If I'm being honest, I dont really see this rule solves anything. As other people have said this would be the equivalent of a band aid instead of a suture. The misconception that farms are the cause or one of the causes of the lag still seems prevalent even though the data
@luisc99 collected shows otherwise.
The Qualia test can essentially be used a a control, what a typical player may be loading and the effects of that upon the server.
1. Qualia
As a baseline, I performed each of the tests at the Qualia warp point, to get a picture of how a typical area should perform. Some processing involved here will be the items in all of the showcases, and those cool little floating text things we've got dotted around Qualia. This is the graph of the TPS and average time between ticks in all three versions (red is 1.14, green is 1.15, blue is 1.16), but this is the general summary:
Version | Mean TPS | Median TPS | Standard Deviation |
1.14 | 19.80 | 20.30 | 2.27 |
1.15 | 19.92 | 19.51 | 2.01 |
1.16 | 19.98 | 19.89 | 2.77 |
And the statistics from Octos Farm.
2. Octo's Farm
Here, the major things for the server to process is the redstone and pistons involved in the farms, every entity that is in the farm, each of the item drops it creates, and all the hoppers and chests that are required to store all the drops. Again, this is the graph of how it performed in different versions, and this is how it breaks down:
Version | Mean TPS | Median TPS | Standard Deviation |
1.14 | 19.52 | 19.97 | 4.29 |
1.15 | 20.03 | 20.59 | 2.97 |
1.16 | 20.06 | 20.24 | 3.44 |
Comparing the two, as Luis already said, there is a very small drop in TPS, one that probably wouldnt be noticed by players. The conclusion that we can draw from this is that pumpkin farms really dont have that big of an impact upon server performance; the drop in TPS between Qualia and Octos Farm in 1.14 is only about 1.7%. This is obviously only done with one large farm but a situation where there are multiple people online using their farms at once seems to be unlikely.
And now the stats from Cyphurs farm.
3. Cyphur's Farm
I picked this as a third test to ensure I've got multiple data points for farms, rather than just the single one. As Cyphur admitted in a different thread that they have a large farm, I took that as an invitation to test it. Much like Octo's farm, there are a lot of things to process here, mainly entities and water flows, but this farm also includes nether portals, which will involve moving entities between worlds, which may be a source of strain on the server by requiring more chunks to be loaded and unloaded. As with before, here is the chart, and here are the results:
Version | Mean TPS | Median TPS | Standard Deviation |
1.14 | 19.48 | 20.06 | 6.35 |
1.15 | 20.03 | 20.00 | 2.37 |
1.16 | 20.16 | 20.06 | 2.29 |
Whereas the drop in at Cyphur's farm is less than Octo's the fluctuation is triple that of Qualias and double that of Octo's farm in 1.14. The problem appears to not be with pumpkin farms but with farms with a lot of mobs and potentially cross world loading like gold farms or Cyphur's farm. That isnt to say that any of these farms cause a significant issue or TPS drop, because they dont.
The notion that is imbedded in the proposal; that after the server is updated to a newer version the fluctuations will decrease, is also partially wrong. Although the fluctuations will decrease during 1.15; in both Qualia and Octos farm the deviation goes back to higher levels, although the deviation at Octos farm would be lower in 1.16 than in 1.14.
The conclusions we should probably be drawing from this should be the ones that Luis originally drew. Farms are not a significant source of lag. Luis has also said that he will be trying to fix the legitimate sources of lag. Due to the problem most likely being reduced within the foreseeable future this rule is nothing but a hindrance to both staff and players. Both groups of people should be able to just enjoy the game without worrying about enforcing unnecessary rules.
The easy solution to this is not necessarily to regulate farms but to switch up the economy a bit. If people are still convinced that pumpkin farms cause significant lag (Which they dont) Why dont we just decrease the price of pumpkins in order to incentive other ways of making money. As for farms like gold farms or Cyphur's farm the commodity received is either non sell-able (XP) or shouldn't have the price changed (Gold). The regulation discussion should probably be about these farms instead of agrarian ones, I have no idea for a solution for these types of farms but thats why the discussion is still on
To tie it all back together, I dont know why we're even considering this bill because it fails at its main purpose, to stop lag, and we should be finding a permanent solution rather than a temporary one.
@Lividup64 Theres your analysis <3
tl;dr: Pumpkin Farms probably dont cause significant lag and shouldn't be regulated the way this bill proposes. Other versions might make the fluctuations worse. For other farms, it should more nuanced than this bill