I don't see where he addresses farm size in relation to spawning in the video you linked, so I'm not sure you understand my question. I know I could fill the Nether with slabs, pistons, and minecart rail. I could also try to fill as much as possible of the 144x144 spawnable area around me with Pressure Plates and Pistons. Given a farm in the center chunk of an AFK spawning area, it seems like there should be a point where the returns (dead pigs) levels off. A point where it's not worth the additional effort in time and materials for the few extra nuggets per hour I'll get. As it is, my unslabbed areas are spawning up to 50 monsters then not climbing any higher. I think that might mean that I have already reached a point where I have more capacity than what the server can fill. If I know what the capacity of a chunk is then maybe I can take some pistons out and set them up in an adjacent chunk. Do you have a source you are basing this on? Since we are talking about monsters, shouldn't this number be closer to 90x3=270 pads in a 9x9 chunk area rather than 250x3?
As far as I understand it, there's no mob limit per chunk. The EMC mob limit counts mobs in a 64 block radius around you, the only other possible mob spawning stop thing would be if a mob tries to spawn and there are already 8 o more mobs of the same class in the immediate area. As long as you're killing the mobs faster than they spawn, your farm can be very efficient. Perhaps that is your problem, you are killing the pigs so fast that only 50 manage to spawn, if that is the case then you can increase the spawn area untill you reach a equilibrium, unfortunately I have no idea what numbers would be good for that.
