Speed up your game downloads & other services with a LanCache Server!

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Hello all,

I just wanted to share my recent experience with setting up LanCache.

So recently I started to investigate a Steam Cache server. However after some issues with getting it setup I did some more investigating and came across LanCache. LanCache in short will allow you to cache content from various different services onto your NAS (if supported) or a dedicated PC. The great thing about this is those large pesky files such as games can be cached locally after the first download, meaning that if you have another PC on you LAN that needs those files or you need to re-install, your PC can grab this from your LanCache as opposed to a full re-download.

LanCache at the point of writing this supports caching content from the following services.

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This container is designed to support any game that uses HTTP and also supports HTTP range requests (used by Origin). This should make it suitable for:

• Steam (Valve)
• Origin (EA Games)
• Riot Games (League of Legends)
• Battle.net (Hearthstone, Starcraft 2, Overwatch)
• Frontier Launchpad (Elite Dangerous, Planet Coaster)
• Uplay (Ubisoft)
• Windows Updates

This is the best container to use for all game caching and should be used for Steam in preference to the lancachenet/steamcache and lancachenet/generic containers.

Source: https://lancache.net/docs/containers/monolithic/

There is also another full list of currently supported services expanded upon HERE

Fortunately to run a LanCache you do not need to have a super PC and you could likely run this on an existing PC or another machine laying around your house. However like with everything PC, your performance of the LanCache will vary depending on the hardware used.

As my LanCache will not be utilised by many machines I can use the specification guidelines for an up to 20 client build as per the below recommendations.

 

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Low capacity

 

“We have 20 ppl and somewhere to put them we need a name for our LAN. Also known as my housemates all game, lets level up.”

• 8 CPU core
• 16GB DDR3
• 2TB HDD + 512GB SSD LVM Cache.
• Without the LVM Cache the system will push around 300-400Mbps, with the SSD Cache pushing around 800-900Mbps

Source: https://lancache.net/docs/hardware/

 

As for my build I am running the following which suffices just fine as a point of reference.

CPU: AMD Ryzen 2700X @ 4.1Ghz all core.

CPU Cooler: Wraith Spire

Motherboard: Asus ROG I-Gaming X570 (ITX)

RAM: 16GB Corsair Vengeance 3200Mhz DDR4 CL16

Storage 1: Kingston A2000 256GB M.2 (For Windows OS)

Storage 2: Sandisk Plus 1TB SSD (Used for system caching to improve LanCache output performance)

Storage 3: Toshiba X300 4TB HDD (Used for LanCache)

GPU: GeForce GTX 1660 MSI Armour OC

PSU: Be Quiet Power 11 600 Watt

Case: Thermaltake Core V1

As per the above recommended specs from LanCache, if you have a spare SSD you can dedicate (or partially dedicate)towards system caching to help with through put, then do it. I have a 1TB SSD. I will be giving LanCache a 500GB partition to use, the other 500GB or so partition is used for my Plex transcoding temp file.

LanCache runs on Linux. For my build I am running Linux (Ubuntu) on VM which works wonders. I fortunately found an excellent guide to help me get LanCache setup. Considering I am not a Linux buff, it helped me hugely. It also gives a nice overview of LanCache and its benefits. So get your LanCache up and running by watching the below

Credit to Youtuber "Battle(non)sense" for this great video.

**Note** While the video recommends Linux Mint, when I attempted the setup, I can across an issue where the Docker configuration files would delete themselves for no reason. I re-attempted exactly the same setup procedure just fine however when using Ubuntu, so I would possibly recommend trying that over Mint. At the time of this article Ubuntu 20.04 LTS is working well with LanCache.

LanCache is also highly configurable to your needs, once you are happy with the initial setup you may want to check out some of the more advanced configurations you can make.

https://lancache.net/docs/advanced/tuning-cache/

https://lancache.net/docs/advanced/config-hash/

Hopefully the above gets your nerd juices flowing.

Have fun !

E

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