I'll just drop this factoid:
Mineplex has won the Guinness World Records award on January 28, 2015 for having 34,434 concurrent players, the most on a Minecraft server at the time.
Mineplex has won the Guinness World Records award on January 28, 2015 for having 34,434 concurrent players, the most on a Minecraft server at the time.
Mineplex had the most concurrent players but they weren't on a single individual bare metal server or single server jar instance.
A lot of large "servers" like Mineplex, Hypixel, etc run a proxy which sits in front of a bunch of other servers. The concept of a "server" can have many meanings in Minecraft so it gets fuzzy quickly.
I'm not sure if this 1,000 person test is a record but I'm not aware of any other test running so many concurrent players on a single dedicated box with a single instance of Minecraft running. Folia takes advantage of more CPU threads so everyone is in sitting in the same server instance.
Hypixel beat out Mineplex later on, BTW.
You generally want good performing (not VPS or "cloud" instances) but you can run a bunch of different worlds and have people with cross server talk, the ability to warp between worlds, etc. Most of the larger networks and nearly all of the smaller networks use a variation of this kind of model.
* https://www.spigotmc.org/wiki/bungeecord/ - Older, less-performant but still used by some teams
* https://papermc.io/software/velocity - Newer, more performant, maintained by the team that makes Paper, one of the leading performance MC server implementations.
For context of scale btw, when Hypixel had 200k+ players online at peak we had something like 2,000+ 1U E3-1271v3's each with 32GB RAM, all colo'd in a single DC in Chicago. Egress is 70-80gbps or so 95th percentile, with most months (at high peak) egressing 10PB/mo+ of real-time, uncacheable data.
I thoroughly enjoyed creating different game modes, similar to Hypixel. Whenever I would play on Hypixel I’d think about how the games had been implemented.
Seeing this thread brings back a lot of nostalgia. Reading through these comments makes me realise that a lot more work went into these servers than I had ever imagined. Naive me thinking it was just a bunch of spigot servers with bungeecord thrown on top.
I’d love to revisit and get back into it all. Alas, I’m stuck working on software nowadays instead.
GWR is purely just marketing, none of their records should be taken with any merit.
You "win" Guinness World Records by paying for them.