1.7.8. conversion problems and solutions?

I noticed some problems with player file conversions and skulls.

When I tried to convert my player files, it seemed to stop at 11,600 conversions and wouldn't continue after retrying over an hour. I could delete the player folder but then that's a lot of players who lose data.
Anyone have more details on that scenario? Is there a limit on the # of files you can convert before perhaps throttling or something is put on your connecting IP?

Skulls have a few issues too.
- I noticed after the conversion issue, player skulls caused a lot of lag when the chunks they are in load. Apparently if the conversion is unsuccessful (connecting to Mojang servers to acquire ID from Name), this lag will happen again (on restart or perhaps otherwise).
- The SkullMeta call for getOwner() returns a big string like {Name:"DoingItWell", id:"123..."} which can be breaking for some plugins. Plugins need updating that rely on how that worked previously.

Maybe on this thread people can share other problems they encountered, advice from successful conversions, or other tidbits.

For the player file problem, I may just try to convert the most recent players and delete the rest. However, I'm still thinking how best to handle skulls.

 

I'll stay on 1.7.5 a little longer but add a catchitall-uuid-etc plugin to record things, just in case and to buy time.

Almost all user interfacing needs to be changed, including signs for shops, protection. In effect i will probably recode or alter some plugins that i had just used before, in order to work with some global token system, though the original name-owners shall still use their name, something like that.

I will then probably also add a trust-thingy, that allows to define buddies, so you can use your friends names in very important commands like for economy, as long as the buddies still have their name - if they change their name, the commands with the old name will fail, if set as buddy. Because tokens are not nice to remember, i might reserve left clicking on all interaction for "info" on things, also stating names behind the tokens, while the right click is reserved for actually using something, so no more both-buttons interaction like buy/sell with one sign.

 

Also noticed 1.7.8 is incredibly laggy for my server.

40 ish players with a 20 TPS on 1.7.5

6 players with a 15 TPS on 1.7.8, minus 2 somewhat heavyweight plugins due to incompatibility and server intensive activity disabled using /stoplag from WorldGuard)

It's not the specs of the machine, because they've proven to be ample for over a year now.

Although I havent conducted super official benchmarks, I'm still going to go ahead and blame the new software for being inefficient.

 

Its not working for me when I just try to convert the player files from different worlds, And I have only had 167 total users join my server.