Hey, so I’m going to explain to you all what I did recently with spawn chunks and spawn.
Before I get started I want to clarify two things, spawn chunks are the chunks that are around the worldspawn point, which are in memory constantly and thus any entities or lag-producing things in these chunks will impact everyone all the time. Then there’s the spawn town which houses the spawn point, which is different than the worldspawn.
Worldspawn = spawn chunks = always loaded in memory
Spawn point = Spawn town = where people build community stuff/etc
The problem before was the worldspawn and the spawn point were in the same place, say, (x, y). So, everything build in spawn city was in the spawn chunks, which means it was always loaded in memory. So, if people wanted to have farm animals, chickens were pretty common, cows, rabbits, horses, etc, they were counted by the server as always loaded. Over the past many months I kept track of this and found this to be about 200-300 entities loaded at all times. It didn’t really hurt the performance that much but that’s about equal to having one to two players on at all times.
The other problem was redstone contraptions were sorta limited in spawn because I did not want people to build lag-enducing machines that would run 24/7 and hurt everyone.
So, the ultimate solution was to separate the two spawns, worldspawn and spawn town. So now spawn town is say, (x, y), and worldspawn is (a, b). On top of this, I (with much help from shy Silnius and two!) cleared out all the land in the spawn chunks making it so no entities would exist in these chunks at all, saving on performance.
So now, players can build somewhat to their hearts content in the spawn city without worrying too much about lagging others, since it is not always going to be in memory. And, we managed to shave off about 200-300 entities from always being loaded by the server by this, too. This will help during peak times.
Finally, all of this was achieved without affecting regular players (mostly). They (should) never touch the worldspawn point by accident. If they were to die they should end up in spawn town. I have thoroughly tested this. If they do /spawn they will also end up in spawn town, like normal.
Does anyone have questions?