Minecraft server and its bottlenecks.

I run a fairly large community, but even with this config:

i7 980x
24Gb DDR3
500GB SATA drive

I seem to have a cap of around 80 players before we start to notice lag (unsmooth movement, delay in chat etc). The map file itself is 2.8Gb, and I think this is whats causing the strain. How do you guys, who claim to have a 100+ player server, even get to that? Are you using special hard drives like SSDs or Ramdisks?

 

yeah It is most likely your HDD. if you don't want to use Ramdisks then I would recommend SSD's and just have a script running to take the backups from the SSD's and periodically move them to the disk drives for storage. Even though SSD's are way more expensive they are completely worth it

 

A much occuring symptom is that whenever you move towards not-loaded chunks, they get populated with dirt blocks in a noise-like pattern.

Was thinking of using a RamDISK since most linux distro's support that anyway already. I also checked out this MineOS distro that has some very easy scripts to set a server up with ramdisk, but the guy advices you to run it in a VM (VirtualBox, VMWare etc) but this would cause just more overhead?

 

I run my server on Win Server 2008 R2 in Vmware ESXi and I don't see any overhead.
The only issue with VMware is that you lose a little CPU speed but minecraft isn't CPU intensive.

 

Minecraft only uses 1 core really. When 80 people are online, what is the CPU usage like?

Sure a i7 980x has 6 cores, but minecraft won't benefit from it. If you cpu usage on the core minecraft runs on isn't near the 100% then it is most likely your HDD (or internet connection)

If its the HDD, i'd suggest getting an SSD. An OCZ agility 3, 60 GB will set you back like 100 euro but will give you a big performance boost then.

 

Couldn't bandwidth be a factor as well? My server has about 30/30Mbps and I also get a lot of bottlenecks with about 20 players (6gm ded. ram). I'm getting 100/100M to the server on Thursday though, so I guess I'll see if bandwidth really was the problem.

But then again, I run of a HDD as well, not a ramdisk or an SSD. Really considering moving to one of them. Also, my CPU is always pretty high. I have an AMD Athlon II x4 630 propus @ 2.8ghz