Is 16 cores on Folia really necessary to have more performance than on Paper?

My current server has a 3700X, therefore it has 16 threads. I am hosting a smp and I wonder if I should switch to Folia at the next season (it is in several months and Folia will be more production-ready). At the start of seasons I can have 35+ players at the same time and there are some performance issues. I totally get that when using Folia, not all threads will be used by regions and some are reserved to generation, other processes, etc. However, Paper can barely use 1/4 of my CPU and I feel like Folia could potentially use my resources more effectively. I really wish there was an easy way to benchmark this.
10 Replies
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Requested by seriset#0
snowznz.bak
snowznz.bak2y ago
yes
Nerd
Nerd2y ago
Folio is generally quite explicit, there exact phrasing is something like "It needs 16 cores, not threads as an absolute minimum" so a 16 core chip is the bare minimum essentially
SERISET
SERISETOP2y ago
rip :(
QarthO
QarthO2y ago
If you’re having issues with 35+ players on paper, paper isn’t the issue, and folia won’t fix that Folia is meant for much much larger servers
PhonicUK
PhonicUK2y ago
If I was them I'd do it the other way and say that 32 threads is the minimum and enforce it at runtime
snowznz.bak
snowznz.bak2y ago
Well what about plugin developers testing
PhonicUK
PhonicUK2y ago
The tests wouldn't be valid without the appropriate number of cores/threads since you wouldn't get the same concurrency issues So you'd need a 32-thread machine to actually test against it too Linode will rent you a 16 core system for $0.43/hour
snowznz.bak
snowznz.bak2y ago
well what if its literally just run a few command and oh hey it works
PhonicUK
PhonicUK2y ago
Just because it works on a 8 core system doesn't mean it'll still work on a 16 core system... That's half the problem with highly concurrent applications AMP has had the opposite problem before now where something would be fine on high core count systems, but would misbehave on systems with fewer cores - because tasks that were expected to run concurrently instead ran sequentially. Folia you'd have the same basic problem. You test on a 4/8 core system and it's fine because some of your tasks run sequentially because you don't have enough cores, put it on a 16/32 core system and they run concurrently and you get race conditions. So your tests are invalid in a heavily-threaded environment if you can't roughly match the target hardware.

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