Map Pregeneration.

[Fuzzymage 0]

Hey guys,

 

So, im running a semi new server that has started to attract new people.  The issue I'm running into are people starting to explore and generating new chunks which is causing a bunch of server lag.  Does anyone know how I can pregen the map?  The only way I know how to requires bukkit and wordborder.

[InsaneJ 561]

WorldBorder is definitely the way to go to pre-generate a map for TFC. You can (temporarily) use MCPC+ to run both Forge and Bukkit on the same server and pre-generate the map.

Generating the map with players on can be either slow, or laggy. But never fast and without lag. So depending on your needs you may consider closing the server for a day or so to pre-generate the map.

[Fuzzymage 0]

So, I'm assuming leaving mcpc+ on for admin plugins beside worldguard/edit/hawkeye isnt a good idea?

[Kittychanley 1,002]

TFC isn't officially compatible with MCPC+ due to the fact that it changes some of the behind the scenes forge code that TFC is working off of. Because of this, any issues that you might come across while using MCPC+ probably won't get any support since there isn't much TFC can do to fix them.

[Omicron 62]

Yeah, many mods don't directly support MCPC+. That said, I encourage you to trial it anyway; admin plugins aside, the performance advantage over vanilla/stock Forge is gigantic. Especially on longer-running servers, which will continually lose performance over time to a phenomenon called chunk leaking. This doesn't happen with MCPC+.

 

Example: I ran a 1.6.4 server last fall on my own computer. It has a state of the art 4x 4.2 GHz Haswell CPU with 16 GB RAM and only SSD storage. I loaded up all sorts of mods, including Alternate Terrain Generation which produces landscapes that are just as performance-hungry as those of TFC, if not more so. With maximum serverside view distance enabled (15 chunks instead of stock 9), and four people online in completely different areas, I started off at 9 ms world tick, thanks to the raw power of my CPU.

 

Fast forward three months, and the same machine couldn't stay under 50ms world tick with more than 2 people online at the same time, regardless of server view distance. Even with nobody on and no chunks loaded, it sat at 25-35 ms. Nobody on the FTB forums or the official Minecraft forums had any idea what was happening, only that yes, that happens sometimes. Or rather, that's what the FTB guys said. The vanilla guys said that their Bukkit servers are totally fine and it must of course be the mods I run that break things. And yet, Opis showed that the total serverwide load from tile entities (the stuff that many mods go crazy with and which is usually the first suspect for lag) was less than 4 ms per tick. Or in other words, less than 10% of my CPU time went into mod content. The rest just vanished into thin air. After running a JVM profiler, I discovered that all that CPU time was sitting in vanilla functions for biome checks and mob AI simulation. Even on a completely empty server with no chunks loaded. What the heck was going on?

 

That's when a google search randomly led me to the old Spigot project and a discussion about chunk leaks - a vanilla bug where a chunk is not properly unloaded, so that despite it showing as unloaded it still takes up CPU time. Spigot fixed that. And later it integrated into Bukkit. Which brought me back to the fact that nobody running a Bukkit server seemed to have these issues I kept seeing...

 

So I backed up my world and threw it on MCPC+. I expected issues, because with IC2 and Thaumcraft, I had at least two mods which explicitly said to avoid MCPC+ because of possible incompatibilities. Much to my surprise, there was not a single issue, not even a log message. And the world tick? 6 ms with 4 people on. Boom. I was downright shocked - that was a third less on a three month old map than what the stock Forge server needed on a completely fresh, empty world!

 

I'm definitely going to keep hosting my servers on MCPC+ in the future, unless an incompatibility forces me back to stock Forge. Thankfully I haven't seen one yet.

[Fuzzymage 0]

Thanks for the help/tips.  Got it up and running and pregenning, No issues so far.