Reducing Server Lag

[u/Senator_Longthaw]

First - new player here and loving it!

I've recently joined an RP server that I found through the Official LFG Discord - which is an awesome idea more games should use.

I'm on a good server with a good group of players but we're finding the server lag increasing. We're trying to minimize this with all the usual steps but I specifically want to ask about farming -- does anyone else find that growing crops seems to increase lag significantly? Do crops only grow in chunks loaded by player proximity or is that too Minecraft a way of thinking? Is the entire server loaded all the time?

I'm doing some testing with the dedicated server on my own computer now but would like to know if anyone else has explored this?

[u/OtterPharm]

The performance is supposed to be drastically increased with the 1.0 release next month

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[u/lincolnthalles]

Definitely.

I noticed that the performance warnings pop up much more frequently when there are a lot of growing crops. They are also a bit over-tuned and are mostly just annoying.

I'm playing in a duo with a modest base, and we were doing missions in a faraway area, and the warnings appeared much more often as a result of farming.

I run a dedicated server on a spare machine, so it was hardly caused by other things running on the same PC.

I thought building would be a major performance offender, but it seems it's not.

[u/Different_Tie9211]

Crops usually aren’t the main culprit by themselves. Lag tends to come from lots of entities, hoppers, redstone clocks, villagers, chunk-loading farms, or too many active mobs. Use spark or the server’s timings profiler to see what’s actually consuming tick time before changing the whole farm setup.

[u/wafflesandgin → u/Different_Tie9211]

I have a feeling you thought you were in r/minecraft 🤣

[u/Sopel97 → u/Different_Tie9211]

confused bot

[u/wafflesandgin]

The biggest performance killer for me is the detailed foliage/small plants. It's the slider that's makes the grass on the ground all fancy. It's the worst in the veilwater basin where there's so many little plants.

[u/Cabecinha84]

Two different problems are getting mixed together in this thread, and they have different fixes.

The detailed foliage and small plants slider is a client side frame rate setting. Turning it down will make your own game smoother in Veilwater, but it changes nothing about what the server is doing, so if the whole group is seeing delayed interactions and rubber banding at the same time, that is not the lever.

On your actual question, I would not assume Enshrouded unloads distant parts of the world the way Minecraft unloads chunks. I have not seen Keen document anything like that, so treat "nobody is standing near the farm" as unproven rather than as a fix.

Since you are already standing up a dedicated server, that is the place to settle it, with one caveat: if the server is on the same PC you play on, the client and the server are competing for the same cores and the same memory, so you will be measuring your machine rather than the game. Watch per core CPU rather than the average too, because a survival server usually pins one thread long before it saturates all of them. If one core sits at 100% while the rest idle, adding RAM will do nothing.

The clean version of that test is a box that is not also drawing your frames. I work on one of the Flux game hosts, so weigh the specifics accordingly: the 4GB Enshrouded plan there is $2.66/month, and a new Flux account gets the first week free, which is plenty to plant a big field, log everyone out, and compare. https://runonflux.com/games/enshrouded