Server Lag? Why is that so?

Hey there we haven’t posted anything in the last week but we are still here so whats happening?

We have been started hosting new servers and dropped some old servers. Our currently most used server does belong to the awesome Aphmau’s – Minecraft Diaries + Modpack. The user base is so overwhelming that we had to open a second server today to distribute the players a little better and reduce lag.

Also our other servers are heavily used. We are talking about 61 people playing on our Mincraft Modded and Vanilla servers simultaneously. Around 85% of them on Modded servers! Of course this sets our root server under heavy load.

The fact that Minecraft is not programmed to use multiple cores makes our modded servers with many people online lag, even though we have loads of CPU power (6 Cores / 12 Threads @ 3.8 GHz) backing them.

But what does this to our server? See it for yourself:

As you can see, while our CPU is not that heavily used, our HDD’s are in the evening at nearly 100% IO-load. This is what causes the timeouts and lag on our Minecraft servers. Also our RAM is most of the day at ~60 GB of usage by apps, which basically means the system has left as little as 4 GB. Sometimes swapping also kicks in and makes things even worse.

Also take into consideration, we also host our Website, our Teamspeak 3 server and many more services on this server!

We do our best to avoid any lags but sadly we sometimes cannot do anything about it because it is related to badly implemented Minecraft mods / plugins, non-optimized Modpacks or heavy load due to loads of users joining at the same time.

We hope this explains the lag a little bit to you.

Sincerely,

Your Unitedworldminers Team