What are the requirements to run a steam server

The development of steam has started on solaris, but moved to linux and is now usually run on linux systems. Our recommendation is to run it on Debian (steam is also part of the distribution) or Redhat. It might still also work on solaris, but we have not tried it for a long time (feel free to participate and try it on solaris - we are curious about the results). Apart from that, we succeeded in running steam on macosx.

There are no specific requirements for the processor speed: as fast as possible of course. Unfortunately, the server is not that scalable to different CPU. Therefore, a large number of CPUs does not increase speed very much and does only run the different services and our mysql (possible other databases might work here, but are not tested yet - we have a quite generic SQL interface) backend would run on a different processor (it is also possible to use mysql on a different machine).

The main memory of the machine should be at least 512k for small applications. Apart from that, it depends on the use of the steam server. We recommend 1 gig minimum main memory or more.

Steam needs a new linux kernel (2.6 and above).

How many users does steam support

There are currently steam servers with quite a lot of active users (a few thousand). The number of concurrent users is unknown and can't really be determined. It depends on the usage of the steam server, which serves as a collaborative backend for different applications. For example, there is the whiteboard, which could produce quite a lof of traffic and high load on the server (a lof of people in the same room at the same time could slow down the server).