@JKELLER4000 "It would also cause confusion when players ask what the render distance is and they get possibly up to 8 different results in a day."

I am not familiar with command blocks . are they able to use variables? can you have the command that tells the render distance to be dynamic also?

well ok the reason why i want the higher render distance is

http://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Spawn#Despawning

"A mob will immediately despawn if there is no player within 128 blocks of it. "

so if we set chunk render distance to 128/16= 8 all mobs that are no longer active will despawn! and then we will not ever reach the mob cap!

right now we have render distance of 6? (6*16)^2 or a total of 9260 sqaure meters.

pi*128^2= 51445 square meters.

therefor only 9/51 *100= 17% of mobs are elegiable for despawn so after ~5 rounds of mob spawning and despaneing no new mobs will spawn because we will have hit the mob cap :(

(I used bad math because mobs do not despawn if they are withing 32 blocks of a person so the math comes out a bit worse than the math i have shown if we remove 2 chunks from render distance :( )

http://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Spawn#Mob_cap

I guess if it is possible to raise the mob cap. if we are not going to allow mobs to despawn. then raising the cap would allow for a high mob count and a more time equally number of mobs. instead of just the 15 mins after a restart?

if we are not running into ram or internet problems or hard drive bottle necks. then having millions of mobs stored off map not moving will not cause any cpu usage as they are not moving nor loaded!

Render distance is stored in the server.propeties and cannot be changed by command blocks.

It would still be a confusing concept to have the server give a different answer for what the render distance is up to 8 times per day.

While we are not running low on RAM, we are 99% of the time maxing out our CPU and recently I just hit 88% usage on our SSD (causing me to split apart the RAID to get more space).

The biggest contributor to lag right after chunk generation is entities (especially the ones with AI and logic). I purposely set the render distance low to enforce the mob cap.

It's either a low render distance and mob cap or a player limit of 20 players. You can't have both 50-60 players and a render distance of 8-10, it's just not possible with the current performance of Minecraft and our server. I would like to upgrade to the "7700k @ 5.0ghz, NVMe SSD" once they come out of beta, but for now, I'm not sure it would be a good idea to rais the render distance/mob cap.