[frost]

It is possible to go a step higher in terms of hardware but if you know about upgrading, the higher you go up on the spectrum, the more it costs for minimal improvements. Since the current hardware is on the higher side of server hardware, going up one step would help a tiny bit if at all while costing 3x more.

A big issue survival servers like ours face is entity count. Since pvp and minigame servers don't have many entities like large animal farms and etc, they are able to hold many more players without facing the consequences of high entity counts lagging the server.

Towards the end of 1.8 we were able to bump the view distance to 8 and even 10 while holding 50+ players with no lag. This was all changed after 1.9. Something with the way entities acted or loaded was changed causing all servers to have much more lag from entities than before. With this, in order to increase playing quality I had to lower the view distance. 1.10 seemed a bit more stable and I bumped it up once again. The view distance is constantly being changed in the background and I would love to have it at 10, but that is just not possible. With where we are at there is a balance between player count and lag in order to have the highest quality playtime