Status: Server Live!

If you are reading this I have migrated the survival Minecraft server to a new host based in Germany, the normal IP still applys and I have updated the DNS to point to the new server now.

Moving Status Notes:

1. Live Map will not work at present as it requires its own massive setup as its quite a custom and time consuming.
2. Creative will not be working at present, down on the priority list, Survival first.
3. Need to re-setup backups & all my custom scripts
4. The website will show the server as offline when its not as the web-hosting company has not yet opened the correct IP/port to ping the server (Ticket is open).
5. As the live map isn’t yet setup it’s trying to generate map tiles as you explore, I’ll leave this on for now and do a full render when I have the full web server live.

Why move?

• Mojang/Microsoft chose to destroy performance going forwards from 1.13+ for hosting a server, we were at the limits of what our hardware could support maxing everything out
• I needed to find a way to speed up our backups, they were taking 3+ hours some days, and some days would take 5 hours which would destroy TPS as they were taking up all the CPU, so moving to a better CPU & SSD instead of HDD should solve this
• I wanted to improve startup and shutdown times, as the startup had somehow crawled to 10+ minutes on the HDD, with this new SSD its about 1 and a half minutes, so i’m able to push updates and resolve things faster.
• When we were getting 40+ online the server was starting to crawl top a dying TPS, I wanted something more beefy to see if we can resolve this
• Chunks were loading too slow, clicking chests, buttons etc were too slow, I again put this down to read/write speeds for the HDD, moving to an NVMe SSD should be snappier, your redstone speed may change on things
• I want to see if I can increase the render distance + add more mobs again, I have bumped the render distance to 4 from 3 right now and I will need to monitor as we go how far we can push it to.
• I’m going to keep hold of the old host, for my own sanity and piece of mind in-case anything goes wrong
• I’m always keeping an eye out for the best price to hardware dedicated server, the USA/Canada offer nothing even close to the specs of this new German machine.
• A stroll undiagnosed lag spikes for everyone online, I’m at the point now where it’s a plugin evasing me, something with the os or it is just the network, will find out with the new host.
• 1.14 introduced 4x the amount of data being sent between client and server, which is utterly terrible for everyone, no benefits at all, so I needed s bigger pipe, 1gb instead of 100mb.

Downsides

• Overseas people (USA/Canada) will physically be further away from a central European server than the Canadian server, I’m aware this is the majority of the player base (I do have Analytics), but this is why I had a long test period with a duplicate of the server and a poll vote at the end of the test period to make a decision if ping was going to be too high, which was mostly positive (bar some nasty angry PvP peolpe)
  Do not panic if your Ping shoots from 20 to 120, this is still full bars of network in tablist! You may lose out on being closer to the server location but the servers hardware now does things faster to compensate.
  I have also enabled a massive bump in network compression, this uses more CPU but we have it to spare now, so traffic between server -> client should be compressed better.

Key information about the old & new server can be found by reading my testing thread I put up (now closed):

https://piratemc.com/topic/testing-needed-help-me-test-a-copy-of-the-server-on-a-new-host-now-aug-2019/

How the poll ended:

Interactive to see who voted for what:

https://stats.piratemc.com/polls/

Live Log

Notification to warn that I am starting the process to move today, I’m keeping the comments closed until I have the time to write up a FAQ.

1. Got bent over and paid for this new host (Someone please pass the ice)
2. Backups complete, whitelist on.
3. Coping plugins and worlds over (3.5 hours~)
4. 12:43 GMT: Files copied, having to manually copy the things I haven’t added to my copy script
5. Moving over Analytics database..
6. 13:10 GMT Moving over Bungee server..
7. Doubling the ram for the bungee server as we have so much of it now, yeet!
8. 14:01 Changed the DNS to the new German host. mc.piratemc.com & updated MOTD to say were moving today (itll say no fallback server instead of the whitelist message right now)
9. 14:26 increased the compression for overseas guests on the bungee server
10. Booted Bungee+ Survival and all seems to be working, doing a big check over now.
11. Increased main survival render distance to 4 chunks from 3 (Lower yours in YOUR client if you have bad internet)
12. Bumped the main survival ram from 8gb to 10gb (maximum you can have a Minecraft server at without java playing up)
13. Changed a bunch of settings in my wrapper scripts
14. 15:42 gmt Sorting out some map files (the map wont be live as I need to make a web server for it, but preparing the plugin, the map will also need to be re-rendered once its live)
15. Some staff & players have been whitelisted and testing perfectly fine, i’m doing as many checks as I can so I don’t have to keep rebooting the server on you before I open the whitelist.
16. 16:52 gmt MASSIVE battle with the live map, utterly mammoth task, I got half of it prepared but there will not be a live map until I can keep at this.
17. I have removed the whitelist for now to get people on, be aware I will need to reboot if I need to make changes.