Recommended specs for a smooth Multiplayer experience?
Me and a bunch of friends want to setup a survival paper server running an amplified world with Distant Horizons.
We've been looking around for server providers and ended up on Pebblehost. The plan we chose has dedicated server threads no one else but us will use.
We are hoping that will allow us to fly around with elytras and rockets and have no issues.
I'm worried that 8gb and 3 threads won't be enough to have a smooth experience WITH distant horizons... We expect a max of 10 players playing on an amplified world with no other modifications. The cpu specs are in the image.We would try pre-generating of course but since I'm rather new to Minecraft server hosting I thought I'd get more experienced opinions first before we pay. Thank you for your time / advice in advance.
51 Replies
I'd imagine for realtime updates and sync on load, 3 threads would struggle quite a bit. Is it substantially more expensive to upgrade to 4 or more threads?
1 additional thread would cost us 10$ more i think... right now with 8gb and 3 threads we would be paying 53$.
All we are looking for is to play survival minecraft together again. Seeing distant horizons made us excited since we loved our amplified worlds.
Are we looking for something that won't be possible? I tried Distant Horizons on a solo world with my 5900x and 3090 and it shot up my temps quite a bit but it ran decently well.
Your best bet would be to lower the CPU load preset on the server to minimum (iirc that's /dh config common.threadPreset MINIMUM_IMPACT)
I bet it'd play smoothly but DH would be quite slow at sending LODs to all the players
I see, I thought it would save the LOD's the moment they are generated once which would give us a smooth experience if we pre-generate a lot I guess?
They do get saved in a database, but the server has to serialize the data to a simpler format before sending the data, which can be resource hungry when everyone's clients are trying to fetch so much data at once
Unrelated obligatory mention I had to read your name a good 3 times over cuz I watch your videos, cool stuff lol
YOO thanks man appreciate it!! :yippie:
Didn't expect to be recognized here, thanks for watching my stuff
With the server specs listed in the image + knowing that they are 100% dedicated threads for us, whats the minimum you would recommend for a somewhat smooth experience?
In terms of thread count you mean?
Or something else
yeah or ram
the only things i can increase are ram and threads
maximum being 5
8gb sounds good, 3 threads is the only "red flag" ig, I'd just start at 5 threads and seeing how it runs
xdd
getting expensive **
is it a bad serverhost? could i find better ones?
Ah right that'd increase cost immediately after being set, try 3 ig
Sounds a tad expensive, we've previously partnered with CloudNord when they sponsored a VPS for us. Check their pricing
I will, thank you! I wonder if others have succesfully setup smooth servers with DH yet... would love their knowledge before i'd spend 70$ to find out
definitely sounds more reasonable for now
but im wondering if those 8 cores are dedicated to us only or if we share them with others
The way hosting providers typically work is that you share the same hardware (including the CPU cores) with other customers
This works fine as long as everyone uses their resources reasonably. You can have spikes or even longer periods of full load, but if every customer tries to use 100% all the time, then they won't actually be able to
I see yeah I've read about this here: https://help.pebblehost.com/en/minecraft/what-is-a-dedicated-thread-used-for-in-minecraft
PebbleHost Knowledgebase
What is a Dedicated Thread used for in Minecraft?
Is Minecraft single-threaded? Can it use multiple cores? What is a thread, anyway?
which is why pebblehost seemed so good at first since they give us dedicated threads
we love flying around and exploring with elytras in the amplified terrain
I just would love a sort of "confirmation" that once we spend the money it is gonna be somewhat smooth, do you think we would run into a lot of issues using Cloudnord / pebble?
(Have had bad experiences with server hosts in the past, especially with chunk generation xdd)
Very cool that Pebble has an option to rent dedicated cores :) The above screenshot is from Cloudnord?
This is cloudnord, yes
8 cores sounds good on paper, but im aware of the shared thread thing
Since it isn't mentioned, I would expect that those cores are shared. But that shouldn't be an issue unless the provider is massively over-provisioning. Cloudnord has very friendly and helpful support, so I have no doubt that they will come up with solutions if you encounter any performance issues
They also have their own Discord server where you can chat with them directly :)
That's really good to know, thank you so much for the info. One more thing I was wondering about is how much Ram plays a role in storing the LOD's?
Would going for 16gb ram make us feel a big improvement or does it not matter much in terms of DH?
In solo it felt like it mattered a lot, was running at 20-25gb of ram usage xdd
Do you plan on using Fabric/Forge, or a Bukkit server? I have only really tested the plugin myself, since that's what I work on, and it can run on a Raspberry Pi with just 1 GB of RAM allocated :)
The plan was using Paper 1.21.5
so Fabric i'm assuming
Nice
No, Paper would be a Bukkit server :) So you'll be using my code
Oh I see, which means we'd need the plugin version on the server and not the mod correct?
Yup
:hmmnoted:
That would be all questions I think, thank you so much for your time.
No problem at all :) There's a basic guide to getting started on the plugin wiki. Feel free to tag me if you need anything else.
:ablobsalute:
I ran into one issue on my server so far and I was wondering if there's a known fix for this:
the LOD chunks start generating super far away, leaving giant holes usually, as if the plugin doesn't care about trying to generate adjacant chunks instead of random ones
only happens on the server, not solo worlds
did i miss a FAQ question for this?
some more examples of what I mean
It should fix itself with time. Afaik, it has to do with how DH queues requested LODs
I see thank you! I saw there were 0 requested world import / generation tasks so i thought something was wrong, but im guessing that was because i wasn't moving around
One last question, sorry for using this post as a personal support chat :(
We've got everything up and running and are wondering how exactly we are supposed to pre-generate chunks for our server world. The documentation and discord disagree a lot suggesting chunky and also telling us to avoid chunky,
What would be the best recommended way to pregenerate not only LOD's for our server but ALSO chunks?
(here is the FAQ post telling us to not use chunky, am i confusing singleplayers best practices with multiplayer ones?)
the faq is partially outdated cuz mod compat and personal recommendations kept changing
the current preferred way of generating both would be
/dh config generation.mode INTERNAL_SERVER followed by /dh pregen start DIMENSION 0 0 RADIUS
when using INTERNAL_SERVER i believe adding c2me helps performance a lot, but i'm unsure whether that's available on the plugin versionthank you so much!!!
Yeshi and the rest of the server largely assume that everyone is using the mod. The command given here does not work on the plugin version, and the recommendation to not use Chunky also does not apply to the plugin
The instructions on the plugin wiki are up to date, so just follow those :)
1. Set a world border.
2. Generate with Chunky.
3. Generate with DHS.
4. Play block game :)
yeah I see, couldn't find the /dh commands or anything related to it
thank you so much for helping out Jckf, appreciate it
Sorry about the confusion. Long term plan is to make the two projects into a single coherent one, but it's a ways out still
fully understand, plugin is so new I was expecting to run into things like this
you guys are doing great, honestly breathing new life into the game for me and others right now and it genuinely could be gamechanging if this becomes more stable / performant in the future
huge respect
Wait how do you do that
The core of Distant Horizons is written to be as platform agnostic as possible, so it itself does not have any specific ties to for instance Forge or Fabric. In very simple terms; it just relies on being provided wrapper objects that represent the objects it needs to access, so the version for each mod loader simply implement these wrappers differently - but use the same core. In theory it should also be possible write these wrappers for any plugin system as well, like Bukkit or Sponge.
Lets not hijack this thread for this conversation though.
@Jckf (GMT+2) can you edit the plugin's /dh command to print some more useful info and also maybe redirect to plugin docs
Yeah I realized that it could be more useful as well. Especially given the conversation in #dh-tech-talk
Pre-generating with chunky worked perfectly fine and none of us have issues. Server performance is decently stable too!!!
Thank you all for your help, as I said this is a game changer for us. Great work on this!!
Do I have to close this thread somehow? Or mark it as solved?
You can leave the thread as-is, since there isn't really any single answer to it :)