Server Optimizations
Table of Contents
Slimefun is a really big plugin and therefore always raises questions about its performance.
The plugin has been around since 2013 and has received many alterations and optimizations over the years. But depending on how you use this plugin, performance might differ.
This article should help you discover bottlenecks and limitations and guide you to optimize your server and your Slimefun configuration to run as smooth as possible.
Here are some of the most important tips on how to optimize your Server or your Slimefun configuration:
The most important aspect of Server-optimization is information.
You need to know what to look for in order to improve performance, so here are some very important tools you should get familiar with:
Spigot and Paper both come with their own profiler already. You can access this profiler by running /timings in chat.
These profilers provide insight into what your Server is struggling with, it can even break it down into each plugin you use and even the specific tasks of these plugins.
Note: Understanding a timings-report can be a difficult task. Please refer to this wiki article on spigotmc.org for a general overview of how timings work.
But keep in mind that not every number in these reports is important, particularly "startup-tasks" can show up as red while they don't have any impact on performance since they only run during the server's startup sequence.
Slimefun also provides its own profiling tool which allows you to find sources of lag.
By running /sf timings you get an overview of what chunks, what machines or even what addon has a high impact on performance.
Try it out and get yourself familiar!
You will surely see some differences between the different content in Slimefun and any addons.
In addition to your standard timings-tool, there are also some third-party tools which can help you and developers to track down where the lag is coming from code-wise. We personally recommend ⚡ Spark by @Luck. Reports from Spark have helped us tackle a few optimization problems and identify bottlenecks already, so it seems like a very useful asset for both, server owners and developers.
Choosing the right Server Software plays an important role in Server-optimization.
Since the discontinuation of CraftBukkit, Spigot has become the standard Server software.
But there are countless alternatives and forks to choose from.
Paper for example is a fork of Spigot and has proven itself to have slightly better performance than Spigot and also provides better and more detailed timings-reports.
Cargo networks from Slimefun have been optimized to work best when using Paper.
But there are countless other forks of Bukkit/Spigot out there which claim to also improve performance.
We suggest you to look into this yourself and make your own choice.
If you have control over your Server's Java version, try to choose the latest possible version of Java.
Once you have chosen a Server Software that you think is right for you, you should probably also dedicate some time to configuring this software.
There have been many external guides on how to do that, so we will just link some of them here (They are better at this than we are):
- Reducing Lag - A basic guide (SpigotMC Wiki)
- Server Optimization Guide (Posted by @Celbrimbor on the SpigotMC Forums)
- Optimizing Java Garbage Collection (@aikar's personal blog)
Do not use /reload. Ever.
Whenever you add a new plugin or edit a config file, restart your Server. Using /reload can cause huge memory leaks that negatively impact your Server's performance. /reload is not safe to use and you should avoid it at all costs.
A lot of plugins are not meant to deal with reloads and Slimefun is one of them, you should always restart your server instead.
Slimefun has been around for a long time and there have been many Servers who use it since years.
Any Server that has used Slimefun before summer 2019 will have a bunch of old Slimefun Items.
These items are likely to still use an old Item format which is slow and inefficient.
The old format relied on lengthy Item comparisons and lookups.
Everytime a player clicks with an Item in their hand, Slimefun has to compare this item with every Slimefun item in existence, including any items from addons.
This is a relatively quick operation but the time increases with the amount of addons and the amount of players on your server.
The new item format instead assigns any Slimefun item NBT tags that tell the plugin what item the player is actually holding.
This is significantly quicker and reduced all these comparisons to just one simple lookup operation.
However as we do not want to break any old items without these NBT tags, the system will still fallback to the old one in order to preserve compatibility with older items.
If you are confident that you have no Items which were crafted before summer 2019, you can disable this fallback and use the new system exclusively.
This will improve your Server's performance significantly.
But be aware that any items crafted before summer 2019 might break when doing so.
You can optimize your Server with this method by setting backwards-compatibility to false in your plugins/Slimefun/config.yml.
options:
backwards-compatibility: falseMany Slimefun blocks execute code on a very regular basis, the default for this setting is set to run these tasks every 10 MC ticks (20 MC ticks = 1 second).
You can increase this delay to slow down block-ticks which might help your server's performance.
However you shouldn't set it too high, otherwise your players might complain about their machines running too slow.
You can configure this setting in your plugins/Slimefun/config.yml. We recommend to only make small changes to the default value of 10 MC ticks when necessary.
URID:
custom-ticker-delay: 10Similar to this setting, Slimefun regularly checks Player's armor to apply effects that come with wearing specific sets of armor.
The default setting for this task is set to 10 MC ticks (20 MC ticks = 1 second).
You can also change this value when necessary.
options:
armor-update-interval: 10Cargo networks are known to cause some performance drops depending on how they are set up.
They have gone through many optimizations over the years but they can still cause a bit of trouble from time to time.
With the merge of Pull Request #2106 Cargo networks have been drastically optimized to run best when using Paper. You can find more info about Server Software in section 2. Choosing the right Server Software.
Here are two ways how you can limit cargo networks to prevent your players from making large networks that hurt your server's performance.
You can set a maximum network size for cargo- and energy networks in your plugins/Slimefun/config.yml.
The default of 200 possible network members is very generous to players, decreasing this threshold will improve performance.
Note that this limit corresponds to the amount of steps taken by the pathfinding algorithm that looks up possible network members, it does not correspond to the actual amount of nodes in your network!
networks:
max-size: 200Normally, cargo networks are treated like any other ticking block (see Step 4).
But you can also make cargo managers run slower than other blocks.
This delay will make the cargo network skip the amount of ticks specified, a delay of 0 will make cargo networks tick on every run.
A delay of 1 will make networks only tick on every second run. A delay of 2 will make it skip 2 runs before it runs again, so it runs on every third run. And so on...
As this setting is multiplied by the tick-rate mentioned earlier, setting this too high can be a big disruption to your player's experience.
We recommend setting it to 1 and only increase it when absolutely needed.
networks:
cargo-ticker-delay: 1Lastly, one of the most effective ways to optimize your performance is to keep automatic Slimefun updates enabled at all times!
We regularly release patches, fixes and small performance optimizations and the plugin gets better (content- and performance-wise) with every newly released build.
You should always use the latest version, so we highly recommend you to enable auto-updates in your plugins/Slimefun/config.yml.
options:
auto-update: trueThis Wiki is made by the community and for the community. Here are a few ways you can help with that:
If you have any questions, you can also just join Slimefun's Discord Server and ask there :)
