Its not the noice thats the problem. Its the particals. This gets especially obvious with tall trees and the more harvesters are around. These particals go all the way from where they where created till they hit a block. If 4 simple harvesters can cause a 75% FPS hit then that is not ok in anny situation.
More so these particals cannot be disabled. Not in vanilla MC and not with optifine. More so the option realy shoudnt be called "Disable sounds for the harvester" as thats a side effect of what it does. It changes the way blocks are destroyed so that instead of getting sound and particles you get neither. Because of this the option cannot be client site because it changes the way the harvester functions.
But hey, if you guys like living hundreds of blocks away from eachother and use powersuits to visit eachother then go ahead. Leave it on. I on the otherhand would like to play multiplayer and actually be able to live and build with other people. Something that simply cannot exist if more then 1 person decides to put down a mfr tree farm. Or if you have someone who realy likes MFR make a huge treefarm. Now sure, if it was a 10% or 20% FPS hit it would be fine. But it isnt. Its a 75% fps hit wich cannot be disabled client side, thats huge and cannot be warrented no matter what arguments. (well unless you buy everyone the best computer out there...)
Another very interesting case similar to this is the water dropping particals. For fun and giggles make a 50x50 platform ~70 blocks up in the air and put water ontop of it. Now fly under it and tell me what this does to your FPS. I am sure happy this case can be turned of and it is not depandent on a server site setting. And then there is ofcourse the simple solution of putting another layer under the platform
Annyway to restate the problem:
- Breaking a block causes particles
- There particles travel from where they where created to the first block they fall on
- A harvester with the "vanilla block destroying" on causes particles to be created
- The bigger the tree, the more particles, the longer they exist
- The more harvesters, the more particles
- The config option that disables the particles (and sounds) is actually a setting for an alternative block destruction method. As such its server sided.
What fixes it:
- Turning off the "Sounds" setting wich realy is an alternate block destruction method that not only disables sounds but also disables the particles.