Using a Server Vs Local

A year or two ago, using a server was needed in many cases to help you hit most releases. Now, you don’t necessarily need a server for all drops. For a lot of people, they can run from their home pc just fine for many releases.

The need for a server for many people vs using their home pc for a drop can often come down to a few different things, such as:

1. PC Specs

2. Internet Speed

3. Physical Location

4. Store/Website

5. Number of Bots and Tasks

PC Specs

Depending on the specs of your home pc, it may already be enough to run your bots comfortably. The exact specs that someone will need will vary from person to person, depending on the number of bots and tasks they plan to run.

For many people, an 8 core CPU and 16 GB of RAM, is enough for what they plan to run. For others, you may need more of either CPU or RAM depending on the bots you plan to run.

For example, Mek browser mode tasks are very CPU intensive. The more CPU cores you have, the more browser mode tasks you can run. Meanwhile request based tasks (the type of tasks most bots use for most sites) are not as CPU intensive, and don’t require a high number of CPU cores in order to run a lot of tasks and/or bots.

Bots will generally list the minimum specification needed to run the bot, but cannot necessarily tell you how many tasks to run based on your pc’s hardware. The best way to determine if you can comfortably run your bots from your home pc is to actually run a drop and monitor your task manager’s resource monitor. If your CPU and RAM usage aren’t completely maxed out, and the bot appears to be running smoothly with no lag, then it’s very possible for you to run your bots on your home pc.

If you are unsure of whether or not you would benefit from updated pc specs using a server to run your bots instead, then you can always run one drop local, and then the other drop on a server, to see if there is a major difference in number of successful checkouts.

There are many resources out there that would help you to build your own PC that would work great for botting, or you can purchase a prebuilt PC with the specs that would be good for botting. As mentioned previously, an 8 core CPU and 32 GB of RAM is a solid baseline for most people, but you can increase the number of cores to either 12 or 16 if you think you will run tons of bots and thousands of tasks on your pc, or if you want more CPU cores in order to run more browser/headless task modes.

One thing to note is the difference between vCPU and a physical CPU. A vCPU is a virtual central processing unit. A vCPU is seen as a single physical CPU core by the virtual server. If the host machine has multiple CPU cores at its disposal, then the vCPU is actually made up of a number of time slots across all of the available cores, thereby allowing multiple VMs to be hosted on a smaller number of physical cores.

Some processors may also include multithreading/hyperthreading, which can make it appear that a CPU has double the number of cores depending on the bot you are using. It basically means that one CPU core can work on two problems at the same time. It doesn’t mean that the CPU can do twice as much work. If you build your own PC, you will find that many of the modern CPU’s contain some form of this feature, while many server CPU’s do not. This is why with bots like Mek, it will suggest more browser mode tasks on local than on server if you have a CPU that supports this. If you look at your task manager or another software that let’s you look at your PC specs, you can see it there as well.

Internet Speed

In addition to good specs, you will also want good internet speed/bandwidth that are both fast and can handle the number of tasks you plan to run.

If your internet speed and bandwidth are too low, then running a lot of tasks will probably not be the best idea, as you will clog up your network. This is why it can be beneficial to run off of a server if you plan to run a lot of tasks.

There isn’t an exact speed that is recommended for botting. Anything beyond 1 Gbps isn’t really needed. Remember that bots using request modes are not downloading things you’d see when visiting a page manually such as images. Your tasks do not have to download tons of data every refresh. Generally the only reason you’d need 10 Gbps over 1 Gbps is if you were maybe running thousands and thousands of tasks, in which case it’d probably be better to spread network traffic to other servers/computers.

A minimum speed of 300 Mbps - 500 Mbps seems to work for botting. For many people, they can hit just fine on speeds ranging from 300 Mbps - 500 Mbps, on sites like Shopify, Supreme, Footsites, etc. 1 Gbps is ideal if at all possible, but nowadays, due to the speed of checkout flow for each bot being a lot slower because of antibot security on websites, it is not mandatory.

The best way to really tell if your internet speed can work well enough for botting is to actually run for a release on your home pc. Not all drops demand a fast internet connection, so keep this in mind as well.

Physical Location

The location of where your bot is running from, whether it be your home in San Francisco, or your server in Virginia, will play a role in determining your latency/ping. The shorter the distance between your computer and proxies, the lower your ping will be. If the actual distance between the computer the bot is running from and location of where your proxies are too far from each other, it will result in much higher ping.

This is something you need to consider when running local vs server. Most proxies are based in the east (Ashburn, New York). For people who live in the west, your ping will be quite high because of the distance being really far between the pc and proxy location. For more speed intensive websites, such as Supreme, it can be more beneficial to run off a server in this case, to lower the latency of your tasks.

Note that you can lower the delay of your tasks to compensate for higher pings. However, you will need to play around with the delays and find what works for you. Generally, most suggested delays assume you are running on a server located near your proxies for lowest possible latency. If you are running a delay of 3500 ms with a ping of 100 ms for example, and you have a ping of 600 ms on local, you can try running a task delay of 3000 ms to try to compensate for the difference in ping. Sometimes tasks can seem a bit slower when running this way, so keep that in mind and try it out for yourself before fully committing to it.

Store/Website

Some stores have release methods in place that do not necessarily require fast internet speeds or low latency, such as Yeezy Supply. For these types of stores, having the fastest possible bot tasks isn’t really needed, and you would not necessarily benefit from running tasks on a server in a lot of cases.

However, for sites that are more speed intensive, it may be beneficial to run tasks on a server if your home setup environment isn’t suited for fast sellout drops. Shopify you can run off of your home pc just fine, and is often advised for sites enabling proxy protection so you can run tasks from your home IP.

You don’t really need to have a server that is located right next to the store anymore. For example, you don’t need to run off of an NY server for Supreme and only VA for Shopify as an example. Sell out times are a lot slower now overall, and due to things like rate limiting on very low delays, makes it unnecessary to have your server right next to the store.

Number of Bots and Tasks

If you plan on running a ton of bots and thousands of tasks, it is helpful to split them up to not congest a network with too many requests or to use up all the resources of the computer’s hardware.

For most people, they can run 2-3 bots at a time with a few hundred tasks on their local pc just fine. However, this comes down to your computer specs and internet bandwidth. Some people will be able to run more, while others have to run less.

You will ultimately need to test the limits of your pc setup and server itself to find the optimal number of tasks and bots to run on one computer. Some bots are more resource intensive than others, so it will vary entirely from person to person depending on what they’re running.

Monitoring Computer Resources with Task Manager

During a drop, you should keep an eye on how well your computer/server is able to handle the number of bots and tasks you are running. In case you don’t know how to, a brief overview of how to access and use the task manager can be found here: