Help with reading my Timings Report

Here is my timings report on my server: Aikar's Timings Viewer

I seem to be having issue with lag spikes, and it looks like it seems to be coming from my entities. I have lowered a few entities settings, any idea of what I can do to help with this lag? Is it even entities or am I reading the report wrong?

Pixelfam is my world name and I’m running pixelmon reforged 8.2. Seems to be getting about 1 second of lag every 4-7 minutes.

I followed this guide pretty extensively, but maybe I missed a few things that may cause this issue?

Thanks for any help and let me know if you need any other info!

Looking at your timing report, i can see why you think its entities, however it is not the count of entities (you can see by looking at the graph at the top, you can see where the lag happens and the fact its stable afterwards with more entities).

Personally I would think its creation of chunks as if you look at the lag spike, a lot more chunks where loaded in, with the next pin points being a small extra amount. This would also make sense why the entity and tile entity are so high in resources (as new land is explorable and spawnable).

If it is chunks, there are a few things you can do, the first one is to pre-gen a load of chunks in the unexplored areas, this should help, but it will have its limits (aka once players have explored those chunks then your back to square one).

You could also try turning down the “view distance” in server properties. This should reduce the amount of chunks being created at once giving you less lag spread over a longer time.

The last option i can think of is a world border. This is the most reliable way … However it is like says “to prevent world hunger, we remove the hungry”.

I could be completely wrong too

Also, on a minor note, you should set your x and Xms to be the same value, rather than different. This preallocates all memory at launch instead of trying to allocate it as needed later

Okay, so we have actually already done all of those things. I have another timings report here and the chunks don’t seem to correlate with the lag spikes like the timing report I gave, is that still a chunk issue? If it is, what else could we do for chunks, we have pregenned the world, set the world border to 25k, and set the view distance to I think 4?

As for the “x and xms” values to the same, what do you mean by that?

Thanks for you help both of you!

https://timings.aikar.co/?id=744eb8c9422a4d46bc133bc7fd6238d6#timings

We also had a crash and I have pasted the crash report.

Not sure what’s going on, but I think they are related.

https://pastebin.com/embed_js/PqtHsi0r

The crash you had is related, that crash states that the the server hung for too long.

As for the timing report, in the graph it still relates to chunks, however the entities are looking more likely. The crash confirms what sort of entities too (pixelmon entities doing path finds).

As for what d4rkfly3r said, they are talking about launch arguments (the code that is in your start/run server file). You will have a -Xmx with a number and letter next to it. This is how much ram at max your server will use. There is another one called -Xms (assuming thats the one they mean) which will take a number and a letter. This one is the amount of ram your server starts with when it boots up, by having these two the same your server shouldn’t need to wait as it requests more ram.

So if I set my tick time to -1, would that prevent the crashes, or would that just get my server stuck infinitely in lag? That’s what the support through the hosting is saying to do for the crashes, but that seems dangerous?

So if we are having problems with entities, what are some of the things we can do to improve that? I’ve brought down a lot of my settings already, but is there more I can do? I got another crash and crashes make me nervous as the last world that was on this server became corrupt after a crash and we were never able to recover it (we ended up getting the “pokemon is moving too quickly” problem and we couldn’t fix it).

Thanks again for all your help!

So that works on some platforms (I dont believe it works on forge/sponge … But I maybe thinking of Bukkit).

Because the issue is ordinating from path finding of pixelmon entities, I would ask the guys over at pixelmon as I don’t use the mod.

As for server crash corrupting the world, it can happen from a server crash, but if it does then just apply one of your backups of the world. If your not taking backups then start doing so. (You can backup your world by simply zipping the world folder, although a proper backup plugin/mod would probably be more efficient in terms of space saving (depending on the backup method)

Yes, this disables the server watchdog which is responsible for those ‘crashes’ essentially when your server hangs for a length of time.