[_JELLy__]

As I have been trying to communicate 3 MONTHS ago, please increase the render distance to at least 5 and please reduce redstone lag. It is making my life exceedingly difficult as many of my farms do not work anymore, especially iron farm. I would trade player quantity for more quality anytime, and I would also appreciate a thread in the forums that updates the server spec changes. 

Thank you

[Veo]

you said you weren't here 3 months ago so how could you have pleaded #Busted

On another note, pretty sure redstone lag is more to do with the redstone you use, and that render distance is probably at 5 to reduce lag

[Wrexial33]

Increasing the quality of the server by either renting a better server or reducing player numbers isn't free, are you gonna pay for the increased cost of the server or the amount of potential donations lost? Increasing the render distance could increase lag hugely as that change is carried to every player, meaning the server has to load hundreds or thousands of new blocks per player and reducing redstone lag isn't something that frost can magically do, the nature of redstone is in the game engine which isn't easy to change. He'd either have to reduce the amount of redstone on the server, or, once again, rent a better server. The first would hurt players while the second costs money. Frost has to do what is best for the server, ALL players, and himself. Not just doing something to help a few players but hurts many more players, Frost would not trade "player quantity" (aka cutting the player max, meaning fewer people can play at any time) for more quality (allowing you to build some pointless machine to fuel your own ambitions). Having a high max number of players allows more people freedom to play with their friends. When the number of players is low there is less lag, but when there are more players there are more people having fun together inspite of the lag. And that is selfish of you to say, the server isn't about you or other advanced players, its about everyone.

[frost]

The render distance has been 6 for over a month now.

Also, the hardware we are on is the top that is available. The main bottleneck that is holding us back is processing power since mc servers can only use one core or something like that.

[_JELLy__]

First the render distance is most likely 4 by my counting, If it is really  6, my iron farm would work, and the blocks i see are not only 4 chunks away. Second, about a year ago when I joined, the server hds a smaller community, and since the server had been running for some time before I joined, I assume it was sustainable, without having tons of new players come and go. Third, the server specs back then is 6 render distance and no redstone problems whatsoever, the render dist was increased to 7 soon after, and it has been going down ever since. I built most of my farms when the render distance was 6, and a couple months later they were broken. It is getting progressively harder to play while the community is getting larger. What is next? 200 player cap with a render dist of 3? I am not gonna let that happen.

[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

[Arrei]

There are two things about that, Jelly:

First, for whatever reason, the farthest chunks that are rendered actually aren't doing anything. Render distance 7 only has 6 active, and so forth. I don't know why this was, but it's why I opted for my compact farm design, when I realized the big farms weren't fully loaded for some reason even though I could physically see the entire facility - though that too might not work anymore? Not sure.

On top of that, I've noticed that chunk visuals are kind of weird since 1.9? Upon logging in, I can't see as far as I should be able to see under the current view distance, but flying out somewhere to make chunks visible keeps them visible for a really long distance, although they're not loaded. I don't know what's the deal, but that segues into the next point:

Second, you have to be aware that the game's performance for all servers just TANKED after 1.9 - this isn't something Frost did.. Either Mojang or Spigot/Paper borked something hard. We were running 8 with no issues just before 1.9 and the update forced us down to like, 5. I hope they're hard at work fixing these problems, and I myself like to harass Frost about the view distance from time to time, but the last time we tried increasing to 7, the server slowed to a crawl within a few hours.

[_JELLy__]

I see, But I don't think my eyes would tolerate another downdrop in render distance or redstone performance. You know how much redstone stuff I have and how many farms I own. For the average player the changes are minimal but, not that many on this server plays like me.

[frost]

(06-24-2016, 02:30 AM)_JELLy__ Wrote: First the render distance is most likely 4 by my counting, If it is really  6, my iron farm would work, and the blocks i see are not only 4 chunks away. Second, about a year ago when I joined, the server hds a smaller community, and since the server had been running for some time before I joined, I assume it was sustainable, without having tons of new players come and go. Third, the server specs back then is 6 render distance and no redstone problems whatsoever, the render dist was increased to 7 soon after, and it has been going down ever since. I built most of my farms when the render distance was 6, and a couple months later they were broken. It is getting progressively harder to play while the community is getting larger. What is next? 200 player cap with a render dist of 3? I am not gonna let that happen.

I don't know how you are counting the render distance and telling me that it is 4 while I am looking at the setting right now showing 6 which is what you are asking. There is a separate setting in spigot that involves entity tracking range which limits what the client can see but does not affect server loading or performance. That setting is set to the default ranges. I want to increase the view distance just as anyone else does and the player cap has actually been lowered from what it was before 1.8. Like arrei said, 1.9 really messed with a lot of servers and especially survival servers. There is nothing server owners can do about this except hope that mojang makes their entities as efficient as it was in 1.8 and before

[shisuan]

Not sure what redstoneproblems you have, all my redstone contraptions work great except itemsorter. And there is better ways to build ironfarms so they work fine.