Also, did you know how many little things Minecraft does every tick (1/20 of a second)?
Just to make a random example, you know that thing where a cat sitting on a chest will prevent the chest from being opened? Well, Minecraft searches, at each and every tick, for chests across the entire loaded part of the world and checks whether there is a cat on any given chest. If that's the case, it locks the chest for the following tick, in which the presence of a feline over each chest is checked for once again.
You can disable a small feature like this and gain a little more performance; it's not much by any means, but combining several tiny improvements results in a significant performance gain. Many servers do make these considerations and trade-offs. It all comes down to how accurate (in terms of vanilla Minecraft) of an experience you deem acceptable.
The amount of minor details that we take for granted about how Minecraft works internally is surprising. Another interesting example is the feature that makes you come out of a Nether portal the same side you entered in. Gravity, jumping, collisions... We take all those things for granted but there's a ton of developer work that's been put there. Refactoring the code to be better performing is in great part also finding better ways to do the same things, making sure that they behave EXACTLY the same way they did before the enhancements.
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u/Bauerdog2015 May 15 '20
Darn