Reduce lag from water/lava

Water and lava flows can look cool, but the physics calculations they require hog memory. I don't know for sure if the memory they take up is a large portion of the total, but some players have really gone overboard. Asking builders to show a little restraint in placing flows might help the lag situation.
Still water/lava blocks (like those in the lakes) shouldn't cause problems.

Do you mean CPU side lag or server lag?

I've heard of water causing lag as in low framerates on computers, but I haven't heard of it causing server lag. There are ways to disable water animation to improve framerate if you have problems with that on your computer.

My PC is fine, I'm talking about server lag. Depending on how the program is written, the flow physics could only be calculated when an object hits the water, or just all the time for every flowing block in the loaded chunks. Some should know for sure if it hogs server memory, but an admin could find out first hand by monitoring the server resource usage with and without water flowing.

Remember this is just a suggestion, I'm not screaming for action, just something that can be looked into.

I'd test it myself, but don't have the time to mess with mods for the game in order to do that.

TunnelBorer wrote:Water and lava flows can look cool, but the physics calculations they require hog memory. I don't know for sure if the memory they take up is a large portion of the total, but some players have really gone overboard. Asking builders to show a little restraint in placing flows might help the lag situation.
Still water/lava blocks (like those in the lakes) shouldn't cause problems.

I guess this is more like a CPU problem?

Yes, this hogs CPU time as well. This would also cause lag as any other, more important, calculations would have to queue up. Speculating on the specific workings doesn't address the problem that we don't know for sure if flowing water adds to overall lag.

Out of curiosity though, what are the hardware specs of the orcworm server?

i7-920
8GB DDR3 Ram
2* 750GB HDDs in RAID 1
1GBit NIC

Should have no problems running a Minecraft server... damn Notch.

Damn, the server should be fine. I wish the mobs didn't cause so much lag though, I miss them

Orcworm wrote:i7-920
8GB DDR3 Ram
2* 750GB HDDs in RAID 1
1GBit NIC

Should have no problems running a Minecraft server... damn Notch.

TunnelBorer wrote:Damn, the server should be fine. I wish the mobs didn't cause so much lag though, I miss them

The i7 920 has quad cores that run at 2.66GHz, from my understanding of the whole process of java/Minecraft/hMod you can't utilize all 4 cores even if you configure java to use them.
It sucks, a lot, but that would be why mobs lag everything.

Number255 is correct, changing the amount of cores used by Java didn't seem to change anything, from 2 to 8 (HT).

Orcworm wrote:i7-920
8GB DDR3 Ram
2* 750GB HDDs in RAID 1
1GBit NIC

Should have no problems running a Minecraft server... damn Notch.

Notch apparently spend most of the day yesterday trying to find out the light looping issues that caused the massive CPU rise from the Halloween update, hopefully that research actually accomplished something in the update to come today :\

If it will stop the CPU going to 140%+ usage, then I'm happy .

Ha, true. Java is like the bureaucratic system, it sucks horribly and though everyone knows it, no one has been able to supply a better system.

Damn Java had to get into everything so companies won't adopt the alternatives until more people use them, but people won't use the... you see where this is going.

I heard something about Notch integrating one of the optimization mods officially into the source and that some of the leftover debug code was left in there, which is supposedly causing issues

Xltimus wrote:I heard something about Notch integrating one of the optimization mods officially into the source and that some of the leftover debug code was left in there, which is supposedly causing issues

FastRenderMod? Something like that I think.