Mumble – Open source, low latency, high quality voice chat software
I used to run a gaming server(s) for about four years, we peaked at about 3500 registered users, with 200 concurrent users.... We used Mumble in the community before I came along, we ran Mumble, after I came along, I took over the server and hosted it on a 1 core, 512mb memory linux server.... never went above 2% cpu and... I forget, probably 150MB memory usage with no restriction on quality (users can transmit CD quality audio)... this worked great, I set it up in about 10 minutes with little experience at the time, and the mumble server ran for years without issue until someone dictionary attacked the password.<p>Big advantages:<p>1. Free<p>2. Very low resource requrements, even for hundreds of users. Probably runs great on a google micro-f1 (Free forever) instance<p>3. Crystal clear audio<p>4. Lots of in-game plugins, such as positional audio in game (Battlefield: Bad Company 2, you could hear your teammates talking as they came up the stairs behind you, etc)<p>5. Cert based identity management. Used private key auth to verify you were you; no other user could sign in and impersonate you. Certified users had a big yellow C next to their name.<p>Probably the biggest thing for me, is that there was never, ever an audio glitch where the computer was not able to send/receive audio. We regularly run in to audio problems in Meet/Hangouts where audio does not work properly.<p>When I looked in to online gaming a couple of years ago I was stunned to see that everyone had moved to Discord, I didn't see the advantage of "upgrading" to something with a web client, but I suppose there's less friction to using a web client, even if mumble is a very easy install on Windows.