:( You need a bigger pipe (yj)

Not got much time to play for long periods, joys of having babies I guess, and tonight, first time I decide to try the server we're also looking after my 6 month and 2 year old niece.

Good fun tho. The lag seems way better with animals/monsters off.

Going to turn monsters back on tomorrow and see how it goes. I'll leave animals off.

Also going to see if I can pick up a better socket 775 processor for cheap too.

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....

Right, There's definitely no way to do it without mods.

However there is now a working version of hMod for 1.21, so I'll go about setting that up and see what plugins I need to limit monster spawning.

Any other plugins people want?