Need insight to how hopper/redstone activity is handled.

[AncientTom]

I would like to be enlightened as to how hopper propagation (as well as other redstone activity) is handled in a multi-player environment. Is the server doing all the processing? Is all of the processing being done on the clients' machine? Is this process being shared between the server and client? If so, how much of the load is being handled on the server? Are the hoppers still being serviced by the server even if the chunks are not loaded in any clients' machine? This is all a big question mark to me. I have heard much conjecture about this but I am looking for a factual response from someone that actually has engineering knowledge on the way that vanilla Minecraft was created by Mojang.

Edited February 16, 2017 by AncientTom

[AncientTom]

57 minutes ago, diesieben07 said:

Everything in terms of simulation is handled on the server. The client only gets told what to display.

Thank you for a quick response. Let me expound on this thought. Most servers I have been on are set up to transfer 3 items at a time per second. I am wondering, and this is just plain vanilla theory, how much CPU time is being used per hopper per tick per how many items transferred per tick is being used? I am looking at this so that I can better understand what to expect out of an average player load on the server as the hopper count starts to increase. I understand that there are plug-ins available to optimize and limit hopper and redstone usage but I want to first, understand the generic scenario.

[AncientTom]

I hope that you don't mind engaging in a dialog about this. I am trying to create a programmer's perspective on this, albeit I am mainly a user/admin when it comes to Minecraft. Let me theorize based on your response and you can correct me where I am in error.

There are 20 game loops per second which represent a game tick. (when the CPU is handling the load)

There is a 1 second interrupt being generated for servicing all those objects that registered for this servicing.

The hopper class gets serviced during this interval. Each hopper that is active in the game is serviced, one at a time.

The hopper object servicing, consists of first, fetching any items () in the block above it by creating stacks of each type item (up to 5 stacks, 1 to 64 items per stack) and adding them to available space in the 5 stack hopper buffer. Then when the hopper is not empty, a stack of 3 items are created, removing these items from the stacks already in the hopper buffer and then move that stack of three to the hopper that this hopper is pointing to. This is repeated until all active hoppers have been serviced.

[AncientTom]

I think I just answered my own question by laying out this train of thought and pondering over it. As far as the hoppers sucking from above, floating entities by this time have already been stacked. Even at that, there are too many variables that may need time to be serviced and/or none of them may need servicing. Therefore there is probably no such thing as an average time to process a hopper on the server.

Edited February 16, 2017 by AncientTom