A look at the server...

[SgtSpike]

Here's a screenshot from the server performance monitor, just in case any of you were curious about what I look at to gauge bottlenecking, etc.

CPU is definitely the bottleneck after this update - the average of 49.5% indicates a good deal of cap-hitting on the dual-core processor with a (mostly) single-threaded server app. Hopefully, Notch adds in more significant multithreading in a later release.

RAM could also use a bump though (hopefully it'll be here tonight). It'll be interesting to see if having more memory available will help the lag issues at all. It's definitely utilizing all the ram I give it at this point though...

 

[hometoast]

What kind of ram do you need?

 

[SgtSpike]

Right now, DDR2 4GB sticks. I have 2x2GB and 1x4GB with another 1x4GB on the way (probably tonight), and that'll max out the slots available. That'll give a total of 12GB, and two more 4GB sticks would bring us up to 16GB, which is the max the motherboard will allow.

 

[SgtSpike]

Welll... the server ate up the ram in about the same amount of time it took to install it!

 

[the_actual_God]

I imagine that it would be extremely easy for Notch to implement multi-threading.

There are several fronts in Minecraft to do this, and they probably require a lot of thought and programming.

But there's also the fact that the world logic is calculated in areas. Example: I have a far away base under a lake (in before /chestprotect mod), an area no one ever seems to enter. When I get back on a day later and look at the furnaces, they are still working on the same stack of smooth stone. That is because no one was there to trigger the world logic calculation for that area.

Well, I don't know how exactly these areas are managed/separated, but to have the calculation of separate world areas done in separate threads is a no-brainer idea for this. And maybe someone can even come up with a mod that allows to run several servers on one machine that share one map.

 

[SgtSpike]

I imagine that it would be extremely easy for Notch to implement multi-threading.

There are several fronts in Minecraft to do this, and they probably require a lot of thought and programming.

But there's also the fact that the world logic is calculated in areas. Example: I have a far away base under a lake (in before /chestprotect mod), an area no one ever seems to enter. When I get back on a day later and look at the furnaces, they are still working on the same stack of smooth stone. That is because no one was there to trigger the world logic calculation for that area.

Well, I don't know how exactly these areas are managed/separated, but to have the calculation of separate world areas done in separate threads is a no-brainer idea for this. And maybe someone can even come up with a mod that allows to run several servers on one machine that share one map.

Good points - that does make it sound easy! Hopefully he hasn't written off multithreading entirely then, even with his notes on the todo list.

He did mention in the last changelog that much more optimization is needed for SMP to run without lag roll, so hopefully that means some optimization will be on the way soon!

 

[hometoast]

Yeah, it might sound simple to enable multi threading in a program. But remember, this is already a large program and multi threading is NOT easy to do just righ.t

 

[Socrates271]

Yeah for sure. It may not needed when he's finished optimizing code.

 

[dothedru22]

Ditch log me in and vnc. Just use remote desktop or team viewer. We used logmein in some industrial pc installations for some data retrieving work and it's a resource hog, slow, and not very reliable.

 

[SgtSpike]

Resource hog? Really? I'll have to pay closer attention...

I might use remote desktop, but was worried about opening that port to outsiders.

 

[Socrates271]

Teamviewer is great. Try it out.

 

[hometoast]

I'd take a hard look at running it on a linux machine as well. Myself and I'm sure others in the community can help. The amount of linux-y stuff you'd have to do to get a MC server running on it is minimal.