Mindcrack Server Lagging After Recent Update

[Himea]

Hello,

As the title says after the recent Mindcrack pack update on May 27th (I believe v8.3.1) my server's CPU has been running very hot with the CPU constantly maxed out even with no one online. I've been hosting this server for a little while and before the update it was fine running at an average of 20-40% with 5-10 people logged in at once. I can't make sense of the logs because of the constant spam of the classic "Warning! Can't keep up!", but I've gathered that the problem seems to start up when entering certain parts of the world. To my knowledge nothing has changed since before the update and there's nothing running that should be eating up all of the CPU.

The server is hosted through mcprohosting.com (Multicraft) so I can't give exact specs on the system, but I do know it is using "Dual Xeon E5-2620 Processors, 1.6GB DDR3 ECC RAM, Samsung SSDs, and 1Gbps blended fiber connections".

Does anyone know of a possible reason why the recent update is taking such a toll on the server when before it was running fine?

Thanks for your time.

 

[Urufu_Shinjiro]

I'm getting the exact same issue. I can stop and start the server and it's fine for a random period of time, then sometime later int he day I'll look and whether someone logged in or not suddenly I was at 99% CPU. It seems like it would fluctuate, 40%,70%,50%,99%,60%,95% ever half second it would spike. I made some changes to my bat file per another thread and that seemed to slow the start of the issue but it did come back, though this time it was fluctuating between 20% and 50% but still spamming Can't Keep Up! error.

 

[Mr Chris]

Not really familiar with the Mindcrack pack but you could try checking the number of drops on the ground using /mem (might be a Essentials/Bukkit feature, cant remember) and it will tell you how many entities there are.

 

[Urufu_Shinjiro]

I doubt it has to do with entities, nothing on the server has changed except the update itself. No new machines or anything like that, no new structures, nothing. No player even has to log in for this to happen on my server.

 

[Mr Chris]

Like I said, im not familiar with the Mindcrack pack so I just defaulted to general lagbusting.

 

[Himea]

Update: I've definitely localized the problem to having the server load certain areas. I've changed the server settings to not allow chunk loaders higher than 10, but that doesn't seem to be related to the problem. After restarting my server and logging in, it is running fine at 27% CPU. I can move all around my usual work area with nothing significant happening, even in the area with two quarries running has no problems. However the very moment I enter an area that one of my buddies has been playing in, the server load maxes out. It stays maxed out even after I leave, and only stops when the server is restarted.

I've scouted out the area and there doesn't appear to be anything significant that would cause server lag; just a few caverns and a couple hollowed out areas where a mining turtle has worked. He tells me that to his knowledge he hasn't done anything that would cause lag. There are no machines running, all he has is a couple chests and some torches. I've spent hours pouring through the logs and I can't ascertain what the root cause is.