I would appreciate any tips you have for reducing the amount of time it takes for the world save feature to complete it's task. As on my server it would sometimes take up to 10-30 seconds, freezing most activity until it's done, causing heavy lag for the players and sometimes everyone just loses connection it takes so long. I know using a new world would be better or reducing the worlds being used, but this i don't want to be done yet. Was thinking of an SSD , would that help alot ? Thanks in advance.
<Removed - Do not advertise plugin downloads from untrusted sources - Necrodoom> But, the issue with backups is disk IO, if you have an SSD this will help, or a separate drive that can be written to instead of writing to the drive that is being used to read the data as well. I scheduled my backups to take place during the times of least activity (between 4 and 5 AM) for all of my servers (to a remote server) and only keep a daily backup with 21 days of backup history (I have a daily clean up task using the forfiles command from a batch file). If you have a desktop environment with WIndows, BukkitGUI has a nice task scheduler in it that will let you back things up automajikally.
I wouldn't trust a plugin that is not on bukkit dev. Besides, I'd rather do the backups outside of bukkit. No reason to load up yet another plugin into memory when the operating system can call a backup job to run on a schedule, and then completely unload from memory when done. In regards to speed, it is mainly centered squarely on disk I/O. SATA drives are very slow compared to SAS drives and those are slow compared to SSD drives. All of which cost more money to use the faster drives. An each technology I mentioned has various speeds within them...for example, very slow-spinning and energy efficient SATA drives to very high-spinning SATA drives that require more energy but are faster than other SATAs. When you talk about the "save feature," I assume you are referring to the "save-all" command you can issue at the console. That will save your world files where they live (not possible to use a separate disk to speed this operation up)...so having a faster drive will help with this. But one thing you want to make sure is that your OS is not out of memory. If your OS is having to swap program in memory to disk in order to make room for other operations (this is called disk swapping), it can have severe impact on the overall speed of your server. LHammonds
How often do you run the "save-all" command? My world is over 1,000mb and it takes 1 to 2 seconds which is running on SAS drives. My crontab schedule issues the save-all command once an hour (and does an rsync to another drive). The save-off, save-all, rsync and save-on commands all run within 5 to 8 seconds.
Doesn't the save-all command just commit the chunk data changes? I think his issue is actually backing up the world data to another location, correct? I have some worlds that are over 1GB in uncompressed data and they take a good 10-15 seconds to compress and send to the remote backup server (on the same network). But I've never had the save-all command take more than a second or 2. But I am also running on an SSD, so that may be the reason why... Sorry about that, didn't realize it wasn't a Bukkit approved plugin.
thanks for the help guys, i will try out an ssd upgrade but until then if there are more suggestions/tips i would appreciate them.
