Best Posts in Thread: Lagbusting

Premise​

As most active players can currently attest to, lag has been a major issue in the towns world lately. If can easily take thirty seconds just to resume gameplay after teleporting between your town outposts, not to mention random lagspikes. While some of this has to be done by the server administration team on the staff side, that's not all there is too it.

As the world goes on, the overall lag will increase as players build things that generate lag. They may be very small things, but they add up when we're talking about the number of people online at any given time. In addition, some areas are much, much laggier than others.

Solution​

In general, it is highly possible for lag to be reduced by the playerbase. This isn't an easy task to do as a whole, but everyone can contribute to making gameplay run smoother for all of us. With that in mind, here's many simple changes you can make to help us all out.

• Portals

Nether portals are notoriously horrible for their impact on performance. Simply put, just disable them when not in use by either breaking a block of obsidian and replacing it after.

• Chestshops and Storages

Item frames in themselves are a major cause of performance drops in both your FPS and strain on the server. When creating your chestshops for blocks, you can help yourself by simply placing the blocks next to the chest instead of in item frames. The same also applies to your storage rooms.

• Item Displays

Everybody has some rare items to show off! And naturally, the best way to show them off is in an item frame. However, this also is adding to the total server lag. If you simply must display some items for the world to see, space them out over several chunks to keep it from being concentrated in one spot.

• Item Farms

Yes, even item farms generate significant amounts of lag that can easily be reduced. In the bottom design, you can see a pumpkin farm that has all of its pistons attached to one circuit. This generates enormous lag when it is trying to activate thousands of pistons in a very short time period. The design on the top only responds when that individual plant grows. Simply research better designs that only activate when the individual plant grows, and you will notice a significant increase in not only performance, but the efficiency of your farm, as well.

• Unnecessary Components

You can reduce the strain on the server in your redstone devices by making several simple changes. In this example, you can see several different common redstone components. The fewer pistons and lamps you can use, the better. In addition, it is better to use multiple redstone repeaters in a row than redstone dust leading to a repeater with a delay (redstone dust is actually the #3 top cause of performance issues in redstone).

• More Unnecessary Components

Banners and armor stands, similar to item frames, also hurt server performance. A general area is to use as few of them as you possibly need. Signs and other items commonly used for decorations also contribute to this.

• Entity Blocks and Processing Blocks

Entities like shulker boxes and flower pots consume more server resources than normal blocks. In addition, magma blocks and hoppers generate more lag than normal blocks by being ticked constantly. Lighting changes also reduce performance considerably more than anything else in Minecraft. To fix this, use as few of these blocks as possible, and be careful not to have anything consistently changing your lighting.

• Transportation and Liquids

Entities such as minecarts and boats reduce performance as well. When not in use, it'd be a good idea to simply break them and store them in chests. Flowing liquids also aren't the best idea. Using source blocks instead will improve your experience, but fewer liquids will improve this even further.

• Animal Farms

One of the major causes of issues in towny is large-scale animal and mob farms. One attempt at resolving this made by the staff team was the stacking plugin, which obviously had its own issues. To improve this on your own, it's a smart practice to spread out your livestock as much as possible. Despite this being more expensive due to the nature of towny, it greatly improves performance for everyone.

• Mob Farms

When you're not actively using your spawners, it is practical to have some kind of kill switch to keep them from spawning while you are not actively using the farm. The fewer mobs on the server, the faster it will run. Alternatively, you can simply leave the area, and the chunks will be de-loaded, preventing the mobs from being active.

Conclusion​

There are many ways any player can contribute to reducing lag on the server. These are just a few simple ones based off of the way Minecraft works. Feel free to ask any questions on specific cases below, and I'd be more than happy to help you with the case.

We all want to run as lag-free as possible, and while doing these things isn't a foolproof solution, it will make a considerable difference in the long run as this towny world develops. Good luck, and happy lagbusting to you all!