Ahoy! Day 2 of Optimizations.

I guess there are a few pitfalls when using a bleeding edge server, there have been a few console errors, and we had a crash last night even though we had ample resources available.

So I have decided to re-look at all our main config files that run the core of the mechanics to see if we can suck as much performance out as possible.

Hopefully you will not notice any difference in gameplay, I won’t go over all specifics as I want to see if you actually notice any difference, opposed to reading what has changed and assuming there will be issues without actually playing, plus I can tell if anyone’s talking crap because; as I’m the only one that knows exactly what has changed (Nothing PVP related! getting that in before someone thinks about making this thread off topic, I know you pirates are trouble makers).

Remember if you are seeing redstone issues, this will most probably be because we are on very poor performance and TPS drops with this god awful 1.9.2, once TPS drops below 20, that means everything runs slower, this induces redstone.

TLDR, tell me what changed… hoppers changed, but still should work the same.

Hoppers changed, the majority of our issues when moving to 1.9.2 are because there is an issue with the hopper code in the minecraft server software, this is up to mojang to sort out, and then for spigot to optimize. I have taken the first step which was putting us on a bleeding edge server software that allows me to control hoppers.

Before I explain what I changed you have to understand that the server runs on ticks. 20 ticks is 1 second of server time, which makes 1 tick 0.05 seconds (50ms) Hoppers by default do 2 things, they run a check every 8 ticks and they do a transfer every 8 ticks, so every 8 ticks every active hopper is checked and it will move 1 item. That’s a hell of a lot of checks, the more hoppers the more checks. Now I found out I have the option to set the amount of items sent per transfer/check tick rate, so what I am trialling; is making hoppers check & transfer 3 times slower but moving 3 times more items. Hopefully this should give us a bit of breathing room with this insane hopper lag we are having. This will break redstone clocks dependant on hopper time.

So theoretically hoppers should still work the same, they work slower but send more items (fires every 24 ticks), but in the process breaking hopper clocks. This isn’t a permanent solution, but with the amount of lag caused by peoples insane sized farms, its a no brainier to try this out, its untested and we are testing this live, so if you see any other issues that impact gameplay then please do address it in this thread sensibly, anyone that replies with just anger will be removed.

Now lets answer this, because its inevitable someone will star crying.

“But I cant use my machine! This is unfair boohoo“

1. This is temporary until Mojang sort it out, cross your fingers for 1.9.3 fixing hoppers & entity lag issues (85% of all resources are entity, 40% of that is hoppers alone!)
2. BUT I WANT TO USE MY REDSTONE CLOCK MACHINE! And I want to allow everyone to enjoy the server without lag, this is why I moved us to a dedicated server after all! (I hope it bloody works)

What else?

• You may see more monsters, tell me about the monsters.
• I changed a lot of small core mechanics, grass may grow a tiny bit slower..Shouldn’t break any gameplay?
• Ocelots shouldn’t sit on chests, we were wasting processing power letting every chest check for ocelots all the time.. I don’t think this is a necessary gameplay mechanic to waste CPU is it? Tell me otherwise if it is.
• I turned on an explosions optimizer, I have no idea what this does, its suppose to optimize explosions by using a different algorithm, hopefully the developer didn’t change how they are registered in game, please check to make sure claims can not be damaged, if so report to me asap and ill reward you.
• Turned on queueing light updates, so there is a que system for lighting changes instead of it just taking resources willy nilly, see how much of a difference this makes, it might mean if were running low on resources it takes time for lighting to catch up.
• A bunch of other miscellaneous things I don’t think anyone will notice, do you see issues with something else all of a sudden?