Experience with NoLagg

What's the general consensus with NoLagg? Do people use this plugin with good results?

I've been doing reading, and I just haven't gotten any quality information from server owners if it actually works (Zenforo search sucks). There seems to be a lot of threads with people having issues with it, however, most of them are either configuration problems/plugin conflicts/version mismatch issues. There are also a bunch of threads asking about some nasty chunk corruption issues that it has caused in the past.

The issue I'm trying to solve is improving tick rate. We're not pegging 1 core on our quad core, however at around 50 players the tick rate starts to noticeably drop. The other cores are mostly quiet. RAM isn't a problem for us, plenty to spare. Nighttime is usually the worst, the moon starts to lag a tiny bit, but it's not too bad, and there is a tiny bit of jitter with character movements. I'm assuming most of the extra load has to do with monster spawning.

The chunk loading/unloading features look like they could be appealing. Testing the plugin on our test server by myself it "appears" that chunks are loading smoother, but that could just be part of the chunk loading algorithm, and not actually making things load faster. It did seem to increase my RAM usage by a significant amount. Unfortunately, without any sort of load test, these antidotes are meaningless. The buffered item spawning stuff doesn't really interest me, and I wouldn't plan on using it (item littering hasn't been a huge problem for us).

Does anybody have experience they could share that would be helpful in my situation? Would the NoLagg chunk handling improvements actually improve tick rate, or is it just snake oil? I know I can load it up on our server to see for myself (which I'll do anyways), but I wanted to hear of some experiences first. I don't care if it uses more CPU/RAM/whatever, as long as it actually will improve the tick rate.

EDIT: Here are my -X flags in case anybody cares.

Code:

-XX:+DisableExplicitGC -XX:+CMSParallelRemarkEnabled -XX:+UseAdaptiveGCBoundary -XX:-UseGCOverheadLimit -XX:+UseBiasedLocking -Xnoclassgc -XX:UseSSE=3 -XX:+UseParNewGC -XX:ParallelGCThreads=2 -XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC

 

I've experienced good things with NoLagg. Often posts don't contain these good things about a plugin, more the bugs. The tick rate on a really crummy server of mine improved quite well. It had something like 600MB RAM, 16 Players online and no block latency. TPS was almost 20, with a >1% error.

 

CHeck out Crafkbukkit++ by Afforess. It does much the same thing as NoLagg, but it's built right into Craftbukkit

http://forums.spout.org/threads/craftbukkit.938/