Some of you are already familiar with how our server is set up, but let me give the rest of you a bit of info: We rent two dedicated servers and a virtual server from OVH, all hosted in Canada. The virtual server hosts our website as well as Waterfall/Bungeecord, which is a proxy for Minecraft servers. This proxy allows you to connect to all of our different servers while logged into each other (without this proxy, /server wouldn’t work). Then all of our Minecraft servers (Atoll, Meadow, Summit, Valley, Creative, Events, and Lobby) get split up among the two dedicated servers. This setup allows us to support everyone who wants to play. If we only had one server trying to host everything, the CPU would be overloaded.

Up until today, the proxy was running on a virtual server that had 2 cores @ 2Ghz and 100Mbps of network bandwidth. We weren’t sure at first if this would be enough, but over the last 5 months it has held up pretty well! Unfortunately, starting this week, every player online started experiencing very bad pings and seemingly random times. We noticed that during these times that CPU load jumped as much as 400%! We aren’t sure if this is a 1.14.x issue, but that’s a potential suspect.

Since this issue was happening pretty frequently, and we didn’t want to drop support for 1.14.x clients, we decided to upgrade our proxy hardware! We’ve moved the website and proxy to a brand new virtual server with 4 cores @ 2.3Ghz and 500Mbps of network bandwidth. So far, things appear to be running very well – CPU load average is about 1/2 of what we were seeing on the old hardware.

We are hoping that this will clear up that ping spike issue, and also provide a better experience overall for our players. Since this is a major change, there may be bugs over the next couple of weeks that we didn’t catch at first, so please bear in mind reboots may be more frequent than normal.