Doing some more readings.
Basically I think the reason that mobs slow things down so much is that the method of spawning them is ridiculous.
The spawn algorithm runs 20 times per second(!), and when it finds a valid spawn location it spawns up to 12 mobs at a time. It keeps doing this until a global limit of 200 (possibly 100 since 1.2.1) is reached.
The documentation for the server.properties file is pretty bad - Minepedia is really patchy on it, but I'll keep reading and see what I can find.
It /is/ possible (apparently) to change it with mods, but I'd rather not start installing mods now if Bukkit is on the way. If that's the only way though I guess I will do it...
I was also thinking about upgrading the PC it's running on to 64bit, adding another 4GB of RAM and running the entire World files on a RAM disk.... |