Hello Empire! I was browsing the forums and saw a thread looking to hire people to afk, and Aikar posting that is not allowed due to farms causing too much lag. That makes sense, I know farms cause lag. I have a lot of these farms, which I love building and using. I know Aikar and the rest of the crew are busy fixing bugs and working on new stuff, but I was wondering if Senior staff, developers, or anyone else with in depth knowledge could give us redstone addicts some tips on reducing lag at our farms? For example, which farms cause the most lag? Are entities more laggy than piston updates? Light changes surely make a difference also. I think there are a lot of people here that would really appreciate some advice on what not to do, or what would make emc run smoother. If you guys have any tips, perhaps you could either create a thread somewhere else, or feel free to move this one to the appropriate place. Thanks for everything you all do!
Entities arent too hard on server performance if they are killed. I.E. Guardian Farms, your mob farm... etc... (I think..) I think piston updates are not good for servers, neither are large numbers of hoppers. Which I may be guilty of doing soon... > : D
Hoppers that are not covered by containers constantly "search" for items to pick up. So using hopper mine carts instead of full hoppers helps a lot usually. If your moving items water and glass elevators are the best. If you're using hoppers cover the unused ones with furnaces. Villagers are particularly bad right now. I had 60 farmers in a breeder with 10 bonemeal dispensers that almost killed smp4. I think it was magnified because it was running all the farming code and breeding code on all 60. I think restricting thier movement helps and preventing mating checks also help. Pistons are a little rough, not much you can do about it. I think hopper clocks are easier on server than pulses and pulses usually break after a while on emc.
One thing to note is that if you use redstone, for the love of god light up the arena around the wire so that light updates don't have to keep happening every single time it pulses.
Anytime that one entity interacts with another it's extra laggy. So squids in guardian farms slow things down and cause a bit of lag. From my understanding water or lava that is not "standing" or has not reached it's end can also cause lag. I believe that a row of dispensers for flush systems is better than a piston flood gate (faster also). Splitting large farms to be on seperate timers for pistons or dispensers help split up the lag. I've got a manual button on my cane farm and a single row of pistons doesn't make much of a difference but 4 at once causes noticeable pauses in the game.
Hoppers... Please stop using 400 hoppers in a single area ; ; 95% of our issues lately are due to hoppers. Using water to flow items to a central point with a single hopper would help sooooo much
I think what he meant was to put it all the items in a central point with water then put 7200 hoppers to reduce the lag? (This is being sarcastic)
Dunno how possible it is, but considered a version of RTS that can teleport items? Would make hoppers pretty redundant for a lot of things.
Got an autosorter with close to 400 hoppers on it. I'll see if there is a way to reduce the number of hoppers while maintaining the integrity of the device.
So in my case with the autosorter, could putting around 100 chests on top of the top row of hoppers help reduce the lag without breaking the machine. Most you can do with them is stagger the redstone timers, assuming they're even attached to one. If you have a sugar cane farm, for example, that has the pistons on both sides go off at the same time, maybe try staggering it so one side goes after another one finishes. It'll cut the processing load the farm contributes in half.
Yeah, I think any container on top of a hopper works to lower it's lag. people normally just use furnaces because they are cheap.
Cuts me down to about 200 or so hoppers I can't do anything about. Much better than the initial number.
are farms close together worse than ones right next to each other? Or does that not make much difference?
Something like this would be great, if it also worked in the Wild. Also, if anyone has good examples and tips of how to do item collection from mobs that fall and die, using a low-lag solution, maybe they can let us know. For example, if you flush with water to move items, water breaks their fall and they dont die, so there must be a good way to do this. I am not sure that the hopper minecart system with tons of redstone is much better as far as lag, but I could be wrong. I want to have a good item collection, but I dont want to use too many hoppers or lag the server a lot, so let me know tips/examples/suggestions. Thanks.
