Server Restart?
Posted: Sat Dec 27, 2014 3:59 pmI've been contemplating restarting a Minecraft service (maybe not necessarily our previous server, but a server). I'm just not quite sure how much interest there is, and there's a few issues.
First, Minecraft is a memory hog. Josh has been kind enough to run it on his server for the better part of 2-3 years, but I do think it's grossly unfair to demand that much available RAM for a single service that maybe 4 or 5 of us use. Compound this with the problem we had some time back with the kernel OOM killer targeting various processes at random which I suspect was at least partially the fault of Minecraft (little memory available, Apache ate the rest when something happened, and thus everything started getting killed--except, oddly enough, Minecraft).
Second, with Bukkit development in absolute disarray, I'm not sure exactly how I'd want to host it. One option would be to go back to vanilla Minecraft as we did for about a year prior to using Bukkit (maybe longer?) and simply put everyone on a whitelist. This option would give us the opportunity to return the game to how we originally played it in a sort of "creative survival" mode where you could play in creative or survival depending on your particular inclination. Further, we could provide op status to guildies who regularly play MC without much concern. (We did this before, and I can't recall having any major issues as a consequence thanks in part to the whitelist option.)
Finally, I could host it on my machine--or one of you could do the same--but the number of concurrent players would be confined by upstream bandwidth rather than memory constraints. This would leave us effectively in the same boat but with the guild services on Josh's machine unscathed.
Returning to stock Minecraft does have some benefits. Many of the Bukkit commands we're accustomed to have since been integrated in the retail server, and updates can occur as they are released. Resource consumption by the stock server is also lower than Minecraft + Bukkit. Only when you start including mods and total conversions do you start to encroach on memory consumption similar to that of Bukkit. There's also a noticeable lack of community politics and other rubbish since it's easy to avoid all that nonsense from the start.
First, Minecraft is a memory hog. Josh has been kind enough to run it on his server for the better part of 2-3 years, but I do think it's grossly unfair to demand that much available RAM for a single service that maybe 4 or 5 of us use. Compound this with the problem we had some time back with the kernel OOM killer targeting various processes at random which I suspect was at least partially the fault of Minecraft (little memory available, Apache ate the rest when something happened, and thus everything started getting killed--except, oddly enough, Minecraft).
Second, with Bukkit development in absolute disarray, I'm not sure exactly how I'd want to host it. One option would be to go back to vanilla Minecraft as we did for about a year prior to using Bukkit (maybe longer?) and simply put everyone on a whitelist. This option would give us the opportunity to return the game to how we originally played it in a sort of "creative survival" mode where you could play in creative or survival depending on your particular inclination. Further, we could provide op status to guildies who regularly play MC without much concern. (We did this before, and I can't recall having any major issues as a consequence thanks in part to the whitelist option.)
Finally, I could host it on my machine--or one of you could do the same--but the number of concurrent players would be confined by upstream bandwidth rather than memory constraints. This would leave us effectively in the same boat but with the guild services on Josh's machine unscathed.
Returning to stock Minecraft does have some benefits. Many of the Bukkit commands we're accustomed to have since been integrated in the retail server, and updates can occur as they are released. Resource consumption by the stock server is also lower than Minecraft + Bukkit. Only when you start including mods and total conversions do you start to encroach on memory consumption similar to that of Bukkit. There's also a noticeable lack of community politics and other rubbish since it's easy to avoid all that nonsense from the start.