Server upgrade time!

[Zedwick]

Fellow Zedlings, I have just put down payment for Zedwork’s new server and will be spending this weekend prepping it and all of our data for migration over to our new home. Current plan is to migrate LVS over on Monday, which means it will be down for some hours on that day. Zurvival will follow on Tuesday, going down for several hours whilst everything transfers across. You’ll still be able to access the Lobby server and canvas during the downtime, I’ve added the canvas as a portal in the lobby server, allowing you to move freely between them. Both servers are also linked by chat, so you can keep talking no matter if you’re drawing or repeatedly falling to your death on the parkour courses

I had initially spoken about this upgrade at LVS’ last council meeting, where I announced our new server would come with a 10% increase in CPU speed. I have since found a better deal, giving us a massive 133% single-thread performance when compared with our current hardware. This will mean more mobs and less lag. We’ll also be making the switch from slow hard-disk drives to an SSD. Minecraft needs to do a lot of writing and reading of the world files on the disk, with so many players running around loading and modifying the world having a slow drive can cause lots of lag. A super fast SSD should allow the world to load and be sent to your client much faster.

This new server costs a bit more than I was hoping to spend, costing upwards of £130 in total this month. I’m sure it’ll be worth it, though.

LVS has been struggling with the numbers trying to log in at times, easily hitting the 30 player cap in the weekend (especially during council meetings). I am confident we can raise that cap a little, but my first priority will be raising the render distance which had been lowered to reduce the load on the server. Raising the render distance should have the added bonus of increased mobs, having been affected by a bug causing far fewer mob spawns than normal. I will also be revisiting some of the other lag-reducing measures in place, like the animal caps. These changes will not happen immediately after switching to the new server, as I will need some time to measure the performance increase and make sure everything is running smoothly before making any changes.

Once everything has been moved over and set-up on the new machine, you’ll be able to log in to find your builds, chests and inventories all there waiting for you. There will be no world wipes or new maps at this time.

If you’d like to help out with paying our monthly fees, please consider supporting Zedwork: http://zedwork.co.uk/donate.php

LVS has been successfully migrated over to our new hardware! Will be monitoring the performance over the next few days before I try raising the view-distance. Look forward to seeing everyone on

Zurvival has been migrated successfully. Sorry for the longer downtime, Zurvival is a little more complicated backend and it took longer than I had hoped to sort it all out.

[Forseth]

Woho! looking forward to it Zedwick.

[HOMINIX]

Excellent to hear! Can't wait to see how the mob spawns are affected with the increased render distance. Do you have an idea of what you want to raise it to? Thanks so much for taking the time and money to make an upgrade

[Zedwick]

Excellent to hear! Can't wait to see how the mob spawns are affected with the increased render distance. Do you have an idea of what you want to raise it to? Thanks so much for taking the time and money to make an upgrade

I'm not sure where it'll be raised to, my plan is to see how smooth things feel and what the CPU usage looks like after the upgrade over a week, then up the render distance by 1 and see how that affects spawns and server load over a period before deciding if we can raise it again. I'd like to raise it up to a point that mob spawns are looking healthy again, and be left with a healthy margin to allow a few more player slots to ensure everyone can get on in our busy periods.

[Dax23333]

Yaay! More Powaaaa!!!!!

Awesome work Zedwick. I'm looking forward to seeing the results!I will be a pro parkour person by Tuesday. Either that or ragequit and doodle for a bit.
Also, I remember you saying some time ago that the server was on a SSD before, but had to go to hard-disk drives as the SSD got filled up with the massive map file. Is this new SSD a nice big one?

[Zedwick]

Also, I remember you saying some time ago that the server was on a SSD before, but had to go to hard-disk drives as the SSD got filled up with the massive map file. Is this new SSD a nice big one?

The new SSD is bigger, but still not massively large (240GB). I'm conscious of the space the servers are using and know they won't suddenly balloon up to the point we have no disk space thanks to the world borders which were not in place back then. We should have a spare ~100GB I'd be using just for working space in checking back ups etc.

[Zeyhn]

Great stuff! Im excited!

[Gadget622]

Awesome! Caving will be more of a challenge! Also, quick question, LVS should be up by 3:00-4:00 on Monday? Also, just a quick comment that has nothing to do with any of this, but I'm so hyped for the new End in 1.9!!

[Zedwick]

LVS has been successfully migrated over to our new hardware! Will be monitoring the performance over the next few days before I try raising the view-distance. Look forward to seeing everyone on

[fisher2760]

good job zed and lady I am looking forward to it and 1.9 loving the server today I think its running smoother some people said so ya great work




keep up the great work by fisher2760