Airplane Server for TF (reopened)

    The original suggestion was posted by Reperak, but the original suggestion was deleted by him. I decided to reopen this suggestion because I believe that it will befit the server. This is perfect time to consider this suggestion as we are upgrading to 1.17.

    What is Airplane

    Airplane is a server software like Paper, Airplane is a fork of Tuinity (which is a fork of Paper) that optimizes the performance of both of the said softwares. Because Airplane is a fork of a fork, it has the same API as Spigot, which means that (in theory) all of your plugins will work with Airplane.

    DEAR

    One of the most notable optimizations that Airplane has is DEAR (or Dynamic Entity Activation Range). When a mob does some task, like walking around, jumping, eating grass, etc. in order for mobs to do these tasks, they need to use their AI, which uses CPU. While I did list some very simple tasks, they really add up when a bunch of mobs perform these. Imagine 500 sheeps eating grass or 500 villagers walking around, that can really cause lag and reduce the server's TPS.

    What Airplane does is that when a player is far away from these mobs, it limits the AI of these mobs to save valuable CPU power, the further away from a player the more limited the AI gets.

    https://blog.airplane.gg/static/79036e3d9d743fce4fbd3b0b9c6acda5/39ede/dear.jpg

    The image here shows DEAR in action, the numbers above the mobs are the AI power that mob has. (1/2 is half the AI power and 1/4 is a quarter and so on)

    Other Optimizations

    There other optimizations Airplane has to offer than just DEAR, though, they're not talked about as much, so I encourage you to test Airplane to see what other optimizations it has to offer.

    My understanding, according to previous comments, is that Airplane optimises CPU usage while the machine running TF's powerful enough that improvement's negligible while adding the problems of running a deeper level of forks.

    TotalFreedom's Executive Community & Marketing Manager

    @"Ryan"#1 what CPU does freedom-01 use? I remember it's powerful enough to make DEAR optimisations unnoticeable, but I could be wrong. Maybe this is more useful in a SMP environment.

    TotalFreedom's Executive Community & Marketing Manager

    Quote

    ↩  FromTimeToTime my impression was the opposite, that the server falls over very easily, and it can use all the help it can get.

    From what I've found, the servers resources are more than capable. We rarely actually use near the max memory, disk IO or CPU that the VPS has allocated to it. However it's equally not all that hard to crash servers when you know what you're doing which tends to be where we run into issues...

    Wild1145

    Network Owner at TotalFreedom

    Managing Director at ATLAS Media Group Ltd.

    Founder & Owner at MastodonApp.UK

    For those curious, some historical data over the last 35 days from Freedom-01's VPS:

    Server CPU Load:

    Lower is generally better. The orange line is where a "Warning" alarm is tripped, and the red line is where a "Critical" alarm will be raised.

    Memory Usage:

    Hopefully you all know about this, generally lower is ideal, but you get the idea anyway... The closest to 100% this sustains the more "efficient" we're using the memory allocated.

    I've not got historic metrics unfortunately for Disk IO, but I've not seen any warnings that I would expect to see that would suggest they're an issue.

    Above charts are the last 35 days.

    Wild1145

    Network Owner at TotalFreedom

    Managing Director at ATLAS Media Group Ltd.

    Founder & Owner at MastodonApp.UK

    So I've pulled some data again as part of re-visiting this and considering if it's something we would want to roll out as standard, and given the fact we rarely have issues with CPU Utilization or load, I'm not sure this is actually worth going another 2 or 3 forks down-stream for...

    These are again both over the last 35 days so give a decent bit of visibility.

    Wild1145

    Network Owner at TotalFreedom

    Managing Director at ATLAS Media Group Ltd.

    Founder & Owner at MastodonApp.UK

    ↩ @'Ryan' CPU utilization means nothing when you're hosting a Minecraft server. This is because Mojang thought it would be a great idea to make the Minecraft Server utilize only one processor thread. Your server could be lagging even at <1% CPU all because Mojang didn't utilize all the processor.

    Given the move to the new panel, this is going to be much more difficult / impossible. With that in mind, and given there's no data to suggest this would currently add value, I'm going to decline it. I'm happy to re-visit though when we have completed the panel migration for Freedom-01.

    Wild1145

    Network Owner at TotalFreedom

    Managing Director at ATLAS Media Group Ltd.

    Founder & Owner at MastodonApp.UK