Stress testing, TNT style.

As you could probably figure out by the above image, we used all sorts of fun necessary tests that helped us ascertain what the server could handle, and what it could not handle. High quantities of TNT were one of the things that it could not handle. Still, that was to be expected.

Breaking News: Lava engulfs Minecraftia!

Another test that we conducted was a lava stress test. Minecraft’s physics are certainly very CPU-intensive, so I decided to use lava as a means of stress testing, as well as TNT. I used a server plugin known as ‘WorldEdit’ to generate thousands of lava blocks at the same time. As you can probably imagine, this would place a heavy load upon any server. Fortunately, our’s passed this test, generating all of the lava blocks without too much lag.

Now, with regards to what environment we used to run the server, we used a virtual machine which was allocated a limited amount of RAM (approximately, one to two gigabytes), and using an Intel ‘Xeon’ processor, running at 3.10GHz per second.

So, the verdict? Well, considering that this server was running inside a virtual machine with a limited amount of allocated memory, I would say that the server performed rather well. Of course, this type of environment would not be suitable for everday use, and would only be able to manage a few players, at most. Still, this server proved to be a worthy test subject, surpassing my expectations with regards to its performance.

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