Hopper Mine Carts Fail To Draw Items From Above.

So I designed a system that uses mine carts for feeding items into furnaces. I did this because it is compact, and you can prevent lag by simply designing it so that it does not run constantly. In fact, it only runs when fuel is needed.

I wanted to use hopper mine carts because the item withdraw speed is much greater. However, as soon as I built it, I noticed that the hopper mine carts completely fail to withdraw any items from the chests above.

I created a simple test system, and built it both on single player and on multi-player. It works on single player, but fails on Empire Minecraft. As a note, I just tested it on another server I play on, and it worked exactly the same as in single player.

This makes me suspect that either I am missing something very obvious, or I have found a bug.

Thoughts?

Here is the simple testing set-up I created:

In normal MC there is no issue. On EMC it was changed a bit (for lag issues) so sometimes the hoppers don't suck the items in right away.

This looks like a bug to me. It's true that the rate in which hoppers work has been slowed down a little bit but usually it's not (too much) noticeable. Usually it's simply a bit slower. It clearly manifests itself though when using minecarts and a cactus/hopper combination to pick up the cart; that usually doesn't work quick enough.

However, I tried to reproduce your issue and for sure: the hopper minecart doesn't do anything at all. Even if you set it up in a static way: so put a chest in the air, place a hopper minecart below it (on rails obviously) and just wait. Nothing will happen.

So it clearly looks like a bug to me right now.

Does the orientation of the minecart in reference to the chest make a difference? In the OP pic, the minecart is going with the chest. Did you try it at 90 degrees? I'm not in town right now otherwise I'd try it.