TPS is consistently terrible: Ideas to fix it?

[SengornLeopard]

The TPS sucks on SimPVP, I have friends who refuse to play on it due to the TPS. Is there any way to fix it? When (and I damng well hope) we update ti 1.17 chunks will be larger and thus cause more of a strain.

1.) Do farms cause much harm? For example pigman portal farms, what if we lowered the amount of mobs in a block so that they cram to death quicker and have less mobs pushing each other?
2.) Would a lower render distance work? This is a solution I have seen on other servers, and I do dislike small render distances quite a bit.
3.) We have many non vanilla plugins that affect gameplay. Player portals, the dastardly anty-pvplog... What about adding an item clean up plugin to delete items in the world? There could be a balance where it helps lag yet doesn't ruin farms or pvp loot.
4.) Is it caused by hardware capabilities? I know running a server can be very expensive. If better hardware would help, is there any way the community can contribute?

[sev2worlds]

fabric server with phosphor + lithium, it's that simple

[KoriJenkins]

To my knowledge Sim's lag issues are caused by a combination of outdated hardware (a CPU upgrade could give us about a 40% boost in performance according to Yuk) as well as being on Paper. Apparently moving to Fabric and adding one or two things to the server could generate 40-60% increased performance.

Cramming is only like half the problem. Hoppers are a major source, minecarts, pretty much anything involved in item storage. A plugin that deletes items was suggested recently but shot down due to the likelihood of it deleting items dropped by a player or shulkers mined by a player.

[Yukar9]

Thanks for opening this thread.

One brief thing I'd like to mention is I recommend people using /mspt instead of /tps for measuring server load, as mspt scales linearly with load. If mspt is at 50, then tps will be 20. If mspt is 100 (twice the server load) then tps will be 10. This is also why tps not dropping significantly from somebody logging doesn't necessarily mean that that person isn't causing lag. If mspt is at 10 and you login and cause mspt to go to 60, the tps will only drop by 3, but you'll be causing the same amount of lag as is required to take tps from 20 to 10.

1. Yes, farms are the primary cause of lag. Whenever we run timings at low tps, it's always a small handful of things taking up a large portion of server resources. We've seen the server at 20 tps with 20-30 people online, when nobody is running farms. As I write this, there are 29 people online and tps is at 18.

And it may not be a single person causing all the lag, it's not uncommon to see 5-10 people running farms simultaneously (counting alts.) Even if each of those players only add 10 to mspt each, they'll collectively ruin the tps.

2. A lower render distance would reduce lag. Reducing it from 10 to 8 would mean the server only loads 64% as many chunks. Of course, it wouldn't help against people building their farms entirely within that distance (or using alts to load their farms.) I'm open to this if it's something the community wants.

3. Outside of temporary incidents I'm not aware of dropped items causing significant lag. If it's shown that dropped items cause lag then that would be a possibility.

4. Not really. Our server isn't weak, the best processor on the market will give about 40-45% more performance, but for many times the current cost of the server. We've always been open to server suggestions, so if you do find a better deal on a server, please post it. It needs to be from a respectable company, dedicated server, minimum storage space 6 TB.

As for donations, the biggest reason we don't just take donations openly from people is to not have to hassle with the accounting of it. If we were to start doing public donations, somebody would have to work that out. We would also primarily need monthly donations, not just one-off donations. It has happened in the past that people pledge donations and then just stop donating after a couple months. I don't want us to end up in the situation where we get a very expensive server and then 3 months later aren't getting enough donations to cover its cost. I don't want to have to deal with doing a donation drive every month to get our costs covered.

[Yukar9]

Can anybody actually show that fabric will be better for lag? I'm still not convinced that it's better than paper. I tried to find benchmarks comparing them, but couldn't find any.

I know people keep throwing the 40% number around, but I have no idea what it's based on or how accurate it is.

[TonTheKidRS]

What exactly in the farms cause the issue. It it the mobs, the items, the storage system, etc.

There are ways we could write a plug-in to clear the ground but ignore drops from things that a player directly triggers (for example dropping an item). Although if ground items aren't really an issue than this doesn't matter.

[MoWobbler]

View distance should be lowered to at least 8 in my opinion. Maybe this would break some farms, but massive farms are a big part of the problem anyways. I'm not sure what everyone else thinks of this though, it might be unpopular.

[KoriJenkins]

View distance should be lowered to at least 8 in my opinion. Maybe this would break some farms, but massive farms are a big part of the problem anyways. I'm not sure what everyone else thinks of this though, it might be unpopular.

Rendered chunks aren't the problem, it's entity cramming. It makes more sense to attack the source of lag rather than tangential things.

To put it plainly, I don't like the idea of other people being punished with a lower render distance because someone else wants to afk a gold farm all day.