Economy The Reason Economy Lags

Discussion in 'Discussion' started by mijiperki, Nov 6, 2020.

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  1. mijiperki
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    mijiperki Well-Known Member

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    This thread is a discussion but also a suggestion so move if necessary.
    TPS = Ticks per second (simplified: The rate at which things happen on the server, crop growth etc. 20 = singleplayer speed)

    TL;DR - The cheapest to setup and most profitable farming method causes the highest TPS drop and a single farm owned by 1 user drops TPS from 19+ to ~12. This needs to be fixed, removed and *bannable.

    All player usernames or images of their islands are hidden in this post to avoid problems!

    For months now, the /economy server has been struggling to stay above 19 TPS for more than a few minutes/hours after restart. Players have had ideas about why this is and some have turned out to help such as removing large quantities of chickens or item frames but still have nowhere near fixed the issue.

    For those payers that are online right after restart, the server runs perfectly fine for a "random" period of time before it suddenly becomes sluggish and "laggy". To see how bad the problem was I decided to make a bot to monitor the TPS of the server after restart. Using a free, open source, program and some hobbyist-level C# knowledge, I threw together a simple bot that collects the server TPS and any player connections / disconnections and logs them to a text file. This brought to light quite how instant and bad the drop in TPS is.
    upload_2020-11-6_13-46-6.png
    31/10/2020 Restart (GMT)
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    With this information of exactly what time the TPS suddenly drops, I utilised the second part of the bot. I looked at which players connected / disconnected at around the same time of the drop. I will not be publicly naming and shaming these players as there is a very high chance that they are completely unaware of the problems they are causing and I do not blame them as their farms are VERY common designs copied from popular YouTube tutorials which is also an issue within itself.

    So once I found the names of the player/s I decided to add them to the graph to see how related their playtime was with TPS and well... The graph speaks for itself.
    upload_2020-11-6_13-48-1.png
    5/11/2020 Restart (GMT)
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    So what are these players doing that's causing this TPS drop? Good question and if admins+ had responded to me months ago we would all have known by now. However, surprisingly enough, they didn't reply so I decided that in my own free time I would look for and try to get the coords of these players islands. Its taken a while but I finally found enough islands to fully prove one of, if not THE, main reasons the /economy server lags so much.

    So I bet you're all expecting a redstone filled massive pumpkin and cactus growing megafarm with 500 sheep spawners too? Right? No?

    upload_2020-11-6_14-6-18.png

    Oh. Just that simple mob farm from that first page YouTube tutorial? Yes**.

    **The players in question have scaled this farm up to 25+ columns on some islands and 25+ layers on others. With farms that big, the server is constantly having to deal with all of these water flow updates across multiple islands EVERY tick.
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    Some people may be thinking "Are you SURE that's the actual cause and not something else they are doing or something that happened at the exact same time".
    No, I am not 100% certain this is the issue because I cannot monitor absolutely everything that these players do but I would put a lot of money at 95% sure. Just take a look at this graph of one of the players in question joining and leaving.
    upload_2020-11-6_14-19-29.png
    30/10/2020 End of Drop Party (GMT)
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    And this one where I flew to their island before they got online and then a staff member booted them to spawn also.
    upload_2020-11-6_14-24-9.png
    4/11/2020
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    Coincidence? I doooon't think so.


    So what do we, the players, do?
    Well the obvious thing is if you have a farm with this design or any farm with large amounts of flowing water, be that mob flushing, cocoa beans etc. Please reduce the size or stop using it until a fix is made.

    Secondly, if you know anyone that has one of these farms, ask them to read this thread and at least do that ^

    My suggestion:
    Firstly, some of these farms have been proven, with moderators present, to drop TPS by up to 10 (19.8 -> ~9). The player carried on AFK-ing the rest of the day and hopped back on the next day like nothing happened... If your island is proven to cause significant TPS drop with significant proof (nobody being there raises TPS significantly at that point in time) you should HAVE to change/resize it or face punishment to reduce your online time until you do because it is not fair that everyone else has to suffer because of 1 or 2 players. *This should come under a new official "intentional cause of lag" rule as once the player is alerted that their island is a problem they will have decided to ignore requests to do anything about it, thus becoming intentional.

    Secondly, find or create a plugin or similar to try to help reduce the TPS drop that flowing water causes. Obviously it isn't as simple as that but I have no clue what sort of plugins are currently being used on this server but judging by how badly a relatively small scale water flush farm can affect TPS, my guess is that nothing in this particular area is being used.

    Finally, an obviously unpopular suggestion that should only be used/seen as a last resort, change mob spawn rules, mob drop sell prices or something similar. This will, however, make the already low prices lower but may be enough to deter these lag machines from being used until a fix is created and implemented.

    Extra:
    If you have any questions or comments please leave them here instead of PMing me as then everyone can also see the answers and nothing will get missed or be asked multiple times!

    This thread is not meant to point fingers or send hate at those with these farms but something needs to be done otherwise all that will happen is more of these farms will start popping up and TPS will continue to plummet.
     
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  2. UrsusMaiorus
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    UrsusMaiorus Well-Known Member

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    thats why mob cap diaprears randomly
     
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  3. Moee
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    Moee Well-Known Member

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    I have waayyy too many suggestion posts open right now; make a suggestion to halve the update speed of water, maybe look online for water lag fixes or smth.
    EDIT: have you reached out to this player to alert them of your concerns?
     
  4. otter360
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    otter360 Active Member

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    That particular mob farm design is intended to have only creepers spawn. This would be to utilize the extremely high /sell all price it gives (almost $60, rounded up).
     
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  5. mijiperki
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    mijiperki Well-Known Member

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    I have reached out to some players and as expected they didn't want to turn their farms off permanently / reduce its size due to it making them so much money every day. That's why I think this needs to be "fixed" as making rules around maximum farm sizes on an economy server should not have to be the route we take.

    The one viewable screenshot of the farm design is my small scale farm that I built a looong time ago (just used for the public screenshot as I didn't want to leak the specific users islands) and it did produce a decent amount of gunpowder and $!
    However, some of the main people using this design on a much larger scale do not utilise the cobble wall method so that they can also allow spiders to spawn. They then craft the string into bows and sell them to /shop for the very unbalanced sell price of $10 per bow.
     
  6. Grips23
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    Grips23 Active Member

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    Fingers crossed something can be worked out to fix this soon, the tps drops have been quite dishearten to play with, even reduced my farms outputs down to 1/3rd :(

    If any of the players using these designs want a hand making some new farms that are friendly please message me in game or comment and id be glad to spread some of the wealth making tips!

    I'd also like to mention that during tps drops, once below 18, simple things like eating, smelting, crows regrowing take a much longer time! (The eating part I didn't notice myself but new players/greenbeans complaining during these low tps events asking in chat "why is it taking so long to eat/why wont my tree grow"). During one event in particular I spent 4+ hours smelting 27 stacks of chorus fruit with a double auto furnace, this process should of taken 2.4 hours normally for reference.

    PS. craft some pumpkin pies, sell all the crops, make all the blocks, share the stonks :D
     
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  7. badpeteno
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    badpeteno Well-Known Member

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    This is why I'm in favor of AFK being illegal. Also, I think said farm would fall under the current rule for not creating lag machines.
     
  8. mijiperki
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    mijiperki Well-Known Member

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  9. Grips23
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    Grips23 Active Member

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    A fix to mob grinders could be they stop spawning mobs after a period of time e.g 4 hours perhaps, then until the island has had all players leave allowing the island to unload, would reset and perhaps have a cooldown window of 30-45 minutes between reactivating, meaning those who AFK'ing for long times with mob grinders eventually have their profit cut off, letting in new people, and as mob grinders are largely a low tier income source, shouldnt see many complaints if implemented as they dont scale well and to my knowledge aren't used my many players at a higher levels of playing
     
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  10. Bossgamer
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    Bossgamer Super Moderator Super Moderator

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    Hi Miji, thanks for bringing this up. I'd just like to let you know that your thread has not gone unnoticed by the staff team.
     
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  11. vvyovx
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    vvyovx Member

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    Hello
    I've noticed a severe increase in lag since I've come back to the economy server. After some investigation and a recreation of what Miji has mentioned built to test definitive lag by lw5, we can confirm the ticks per second (functional responsiveness of the server) decreases from 20 to an astonishing 9 while the farm is active. When run alongside the specified user it can drop to as low as 4-5. These numbers are without being built to half of its full size. I see farms like this causing a significant decrease in the server's performance as lag machines and something that warrants a reaction from the staff to at least not decrease the health of the server. Please consider this while deciding what actions to take. =)
    ~vv
     
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  12. Lw5
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    Lw5 Active Member

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    I saw an conversation with 2 people writing about "load balancing" and what i've heared in chat it sounds like a solution to lag. I know nothing about server or load balancing or whatssoever maybe someone else know about it more. What i've heared it will increase performance a lot but might be able to save more money server side.
     
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  13. Boltgreywing
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    Boltgreywing Member

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    If the size of the farm remained the same but the rate at which the farms were flooded changed from being flooded every second to every 1 to 3 minutes would that reduce the lag? I am just kind of curious as those sound like really large scale farms that are mentioned above. Also does this farm cause the same amount of lag in versions 1.13, 1.14, 1.15, and 1.16 or is it much reduced for this particular farm? Is the farm lag smaller with versions lower than 1.12 involving this water mechanic? I must say the statistics are quite impressive though.
     
  14. mijiperki
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    mijiperki Well-Known Member

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    The high quantity of dispensers dispensing water that spreads simultaneously is the main issue here. Each time that the dispensers are activated it causes a lag "spike" during which the server runs significantly slower. Due to how often these farms are activated the server never "recovers" from these lag "spikes" so it feels like the server is constantly under stress when really its just catching up from the last lag "spike" and then it's hit with another.

    So this does in fact mean that if the farms are activated with a lot more delay between activations it would improve performance however it is not a true solution due to the fact that when they are activated the server will still drop down in TPS significantly while processing the water flow updates. A real solution (similar to your idea) is to not allow ALL the dispensers in the farm to activate within the window of a few seconds to reduce the mass stress that the server has to deal with. The server cant process this many calculations and maintain the usual game speed so it "slows down" thus "lagging" the server. If instead the farms manually spread their dispensing over a few minutes (1 tower at a time, half a tower at a time etc) the server would see little to no visual impact whilst these types of farms are in operation.

    Due to players being very unlikely to change their designs, devs could enforce this behaviour by having cooldowns or maximum dispenser activations per chunk/island boundary which would force players to not have mass water flowing at the same time. Keep in mind that very few players would actually ever reach these limitations if implemented correctly as only those really pushing for maximum farm size would have enough dispensers to trigger the limit.


    I am unable to speak for these versions as I have very little playtime in them but it is VERY unlikely this server will see a change in version especially to one of these mentioned.
     
  15. Lw5
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    Lw5 Active Member

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    Any updates on this? :D
     
  16. Ca1
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    Ca1 Senior Member

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    I think the mods banned the perpetrators!
     
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  17. Lw5
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    Lw5 Active Member

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    Good joke tps jumped by a whole 3 tps! :D
     
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  18. GLaDDeX1234
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    GLaDDeX1234 Active Member

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    I'd like the lag to go down, but i think Banning is a little harsh. Could we just give them a warn and instruction for the Player to take it down? (Then we ban if they don't ig)
     
  19. Ca1
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    Ca1 Senior Member

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    Nope sorry 31 day ban instantly.
     
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  20. GLaDDeX1234
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    GLaDDeX1234 Active Member

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    Aw, ig that's fair. But is there an appropriate sized farm that won't do so much to the TPS (or hopefully almost nothing)? I've been slacking on making one, but I RLY don't want a 31 day ban like this, so what's the limit?
     

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