> I am a man of simple tastes, and running the “vanilla” Minecraft server as a Systemd unit on a Linux VM in the cloud
Minecraft is famously under-optimized and needy in terms of CPU frequency.
If running a vanilla (no server mods) version, then using something optimized, like PaperMC is a better idea for datacenter VMs.
(Until you need to dupe sand or something.)
The other route is installing a bunch of optimization mods - some really do help.
Monitoring and metric collection makes a lot of sense when you run a production system, or a personal but critical system.
Promoting a telemetry solution when it comes to a hobby server, which you host for yourself and which can’t bankrupt you by running up a massive AWS bill, doesn’t seem to make much sense when simply bottling it up in Docker and being able to restart or recreate at will is enough (mount volumes for logs and persistent data, back it up, and you’re good).
With games like Minecraft in particular there’s value in being able to have multiple servers with different worlds, perhaps different mods, etc. If you decide not to have more servers because they are snowflakes you do not have time to set up monitoring for then you rob yourself and your players of the opportunity to have more fun.
Furthermore, containerizing it allows you to upgrade as new game versions come out quickly by simply spinning up a new container with your preexisting world as a test, and you get you basic system resource usage monitoring built-in.
What I think could be a more interesting exercise is a dashboard for friends or family that allows to manage the lifetime and configuration of their respective containers.
> The minecraft-prometheus-exporter ... which uses Fabric, another way to run Minecraft servers with mods. Like Bukkit, Fabric was not an option for me.
Forge and its recent fork Neoforge are supported too.
> Microsoft made things confusing by adding the Bedrock server, which reportedly uses a combination of C, C# and Java,
No C# in Bedrock. No Java unless you're talking about the Android versions. Very little C.
It's mostly C++.
> I am a man of simple tastes, and running the “vanilla” Minecraft server as a Systemd unit on a Linux VM in the cloud
Minecraft is famously under-optimized and needy in terms of CPU frequency. If running a vanilla (no server mods) version, then using something optimized, like PaperMC is a better idea for datacenter VMs. (Until you need to dupe sand or something.)
The other route is installing a bunch of optimization mods - some really do help.
Monitoring and metric collection makes a lot of sense when you run a production system, or a personal but critical system.
Promoting a telemetry solution when it comes to a hobby server, which you host for yourself and which can’t bankrupt you by running up a massive AWS bill, doesn’t seem to make much sense when simply bottling it up in Docker and being able to restart or recreate at will is enough (mount volumes for logs and persistent data, back it up, and you’re good).
With games like Minecraft in particular there’s value in being able to have multiple servers with different worlds, perhaps different mods, etc. If you decide not to have more servers because they are snowflakes you do not have time to set up monitoring for then you rob yourself and your players of the opportunity to have more fun.
Furthermore, containerizing it allows you to upgrade as new game versions come out quickly by simply spinning up a new container with your preexisting world as a test, and you get you basic system resource usage monitoring built-in.
What I think could be a more interesting exercise is a dashboard for friends or family that allows to manage the lifetime and configuration of their respective containers.
> The minecraft-prometheus-exporter ... which uses Fabric, another way to run Minecraft servers with mods. Like Bukkit, Fabric was not an option for me.
Forge and its recent fork Neoforge are supported too.
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