Tracking down sources of lag?

[Truculent]

I run a small server (~15 people), and we're having some lag problems. Sometimes it's a bad setup - quarry or something overflows storage and a few thousand entities pile up, or a bunch of .2s timers running, things like that. Sometimes it's a lot less obvious like an iron pipe loop caused by a redstone update flipping a pipe. But it's a real pain to track this down. I spend a lot of time debugging it by teleporting all over looking for areas with a ton of entities, tracing pipes to see if stuff is backed up, searching for areas that make my framerate drop, that sort of thing.

I can't expect everyone to always make the most efficient machine setup and never make a mistake. What I'd really like are better debugging tools,a way to show how much load a specific chunk is generating or the chunks that are eating up the most time per game tick, something along those lines. I've searched through bukkit plugins and not found anything, nor any offline map analyzer that would be of use, either.

If anyone knows of anything that might help out, I'd appreciate it.

[Mortalife]

I would also be very much interested in something to help track down lag if anybody knows about such a program, or even just more efficient ways to track lag down.

I'm sure everyone would benefit from whatever advice people could share on the topic.

[sct]

The best thing to do is educate your players on how to build lag-free machines. Come up with a system to teach them and give warnings to the players who don't care about running machines that may leak/cause server stress.

Finding the lag sources is never easy though.

[vidplace7]

NoLagg will help a lot with those entities

When it detects individual items on the ground, it autmatically places them into stacks on the ground, cutting the possible lag amount by about 64 times. 64 times less lag is good all day long

Ex: Your crazy Quarry fills up your one measly chest, and starts spewing the rest out of the top, shit piles up everywhere!! NoLagg piles all of those entities into stacks, so a pile of 4096 entities just became a pile of 64 entities which will degenerate just like the individuals would, problem solved :D

[DoodTheDud]

My friend made a system of EE machines and ended up spilling 7000+ entiities on the ground when his klein star was full.

best solution, find the player nearest the lag (he will have his game turned into slideshow mode) and teleport to him. then type "/remove drops -1" and it should destroy overflow.

This seems to happen with weird loading for pipes when a chunk is loaded/unloaded or something. I'm no expert, just speaking from experience on my server.

One of these guys can probably give you better answers.

[Truculent]

Hey vidplace7 thank you so much for the NoLagg plugin, I can't believe I missed that one in my search. Has anyone used this plugin with a Tekkit server before? Any caveats or issues?

I'll check it out this weekend & report back.

[vidplace7]

I have seen quite a few (good) tekkit servers use NoLagg with no apparent caveats. It has worked fine in my tests. Just make sure you use the build for 1.1-r4