Bukkit Project Update - Slow development; Addition to the Team
EvilSeph
Since the release of Minecraft 1.2.5, activity around the project has seen a significant slow down and we hope that this short announcement will help clear things up. Despite the recent new additions to the team and the team being eager to get new features and more improvements added to the project, we were quickly made aware of a potential performance issue in our latest Recommended Build, CraftBukkit 1.2.5-R.10. Since it is unacceptable to have a Recommended Build that has a significant performance issue present in it, I immediately froze development on the project and had all our resources redirected to discovering the cause of and resolving the issue of poor performance.
After countless sleepless nights of going through our changes, build by build, we're happy to report that we believe we've tracked down and fixed most of the causes of high CPU usage within our code. Utilising the powerful profiling tool YourKit Java Profiler (which the company has kindly provided to us in support of the project), we were not only able to track down the initial cause of the significantly poor performance but were also able to devise some optimisations and improvements we could make to our code to provide server admins with a better server running experience on top of that. YourKit Java Profiler enabled us to follow the execution of our code and determine what parts of it were taking up more CPU time than it should, giving us the opportunity to replace the inefficient code with a better alternative.
Some improvements include:
- Optimised and improved the entity collision fix.
- Added new ability to set spawn limits per creature type (animal, water animal, monster)
Possible planned improvements include:
- Investigating more avenues for optimization
- Optimised handling of events by only setting them up if a plugin is listening to the event.
Until we're happy with how these optimisations perform, the project will remain under a code freeze and the changes will remain purely within development builds. As soon as we're certain everything is good to go, we'll promote a Recommended Build for everyone to update to. Once we're certain the new Recommended Build is performing properly, we'll resume our normal development style. We've promoted a Beta Build containing our attempts to address the performance issues and hope you'll help us test them out to bring us closer to a new Recommended Build sooner: http://goo.gl/HSFoU
While the team worked extremely hard and tirelessly to get down to the bottom of the bad performance exhibited by CraftBukkit 1.2.5-R1.0, one individual from the community showed a lot of initiative, was instrumental in helping us pin-point several of the hotspots within our code and helped develop many of the fixes we used. As such, it is my pleasure and honour to be announcing that we've made a new addition to the core Bukkit Team. Please join me in welcoming [USER=90593942]Amaranth[/USER] to the Bukkit team, his contributions to, hard work and passion for Bukkit and programming make him more than deserving of this opportunity.
As always, thanks for your continued support and patience while we worked through the reported issues. You guys are truly awesome and we wouldn't be here without you. Thanks for everything!