FTB Performance

[Cougar281]

Does anyone know if there are any performance tweaks for FTB? I have a server in a datacenter (Running VMWare ESXi 4.1, dual Xeon X7560's and 96GB RAM) that's running several servers, including a few Bukkit Minecraft servers, a private Feed the Beast server, and had at one time a few Tekkit servers. I've noticed with the FTB (and with Tekkit as well), the performance is not overly smooth. Moving around is jerky, not sure you could consider it lag. Even a brand new FTB server is less than smooth. But if I go over to the Bukkit Minecraft servers, they are smooth as glass. No lag. No jerkiness. Nothing.

It does seem to get a bit better when I leave my base, but I wouldn't say it's as smooth as the Bukkit servers. I don't have a ton going on at 'home'. Two or three timers, an Enderchest connected to a filter, two Tesseracts (one energy, one item), a Chunkloader and a bunch of various machines that are mostly inactive.

I've watched resources and with just me on it, it generally sits around 2% CPU usage and less than 600MB RAM. Does anyone have any thoughts?

 

[Chocorate]

I'm sorry I can't be of much help, but I don't think it's anything you're doing in the game. The servers should be able to handle a simple setup like that, I believe.

 

[Predatorkillol]

maybe try installing optifine .

 

[OmegaPython]

Umm... maybe your computer can't handle FTB very well?

 

[Omicron]

Every content mod you add reduces performance, especially on the client side (your computer).

This is, among other things, because vanilla Minecraft has this odd behavior where it will push its texture sheet to the video card as part of a tick. Every tick. Now, vanilla Minecraft's texture sheet isn't very big, so that behavior is entirely irrelevant for performance. You don't notice it at all, no matter what your system is. However, once you add 70-80 mods on top of that, like the Ultimate pack does, you're going to have a significantly larger one. Like, many dozen times larger. And it's still getting pushed to the video card 20 times a second. Unfortunately this scales really really badly, and ends up burdening the system far more than it should once you go past a certain threshold.

Mind you, there's other reasons for performance impacts when running additional mods, but this is a big one that especially manifests itself in large modpacks.

 

[OmegaPython]

This is, among other things, because vanilla Minecraft has this odd behavior where it will push its texture sheet to the video card as part of a tick. Every tick. Now, vanilla Minecraft's texture sheet isn't very big, so that behavior is entirely irrelevant for performance. You don't notice it at all, no matter what your system is. However, once you add 70-80 mods on top of that, like the Ultimate pack does, you're going to have a significantly larger one. Like, many dozen times larger. And it's still getting pushed to the video card 20 times a second. Unfortunately this scales really really badly, and ends up burdening the system far more than it should once you go past a certain threshold.

Forge changing this may be the biggest feature for 1.5 XD

 

[Omicron]

Is Forge actually doing it though?

I read on the IC2 forums that the proposed fix is kind of a hack and not a proper implementation. It's quite risky accepting such a thing into a codebase as complex as Forge's.

 

[OmegaPython]

Is Forge actually doing it though?

I read on the IC2 forums that the proposed fix is kind of a hack and not a proper implementation. It's quite risky accepting such a thing into a codebase as complex as Forge's.

This is the info I gathered from Soaryn's stream: The latest 1.5.1 Forge build already has a change (I think it only sends the necessary textures each tick). cpw is hoping to take it even further by sending the sprite sheet to GPU initially, then it stores them, so Minecraft doesn't have to send the entire sprite sheet every tick. Also, apparently they have been talking with the Mojang guys about implementing it into vanilla!

 

[Omicron]

That's pretty sweet! Looking forward to the next few Forge builds then

 

[Predatorkillol]

Well now let's wait 2 years years for all the mods to update *cough rp2 *cough *cough no offense Elo

 

[Quesenek]

You told us about your server specs but what are your pc specs along with your download and upload speeds.

 

[Cougar281]

You told us about your server specs but what are your pc specs along with your download and upload speeds.

That probably would help, wouldn't it....

My PC is a Phenom II x6 1100T with 16GB RAM, a 256GB Crucial M4 SSD and a XFX Radeon HD 6870. It has NO problem running Left For Dead 2 spanned across three Dell U2410 monitors with full detail and all effects, so if any variant of Mincraft is beyond it's capabilities.....

Internet connection at home is about 40Mbps in / 4Mbps out, and at the server end it's a Synchronous 20Mbps link to a Tier 1 backbone. I DID have serious lag issues on my previous internet connection, where when I logged in or 'warped' between the nether and overworld, it would take close to 30 seconds for things like doors to work, but that went away with my current connection.

 

[RedBoss]

in today's DW20 ep (4/11/2013) there's discussion on resolving the performance issues with texture sheet loading to be implemented when ftb goes to 1.5.x

so hopefully we'll see some great performance increases. in vanilla I used to run around 60-70 fps, but with 1.5.1 i average around 100-130 fps. FTB should definitely benefit from the performance increase in the update

 

[Quesenek]

That probably would help, wouldn't it....

My PC is a Phenom II x6 1100T with 16GB RAM, a 256GB Crucial M4 SSD and a XFX Radeon HD 6870. It has NO problem running Left For Dead 2 spanned across three Dell U2410 monitors with full detail and all effects, so if any variant of Mincraft is beyond it's capabilities.....

Internet connection at home is about 40Mbps in / 4Mbps out, and at the server end it's a Synchronous 20Mbps link to a Tier 1 backbone. I DID have serious lag issues on my previous internet connection, where when I logged in or 'warped' between the nether and overworld, it would take close to 30 seconds for things like doors to work, but that went away with my current connection.

Go onto a single player FTB world is it still choppy and laggy? With FTB it could very well be beyond your PC's capability's I know when I use to play tekkit I had a phenom II x4 at 4.0Ghz and it was very choppy yet I could run BF3 ultra no problems. When I upgraded to my current PC with an i5 3570k at 4.5Ghz FTB is smooth as glass. I think with minecraft in general you need a beefy CPU to just brute force through everything. FTB is the same thing with 50+ mods added onto it with each and every one of them adding instability in some way or another your CPU simply may not be up to the task of dealing with FTB.

 

[budge]

I would go so far as to say in its current state, modded Minecraft becomes too much for ANY modern computer to handle, simply because of the way modding currently happens. There's no mod API which Mojang can keep a close eye on and tweak as needed for performance. Instead, we have the brilliant third party Forge project, which is awesome, but can't change the core design of Minecraft like Mojang could.

In my opinion, which is based on incomplete data, one of the biggest issues for performance is custom rendering. Right now, vanilla Minecraft has blocks, which are fast to render, and everything else, such as chests and signs, which are slow to render. We don't see performance issues in vanilla as much because it doesn't overuse custom rendering (except in jungles with all those vines...) If Mojang had an official API, they could implement some compromise for custom rendering that wouldn't hit the frame rate as hard as current methods do.

 

[steelblueskies]

run a ftb server locally on a mobile i7 2630qm. thats 4 cores, 2.1ghz base clock 2.8ghz max turbo. 4 cores, 4 ht cores.

with no java arguments, ie the absolute default server it does exactly what you describe. tick rate claims its below 5ms, but things stutter, while the client running again, on the same machine is merrilly chopping away above 50fps.

change java arguments as per certain already published threads on this forum, and the choppy action responses go away until the world is filled with so much going on the tickrate is above 30ms per.
http://forum.feed-the-beast.com/threads/how-to-make-an-efficient-server.5525/
http://forum.feed-the-beast.com/threads/server-lag.2501/

lesson, don't use the default server launch. customize it to fit your needs, esp garbage collection, permgen space, etc.

second lesson, a good gpu is only important in regards to having one that is dedicated, beyond that point you are pretty much in the processor bound realm and doing your personal battle between vram and texture sizes vs resolution.

third lesson huge gobs of ram do sfa for improving performance beyond the mystery range of 4-12 gigs, and generally start to hurt performance when hopped up well beyond that range.