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I rent a small Linode to run a minecraft server for my extended family. Sometimes it struggles to keep up with just a half dozen of us, and when I tried swappin

I rent a small Linode to run a minecraft server for my extended family. Sometimes it struggles to keep up with just a half dozen of us, and when I tried swapping from a spigot based system to a forge one so the kids could have mods it was basically unplayable. I can't imagine scaling out to thousands of users, this was some amazing work. While developing this did you come up with any best practice recommendations for individual nodes?

Jaxkr 5y ago
Your single-core performance is the most important thing for a Minecraft server, especially for Forge mods. For vanilla, I’d try Paper (a high performance spigot fork) and see if you still have problems. If you’re lagging with 6 people while running Paper, you simply need a better CPU.
- MuffinFlavored 5y ago
  Tangentially related, I had to move a web app off of DigitalOcean because the CPU performance was terrible compared to what you get for $80/mo from a dedicated server from OVH. I know Linode and DigitalOcean compete. Get a OVH dedicated server, try the CPU passmark bench or whatever and compare. AWS + Linode + DigitalOcean are all VPS and pretty slow.
ianhawes 5y ago
What were the specs of the server and which Spigot fork did you run? A month ago I ran a Paper instance from a Digital Ocean instance with about 4 GB of RAM and OpenJ9 JVM and it never dipped below 20 TPS even with a larger render distance. This was on Vanilla 1.17.
- eropple 5y ago
  Have you noticed much difference between a HotSpot-driven JRE and OpenJ9? I am somewhat irrationally biased against J9 because they made us stick it in everything at IBM, but I'm willing to reconsider for better Minecraft performance.
  - ianhawes 5y ago
    I have yet to see hard data on it, but the folks that have been in the trenches doing client-side mods on Minecraft swear that J9 is the superior JVM for the latest versions of Minecraft (1.16+). I don't know that anyone has really done a proper benchmark.
e12e 5y ago
It might be too pricy, but if you go to about 25usd/month, you can get a dedicated server with an i7 from hetzner server auction. These cheap boxes don't have ecc ram etc - but should work well for things like this. https://www.hetzner.com/sb?country=us https://www.hetzner.com/sb?country=us
- ipaddr 5y ago
  The cheapest available right now was 140 euro. When do the 25 dollar server come out?
  - PaywallBuster 5y ago
    I can see few options for 23.53 EUR right there Either way, it's auction page, may not always have the deals you're looking for in this price range
  - grp000 5y ago
    If the cheapest is $25/month, I think it would just make sense to get a used school/office PC. I was able to pick up a used Haswell i5, 8GB of memory PC for $200, which you would probably get better performance out of, and break even at ~8 month mark. That being said, pandemic prices might shift those numbers.
    - e12e 5y ago
      Nothing wrong with getting a used pc, but do you have 1gb uplink at home? In the cheapest offers right now, there's a Intel Core i7-4770, 2x 2 TB Ent. HDD (spinning rust, not ssd) with 32 GB ram. And a xeon box with ecc ram (same, low price).
      - Jweb_Guru 5y ago
        Also, even if you do have a 1 Gbps uplink, a lot of providers will throttle you if they suspect you're actually hosting a server that tries to utilize most of that bandwidth in anything but bursts.
InvaderFizz 5y ago
Assuming the Minecraft server runs on Arm64, you may want to try out Oracle Cloud free tier. You can spin up a 4 core 24GB instance, the CPU is 4 dedicated cores and quite fast.
- ijlx 5y ago
  It does run on arm64, I am currently running a forge server with a few mods on this exact setup. It's just for a few friends, I don't think we've had more than 5 or 6 on at a time but it seems to be performant enough. It's not perfect but it ended up being a better experience than we were having with minecraft realms.
zimpenfish 5y ago
> a small Linode [...] it struggles to keep up with just a half dozen of us I run my server on a 32GB Ryzen5 PC with the world on an SSD and it often struggles with just 2 players no matter what options I tweak. Keep dreaming of the day the Java parts get the same performence as the Bedrock parts (but I know it'll likely never happen.)
- Hextinium 5y ago
  Something wierd about a vanilla minecraft server is that sometimes less RAM is better. If you are using a good enough cpu going from 4 gb allocated to 2 gb allocated massively increases performance for low numbers of users because garbage collection runs more efficiently. You can tune the garbage collection manually, but super counterintuitively this fixed most of my problems.

Jaxkr 5y ago

Your single-core performance is the most important thing for a Minecraft server, especially for Forge mods. For vanilla, I’d try Paper (a high performance spigot fork) and see if you still have problems. If you’re lagging with 6 people while running Paper, you simply need a better CPU.

MuffinFlavored 5y ago
Tangentially related, I had to move a web app off of DigitalOcean because the CPU performance was terrible compared to what you get for $80/mo from a dedicated server from OVH. I know Linode and DigitalOcean compete. Get a OVH dedicated server, try the CPU passmark bench or whatever and compare. AWS + Linode + DigitalOcean are all VPS and pretty slow.

ianhawes 5y ago

What were the specs of the server and which Spigot fork did you run? A month ago I ran a Paper instance from a Digital Ocean instance with about 4 GB of RAM and OpenJ9 JVM and it never dipped below 20 TPS even with a larger render distance. This was on Vanilla 1.17.

eropple 5y ago
Have you noticed much difference between a HotSpot-driven JRE and OpenJ9? I am somewhat irrationally biased against J9 because they made us stick it in everything at IBM, but I'm willing to reconsider for better Minecraft performance.
- ianhawes 5y ago
  I have yet to see hard data on it, but the folks that have been in the trenches doing client-side mods on Minecraft swear that J9 is the superior JVM for the latest versions of Minecraft (1.16+). I don't know that anyone has really done a proper benchmark.

e12e 5y ago

It might be too pricy, but if you go to about 25usd/month, you can get a dedicated server with an i7 from hetzner server auction. These cheap boxes don't have ecc ram etc - but should work well for things like this. https://www.hetzner.com/sb?country=us https://www.hetzner.com/sb?country=us

ipaddr 5y ago
The cheapest available right now was 140 euro. When do the 25 dollar server come out?
- PaywallBuster 5y ago
  I can see few options for 23.53 EUR right there Either way, it's auction page, may not always have the deals you're looking for in this price range
- grp000 5y ago
  If the cheapest is $25/month, I think it would just make sense to get a used school/office PC. I was able to pick up a used Haswell i5, 8GB of memory PC for $200, which you would probably get better performance out of, and break even at ~8 month mark. That being said, pandemic prices might shift those numbers.
  - e12e 5y ago
    Nothing wrong with getting a used pc, but do you have 1gb uplink at home? In the cheapest offers right now, there's a Intel Core i7-4770, 2x 2 TB Ent. HDD (spinning rust, not ssd) with 32 GB ram. And a xeon box with ecc ram (same, low price).
    - Jweb_Guru 5y ago
      Also, even if you do have a 1 Gbps uplink, a lot of providers will throttle you if they suspect you're actually hosting a server that tries to utilize most of that bandwidth in anything but bursts.

InvaderFizz 5y ago

Assuming the Minecraft server runs on Arm64, you may want to try out Oracle Cloud free tier. You can spin up a 4 core 24GB instance, the CPU is 4 dedicated cores and quite fast.

ijlx 5y ago
It does run on arm64, I am currently running a forge server with a few mods on this exact setup. It's just for a few friends, I don't think we've had more than 5 or 6 on at a time but it seems to be performant enough. It's not perfect but it ended up being a better experience than we were having with minecraft realms.

zimpenfish 5y ago

> a small Linode [...] it struggles to keep up with just a half dozen of us I run my server on a 32GB Ryzen5 PC with the world on an SSD and it often struggles with just 2 players no matter what options I tweak. Keep dreaming of the day the Java parts get the same performence as the Bedrock parts (but I know it'll likely never happen.)

Hextinium 5y ago
Something wierd about a vanilla minecraft server is that sometimes less RAM is better. If you are using a good enough cpu going from 4 gb allocated to 2 gb allocated massively increases performance for low numbers of users because garbage collection runs more efficiently. You can tune the garbage collection manually, but super counterintuitively this fixed most of my problems.