Minecraft – Disable Minecraft Server Chunk Caching on Windows Server 2008

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I'm running a minecraft server on windows server 2008, and I'm going to run the world on a RAM disk. However, since a RAM disk is RAM heavy, I would like to minimize or disable block caching in RAM. The read/write speed to the disk will be virtually identical to a cache, and doesn't cause me double overhead.

Is it possible to do disable caching, and if so, how?

Best Answer

Minecraft isnt caching it in the traditional sense of the word, the data has to be stored in memory owned by minecraft at some point, in order for minecraft to do anything with the data. Even reading it!

Therefor it is not possible to totally disable 'caching'. Its also not possible for minecraft to just use the memory of the RAM disk directly, it has to go through the operating system first, which adds quite a bit of latency (nothing compared to HD access, but compared to RAM access).

So it's not useful to just disable caching, it might be possible to reduce the time until chunks that aren't near any players are unloaded with a plugin, but I have been unable to find one. One hackish way that might work is to reduce the maximum memory minecraft can use, that would force it to unload unused chunks faster.

Of course, the only wasted RAM is RAM that's not being used, so (on a dedicated machine) there is no harm in letting minecraft store something it can access very fast.

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Minecraft Server Admin: Regions vs Logging

CoreProtect is multi-threaded. Bukkit isn't. You have a dual core processor.

What this means is that although Bukkit will be restricted to a single core, CoreProtect can do all file logging on the second core.

This means that server performance will not be impacted at all when using CoreProtect.

-Intelli / CoreProtect Dev

Minecraft – Terminal script for Minecraft server autosave

My recommended solution for this kind of thing tends to be "Use The System!".

If you have the option, enabling Time Machine from system preferences to create a full disk backup every hour is usually a good idea, and if you don't have the opportunity, you might want to consider getting an external disk and implementing that approach.

If that is completely out of the question for whatever reason, the alternative is using cron.

Setting up the interval running is easy enough, a simple man crontab should give you the information you need on that; but having a script to actually do the backup might be useful:

#!/bin/sh
cd ~/Desktop/MinecraftServer # or the path to your minecraft server directory
rm -rf world.bak
cp -r world world.bak

Save this as a "minecraft_server_backup.sh" and chmod +x it.

This particular script only keeps the most recent backup, and additionally, it doesn't actually check if the server is running before making a backup.

Best Answer

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