Thanks crafty for trying to help me with the random disapearnce of my room.

@NutjobBob I saw that, it sent me an email and I've been debating whether I should find a monument on the server, singleplayer, or even both and do it. I know the environment would change but I highly doubt crashing the server itself for a report is anywhere close to a remote possibility. I'm just glad that its getting attention like that. Thank you for linking that squid spawning "bug," the mod that reviewed the report left that as the only related bug on the list that I had made.

@Shapedsundew9 thank you for the support. Watch it and possibly once I get some kind of crash report up it will become votable again.

@FlashFood Spent 10 minutes on a singleplayer world hovering above a monument and couldn't recreate this - guardians stayed within the hostile mob cap. I wonder if it's something to do with the combination of many players and low render distance.
I did at one point have 123 squid spawn though which demonstrates the other bug.

I've just had an opportunity to play with this myself, do you have any idea what this distance might be? How high is causing them to despawn?

Hey Guys. Didn't realize I made the top 10 list for entities -_-

My bad.

The screenshot from Crafty above of the caves is from under my base. I didn't realize not lighting the underground up would cause any issues. I was quickly reaching 250~ entities and couldn't figure out why. Crafty suggested lighting up everything under our bases. While I don't necessarily like this idea, it may be the only solution until Mojang gets their stuff together.

I dunno if I'm the only one who doesn't light everything up, but this is in part because I'm using a shader so I can just carry a torch in my off hand to see where I'm going. Another reason is to make my area a huge mob grinder/arena and to make it as dangerous as possible. The other reason is to keep x-rayers and cheaters from finding me easily.

I may just try to find a way to trap the areas enough to keep mob counts low. I'll see how it goes. If not, maybe I'll cover the underground in a lot of lava.

So if others aren't lighting things up and are unaware that it is adding to the server lag like I was, then try lighting everything up.

This may not be as big of an issue when simply exploring, but when working around the same area, lighting up the underground areas around it helps. Above ground doesn't seem to be an issue since daylight burns most mobs anyway.

I'm wondering if this is actually a bug in how mob caps and/or spawns are dealt with in multiplayer. Based on a server load distance of 4 the cap for hostile mobs should be about 1,000 with 44 players (not an unreasonable number for the server).

@CraftyMyner If you're finding over 10k entities, that's absurdly high given the mob caps. Even allowing for 100 passive mobs or dropped items per player that's ridiculous. Are you able to post proof of this that could be used in a bug report? It would be useful if entities could be counted individually like in the first screenshots above. Also, is this entity problem something that you've only noticed recently, or has it been happening for a while (i.e. pre 1.9)?

If this bug is unique to multiplayer it might be that this is one of the few vanilla servers with enough people for it to be noticeable. I have still been unable to replicate the guardian spawning bug in SSP.

I know this would take a lot of effort and coordination, but wouldnt it be possible to set up a short term 3rd server with a group of players who are willing to help with producing the bug, then force a crash on that to avoid revealing any nessecary information?

Another possibility would be to run a backup then force all players to spawn then force the crash and reboot the server to the backup so people end up where they were before the backup

Idk how plausible either of those would be but theyre still ideas.

I have forced a crash and got the report with 300+ entities as requested but am struggling with how you mean i should send this privately. I have teamspeak on my phone if someone can help me set this up.

A few comments on the bug - when we have seen 900 this is a combination of guardian, squid and ink sacs i believe. We may not be able to reproduce this as I have since drained or enclosed a large amount of water round my base where the squid were spawning. Also there are three of us with bases very close so it could be a cap of 300 * 3 when we are all on.

Thank you for doing that Tez

Report's back open, be sure to shoot it a vote if you have an account!