[doabell]

> I am a man of simple tastes, and running the “vanilla” Minecraft server as a Systemd unit on a Linux VM in the cloud

Minecraft is famously under-optimized and needy in terms of CPU frequency. If running a vanilla (no server mods) version, then using something optimized, like PaperMC is a better idea for datacenter VMs. (Until you need to dupe sand or something.)

The other route is installing a bunch of optimization mods - some really do help.

[ehnto]

People love to bother about Java MC performance, but I ran a modded Tekkit sever for like 10 years on a base Digital Ocean VM. Shoutout to Digital Ocean for having no impactful changes for 10 years too. They give me a VM, I run the thing, life is good.

[strogonoff]

From my understanding, Paper and the like are good for Minecraft servers focused around specific mini-games (rather than freedorm building), and are the only sensible choice for servers with many people (or not that many people, but really underpowered hardware).

However, they may be a problem if players are sensitive to possible non-vanilla behaviour (as you mentioned, and it’s not limited to cheaty duping). Thankfully, spinning up a server with a selection of performance mods is very easy these days. Various tricks like pre-generating chunks in advance also help.

[treyd]

It's kinda nuts. The upstream mojang server binary starts to groan if you have >4-5 players on the same server doing stuff. They've really been dropping the ball on optimization in recent years.

Paper is good enough for anyone but very technical players pushing to the limits of redstone tick timing logic, entity behavior, chunk loading mechanics, etc. These don't matter even for advanced players doing normal things.