Server Restart Frequency and its effects on Mob spawns

  1. 6 years ago

    So as everyone knows there is a bug in minecraft that effects servers with render distance less than 10 (might be 9)
    the bug keeps spawns from clearing out of the spawn radius of the player in the chunks that are unrendered as i understand it.
    either way the hostile mob cap is hit in just a few minutes and does not go back down till the next server restart,
    this makes mob farms inoperable except for directly after a restart it also makes hardmode an incredible cake walk atleast for players like myself who have been playing survival for several years
    My suggestion is simply to decrease the server restart interval so that mobs are less scarce and people with mob farms have a chance to get their farms working more often than once every 3 hours.

  2. Now that we have a better faster server and upgraded the computer per my understanding of various announcements why don't we just increase the server render distance higher to avoid this all together? It might be naive of me to think this but I have read multiple announcements to multiple upgrades. Could the server or system handle an increase to the rnder distance?

  3. Edited 6 years ago by r4iscool1

    The server could not handle an increase in the render distance without lowering the players numbers or tolerating a significant bit of more lag.
    Unfortunately CPU technology is heading in the wrong direction for our usage too, moores law has been broken and it's becoming physically impossible to stick more and more smaller transistors on a chip meaning single thread processing speed which is our bottleneck will not increase significantly until thee advent of new technologies.

    We just have to hope Mojang will finally adapt the vanilla server jar for multiprocessing or at least fix the major bugs.

  4. @R4iscool1 The server could not handle an increase in the render distance without lowering the players numbers or tolerating a significant bit of more lag.
    Unfortunately CPU technology is heading in the wrong direction for our usage too, moores law has been broken and it's becoming physically impossible to stick more and more smaller transistors on a chip meaning single thread processing speed which is our bottleneck will not increase significantly until thee advent of new technologies.

    We just have to hope Mojang will finally adapt the vanilla server jar for multiprocessing or at least fix the major bugs.

    I beg to differ: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/08/intel-i9-7980xe-launch-date-price/

    Perhaps in September the server will be an absolute behemoth.

  5. @Scrappy_Dont I beg to differ: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/08/intel-i9-7980xe-launch-date-price/

    Perhaps in September the server will be an absolute behemoth.

    i9? I'm gonna buy this for my laptop. Oh how I wonder how good will run my laptop after installing that.
    ...and 32 GB DDR4 RAM. :D

    Well shit, I better start collecting donations LOL

  6. @Scrappy_Dont I beg to differ: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/08/intel-i9-7980xe-launch-date-price/

    Perhaps in September the server will be an absolute behemoth.

    Sadly, as R4 mentioned minecraft is almost entirely single threaded and doesn't make use of multi-core processors very well. As I understand it that one would actually be a downgrade from the 5.0 ghz processor the server has atm. Crafty posted a pic of the server usage distributed across different cores a while back in this thread . You can see it's only using one core.

    Increasing the server restart frequency is really the only way to improve mob spawn rates. Even then I question if it's worth it given that any spawn rate increase from the restart is going to be lost very quickly (probably in less than a few minutes.

    I'd also like to point out that as far as mob loot is concerned this mainly effects only gunpowder and slime. Nether and end spawn rates are less effected because they have separate mob caps and most players tend to be in the overworld. In my opinion it's not too much of an issue that a couple of items are rarer than they should be.

    I do agree though that it makes hardmode a cakewalk which is a bit of an issue. Again though restarting more often would only impact this for a very short period of time.

  7. @Scrappy_Dont I beg to differ: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/08/intel-i9-7980xe-launch-date-price/

    Perhaps in September the server will be an absolute behemoth.

    That's not relevant, the vanilla Minecraft jar makes use of single thread speed, not multiprocessing capabilities. As NutjobBob says that would actually be a downgrade from our current set up, it'd have more power but we would have less usable power.

    Currently the vanilla jar only supports doing one world on each core IIRC so increasing the number of cores we have would do nothing.

    As I said earlier in the thread and your link proves it quite well, Intel and AMD for a number of technical and economic reasons have moved away from increasing single thread speed and have started serious development in the area of multicore's for use in multicore processing which is something Minecraft Vanilla jars are not capable of doing. This trend is likely to continue unless some industry changing method is invented or the advent of consumer grade quantum computing.

  8. Edited 6 years ago by CactusOwnage

    @R4iscool1 basically explained everything. Its just that Mojang doesn't bother to change the way vanilla servers work.
    While you could also switch to a Spigot server with no plugins and that stuff you will have almost no lag (most likely) with the current hardware we have, but then it wouldn't be 100% vanilla anymore.
    Personally I didn't notice a great improvement when we switched from an i7-6700k to an i7-7700k, but the 7700k isn't that extremely more powerful than the 6700k. So this is probably the best performance we can get for a while.

  9. To be completely honest, the lag has improved exceptionally over the past few days, might just be me though. I have just noticed that when I mine a block it wont reappear 3 times before I actually get it.

  10. The server will have good days and bad days as far as lag goes, it all depends who is on and what bases are loaded. Expanding the render distance would add a considerable amount of lag. It would likely cause anyone with less then a diamond pick to quit within the first few minutes of playing on the server. Its a delicate balance between the amount of players, render distance and lag. If you change one you affect all the others. Setting the render distance higher might be better for players with big mob farms, however, in the long run it will produce a lot more lag and cause players the go elsewhere.

    With each year a new cpu comes out that's better than the one before, however, with each release mojang adds more features that require more power. I remember back in 1.8 when I could get 88 players with little to no lag and render distance set to 10. Then mojang added enhanced mob collision that caused mobs to calculate collisions with all other mobs, creating an exponential amount of lag (<num of mobs>^2, 2 mobs = 4 collisions, 100 mobs = 10,000)

    I would love to be able to run a full server at render distance 15, but with current technology and vanilla performance, it's just not possible. 1.13 is suppose to focus on performance, but it's likely they will also add more features causing the net performance gain to be minimal.

    - Crafty

  11. Edited 6 years ago by AssaultSquid

    I should have been more specific about the details of how the mob cap behaves, even though the mob cap is filled within a matter of minutes the difference the restarts make is that if mobs spawn into your farm to fill the cap instead of in lots of the chunks mobs spawn into outside of render distance, than the mobs tend to respawn inside the farms more untill you leave the chunk or spawn mobs into places outside of render distance
    basically the more mobs respawn in "healthy places"-that is places inside the render distance cap, the more they have a chance to spawn there again because if mobs are in a "healthy" area during a spawn cycle and the cap is full thats one less mob that can spawn in an unhealthy area, so yes restarts have a weak effect normally. But if mobs are being killed in caves by players and in players farms then the mobs spawn in those places more. this is largely because of the 24-32 block ring around the player that mobs Dont despawn in, beyond 32 blocks mobs have a chance to despawn randomly and beyond 128 they despawn rather quickly
    mobs failing to despawn in the outer ranges is directly the cause of the bug so restarts help people trying to keep the mobs inside the 32 block radius.
    Just clarifying to help the people with mob farms and Juuuuuuuuust incase it effects Crafty's decision on restarts :3

  12. I'm so happy that we have such smart people on the server... because tbh most of this technical discussion went over my head and what I did understand was mostly just from context :P

  13. @AssaultSquid. Are you saying that mobs actually spawn in the unloaded chunks around a player?

    i was under the impression that if i half-slabbed a 11 by 11 chunk area this would mean that mobs would spawn in the area i want. Would slabbing up to 128 blocks (8 chunks) therefor improve the spawn rates by the player?

  14. @AssaultSquid I think you might be misunderstanding how the game handles the hostile mob cap and mob despawning. I'm going to try to clarify some things, @BluePlauge look away now :P

    Chunks, and how they effect hostile mob spawning can be split into 3 types, I'm using the CM render distance of 5 to show which are which:

    1. Unloaded (beyond 5 chunks away from a player)
    Mobs cannot spawn or despawn
    Mobs do not count towards the mob cap
    Mobs (and other entities) are saved though, so they will be there when the chunks are loaded again

    2. Loaded, entity processing chunks (within 3 chunks of a player)
    Mobs can spawn and despawn, as long as they're outside 24 or 32 blocks of a player
    Mobs do count towards the hostile mob cap

    3. Lazy chunks (between 3 and 5 chunks away from a player)
    Presumably to save processing power mobs (and other entities) only get processed if they're in the
    centre of a 5x5 area of chunks. This means the last two chunks loaded around a player don't process
    mobs, these are called lazy
    Mobs can spawn, but cannot despawn
    Mobs do count towards the hostile mob cap

    You can see the problem is with the lazy chunks. If a player is standing still mobs will tend to accumulate in these, and fill up the mob cap so new mobs can't spawn.
    If the render distance is higher this isn't a problem because the lazy chunks make up such small percentage of the area mobs can spawn. On CM however lazy chunks make up just over 59% of the spawnable area (I'm assuming a 2D area, you do the maths). Meaning in each spawn cycle over half the mobs spawned can't despawn and just sit there filling up the mob cap. Killing mobs a player therefore the mobs in lazy chunks to fill the cap faster, the opposite to what you've said.

    @Tez1010 It's also important to remember that the the mobs cap is shared between players. So even if you slab the lazy chunks around you the mobs will just go spawn around someone else and fill the mob cap anyway. Slabbing is probably a good idea in the nether or end though. Different dimensions have separate mobs caps and and most people tend to be in the overworld so you don't have the same problem.

  15. You are absolutely right i did misunderstand the way the chunks were loading but I think what i was observing in my mob farm is competing spawn spaces or something then because staying in the farm directly after a restart without unloading the chunk tends to keep mobs there for a certain amount of time
    I see now that the reason they arent staying indefinetly is because i am still loosing them to the mob cap though.

  16. less is moore

    you have permission to share this around and pretned u make it. not like im orginal either

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