Do large Minecraft servers run on multiple different machines?
Having played on a number of servers, there are often lingering references to multiple different "servers", or a "server" being down, so you can't play That Minigame You Like today.
Does this mean a large server actually runs on multiple different machines, or is this just some other effect at work?
As far as I can tell, the Minecraft protocol doesn't seem to support a federated or handoff system, but I could be wrong. There are servers with incredibly large population numbers, numbering in the thousands, and this could explain how it scales.
Best Answer
Large scale servers like that will more than likely run off of multiple machines as it is possible through plugins to send a player to a different server. Some servers might use a very powerful overclocked single machine to eliminate players having to connect from server to server, and then isolate players on player lists using various plugins. So to answer your question, yes, they can run on multiple machines, however some don't.
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Answer 2
As of how Minecraft is currently built, it is not natively possible to make it run on various servers (except maybe for making the Nether, the End and the Overland run on separate servers, a friend of mine did it quite cleverly and she is not that big fan of plugins or such).
But load-balancing would be hard to achieve in the current state of the art.
Moreover, given the fact that it is an interactive block based world it would be quite hard to determine when to balance a player from one server to another. What would be the boundaries ? How do you update a block to the next server when to areas overlap? What happens when you run from one server to the next in a minecart?
Many questions that seem quite easy to answer but are tricky, especially on a developers point of view.
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