Petition against NoLagg
Hello fellow players,
If you are new, I am HenMeister, an Elder on the server. Nice to meet you. As for others, nice to see you, and thanks for taking the time to read this:
I have had to take the past few days off, but have continued to keep up with the server. I see we have made the front page of Reddit (awesome!), but with it has come several issues, the main one being lag. Awhile I have not been on enough to personally have dealt with it, I can imagine it being a problem with many users online. Also, with new users comes the generation of more lots, etc, etc. That's all great, but...
I do not believe creating a hard cap on mobs, spawning, etc, is the key the solving the issue of lag. After speaking with Azkedar earlier, we both agreed that a better solution (that is more "reasonable") would be a player limit. As of now, the server capacity is maxed at 50. We hit 35 or so yesterday, I would put money on it that lag peaked then. I believe a player cap of 25 or 30 would be more reasonable, or the possibility of adding more RAM to the server and upping the player cap.
Personally for me, the loss of my entire sheep farm, pig farm, cow far, and chicken farm and have devastating to me. A lot of work has been put into them and it is saddening that such sacrifices were made. I checked the entity count when I logged in, and my client recognized 20. It normally recognizes well over 80-100.
In conclusion, I believe such plugins take away from the core feel of Minecraft, and changes it for the worse. This is me voicing my opinion on the addition of the NoLagg plugin, please add yours as you wish! I would like to know what others think. Thank you for your time!
As a newer member I would be disappointed if there were to be a lower player cap as I'm sure I'd be cut, but I feel that's a bit more reasonable than being new and not having any mobs to provide me with the resources necessary to craft or eat. Seeing as how I don't yet have a farm made I find it increasingly difficult to prevent death from starvation. Anyway, this is certainly an important topic of discussion and I figured I'd just provide some input.
I had no opinion of this until recently when my wolf egg was bought out of the shop. The user complained that when he put down the egg no wolf appeared, so I grabbed another wolf egg and tp'ed to him to compensate. We moved to another area and tried again but again no wolf appeared. That left me with no wolf eggs and an unhappy settler that I had no way to compensate.
I can not offer any solutions as I know very little about running a server. However in recent blog posts, Uncovery makes it sound like the constant updating of the 3D map is causing a lot of the problem. He already capped the resolution but maybe going even lower? I personally don't use the 3D map often so this has little affect on me.
I'm personally against putting a player cap on the server. That would annoy the players trying to get on and lower ranked people with excellent potential might even get fed up enough to quit the server.
But again, since I know little about the RAM and whatnot required to run a server putting a player cap might be the best option. I'll have to leave that to the people who know a thing or two about this sort of thing.
Either way I hope we can fix the problem with out to many mobs or players being compensated.
I'm going to have to agree with Xecaria on this one. I don't believe that lowering the player cap is the solution, for almost the exact same reasons that Xecaria has stated.
Thanks for your opinion on that stuff. My opinion is this:
The server is going through changes. We have to change the server in some way along with the changed requirements. For example, we enlarge the map. Or, I reconfigured the dynamic map not to run on its own integrated webserver but rather on the apache webserver that is running already. Lots of changes are done in the background that I do not even bother to post on the blog about it.
I also impose rules. Some of them have been active since more than a year. Still people violate the rules for example by building massive mob spawners that have persistant redstone circuits running for a couple of minutes at a time, and those people have been even masters & elders. I have to spend hours to run after users, check what they are doing and only randomly am able to find this stuff, since I do not have any tool that tells me properly what is happening where and what causes lag. In other instances, people keep dozens of sheep on their lot just in case they might need them one day. Or people plan massive cities and pay users money to join them doing so, which causes other projects to simply vanish, and in the end we have a whole world with a massive, extremely difficult to configure plugin only for one single building project.
The consequence out of this is that the more people plan more massive and great things, the less people will be able to play normally since the few cause extreme resource drain in terms of memory, space, CPU and last but not least - my work.
But do not get me wrong, I do not mind people planning big and making great stuff that makes the server more popular. The issue is rather that if we start to limit the amount of users so fewer and fewer people can make bigger and bigger stuff, we are on a one-way road to a server with 5 people.
But let's look at the resources as a whole. The 2 main constraints are memory and CPU. From the memory standpoint we are good. We have plenty of it and only run a bit short when I have to reset lots. But if I do that before the server restarts nobody will feel it. So the other topic is CPU. It is quite difficult to determine where CPU load is coming from and what causes lag since most of the time it is not one big thing but rather many small things that pile up.
So what I am trying to do is to install a plugin with default settings and then see how that works. Then I adjust the settings and try to improve it to make it more balanced. This is the process I am doing now with the nolagg plugin. If you look at the plugin page only for the spawn limit settings (http://dev.bukkit.org/server-mods/nolagg/pages/spawn-limits-nolagg/), you will realize quickly that there are many overlapping and intersecting issues across global, world, mobs, animals, types of animals etc etc, which allows for a very fine tuning. It is not easy to find the right one. But I want to try if that works.
But before we start limiting users only because of CPU lag I rather want to find out if we can control the issue with reasonable methods that do not significantly change the gameplay before I start to limit user numbers only because a few think they need 250 sheep, 50 wolves or 3 simultaneous mobspawners on their lot. It's about limiting the extremes w/o changing gameplay. I do not think for example that AFK'ing in front of a mob spawner is something that contributes to gameplay - at all.
TL:DR: Let me finetune the plugin and see if we can have a better setting before we kick out users.
...plan massive cities... Ha! You know who you are... :)
...keep dozens of sheep... Ha! You know who you are! ... :D
...violate the rules for example by building massive mob spawners that have persistant redstone circuits running for a couple of minutes at a time...
:|
Thanks for considering Uncovery. Maybe as another possibility of a lag test, we could attempt to turn off the 3D map? Just a thought, maybe it would stop the server from having to consistently refresh and reload the entire map onto the website.
I like having a 3d map, I just don't understand the need to have it refreshing so often. Anytime I need to see where someone is, I use the 2d map.
I managed to join before the Great Reddit Event of 2012, if even only by a few days.
I purely speak from my own personal play style here, so bear with me. Do people really use the 3D model of the world? Its honestly never worked right for me or was far to "laggy", to be of much use. If it helps with game play and keeping active users connected, why not diable it entirely.
Maybe only use it in case of needing to take pictures of finished projects and what not.
//end random thoughts
The 3d map is mainly cool for people to get to peek into the world from the web without actually having to run an MC client and run around. You can see what people are working on, in general, and keep tabs on your friends.
So, it's a fun thing, but not exactly essential.
I use the 3D map all the time. My castle is too large to see all of it in game, so I use the 3D map to try and figure out proportions I like.
Wait... Sockso still plays on this server?!?!? /troll
I'm willing to endure or submit to whatever torture is necessary to keep Uncovery working properly.
Thanks, as always, Unc. Keep up your excellent (and much appreciated) work!
I optimized the map quite well now and it is no longer a source of lag.
My two cents worth is that I use the 3d map on a daily basis to see distance between me and players, etc. I would be very sad to see it go. I also use the 2d map but not nearly as much.