haroldgsm
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OP
Grumpy Old Sysadmin
- Joined:
- May 2024
- Posts:
- 329
- From:
- Ohio, US
Been running SteamCMD containers for six months now. Valheim, CS2, a modded Terraria instance. The automation part works. Wake up, image pulls, server restarts, friends complain about wiped maps. Standard Tuesday.
The bloat is what kills you. These images balloon to 8GB, 12GB. Back when we ran bare metal, a game server was maybe 2GB with mods. Kids these days think a 20GB pull is normal. Mark my words, you'll hit storage limits on a low-end box fast.
Tried multi-stage builds. Tried Alpine. SteamCMD wants glibc, wants Ubuntu, wants your disk and your soul. The layers stack up like technical debt.
Has anyone actually slimmed these down without breaking Workshop downloads? Or is this just the tax we pay for convenience.
IPv4, IRC, and irssi — fight me
kenji3
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- Joined:
- Jul 2024
- Posts:
- 138
- From:
- Osaka, JP
I found the SteamCMD base image from OVHcloud to be reasonably sized. Around 4GB after my Valheim setup. I run it in Singapore region, latency to Tokyo is acceptable for my group.
Have you considered volume mounts for the game files instead of baking them into the image? That helped my storage usage significantly.
conbini > datacenter snacks
haroldgsm
Member
OP
Grumpy Old Sysadmin
- Joined:
- May 2024
- Posts:
- 329
- From:
- Ohio, US
Volume mounts for the game files instead of baking them into the image
Tried that. Workshop items still land in the container layer because SteamCMD's pathing is stubborn. You end up with a 6GB image plus a 4GB anonymous volume that Docker refuses to clean up. My "docker system prune" deleted a wedding photo backup last month. I am not making this up.
The OVHcloud base image is decent though. 4GB is livable. Their Singapore routing to US West is worse than you'd think, but that's not their fault.
IPv4, IRC, and irssi — fight me
larryjeong
Member
- Joined:
- Jun 2024
- Posts:
- 179
- From:
- Texas, US
Rootless podman is cool and all but have you tried just... not updating? My cs2 server has been on the same image since march. Friends whine about skins not loading. I whine about 40GB docker pulls. We are not the same
$3/year. 128MB RAM. Pure happiness.
kenji3
Member
- Joined:
- Jul 2024
- Posts:
- 138
- From:
- Osaka, JP
Workshop items still land in the container layer
I mount /home/steam/Steam/steamapps/workshop explicitly and set STEAMAPPID in env. The downloads go to the bind mount, not the overlay. Maybe different base image behavior?
conbini > datacenter snacks
haroldgsm
Member
OP
Grumpy Old Sysadmin
- Joined:
- May 2024
- Posts:
- 329
- From:
- Ohio, US
I mount /home/steam/Steam/steamapps/workshop explicitly
Which base image? The cm2network/steamcmd one or the OVHcloud? I tried both and got different path behaviors. The Steam client itself moves things around depending on whether you use +workshop_download_item or let the game handle it. Valheim particularly loves to dump stuff in ~/.config or ~/.local/share and good luck predicting which.
Twenty years of this and I still grep for file handles at 2am.
IPv4, IRC, and irssi — fight me
