). You could turn your phone, laptop, or a supercomputer into a server.

    To make servers faster, you can improve both software and hardware. Software is efficiency that the tasks are being done and hardware is getting more workers (either through upgrading hardware or adding a bunch of computers together).

  6. IntoAMuteCrypt Avatar

    A modern server is just a computer. We make servers faster/more responsive like any other computer.

    Every single server in the world is a computer sitting somewhere. You’ve got your CPU, your RAM, your storage, maybe a GPU. There’s some connection to other machines – maybe that’s the internet, maybe that’s just local machines. The real difference is just that servers run different operating systems, and different applications. They’re just normal, ordinary computers though – to the point that you can use a normal computer as a server, or a server like a normal computer if you really want. There’s some features here and there that servers have which normal computers don’t, but they’re not essential.

    The OS and applications are the big difference. Rather than spending a lot of time offering stuff like “a really nice user interface for someone sitting at the computer” or “having a web browser open” and such, just about all the resources of a server go into a specific task, and they rarely change what they’re doing. That task could be “sending and receiving emails” (a mail server), “providing access to files over the network” (a storage server), “managing a game world and synchronising player states” (a game server) or any number of other things. It might even be several at once!

    So how do you make a server faster and more responsive? Same as any other computer. Close down stuff you don’t need – a server that has to host five games and run a website and host voice calls and other stuff will be slower and less responsive than one that’s just doing one task. If all your applications depend on the CPU, upgrading that will speed stuff up. If you’re running out of RAM, adding more will speed stuff up. If you regularly need to fetch data from the storage, getting something faster will speed that up.

    Because servers use the same principles as normal desktops, upgrades to servers use the same principles too. Those extra features sometimes make “improve this part” a bit more complex, but the basic answer is still just “find a way to improve this”.