FasterChest

Speed up world loads and world saves in worlds densely populated with chests.

What's the Problem?

Survival-like game-servers (including factions and skyblock) generally consist of "team bases" that have tons of chests. PocketMine follows Mojang's world format which performs terribly on these servers—a change in one chest requires serializing all chests within the chunk, and 1 chest cannot be read in a chunk without deserializing all chests in the chunk. The performance impact that Mojang's default world format has makes it impractical to host survival-like servers especially when there's a lot of action happening simultaneously (like PvP, events, etc.).

How FasterChest Works?

FasterChest stores items in chest outside (i.e., separately from) the worlds folder in a chest.db file that maps each chest coordinate to their inventory. This means chests are stored individually (rather than altogether as one serialized entry—which is what Mojang does). This allows chests to be loaded only when needed (such as when a player accesses the chest, or an explosion drops chest inventory). A chest that hasn't been accessed during previous and current world-save is neither read nor written.

no-faster-chest-vs-faster-chest.mov

PocketMine's default world load performance (left) vs. with FasterChest (right) for a world consisting of a chunk with 4096 fully-filled chests containing custom-named items with 5 enchantments

How to Use FasterChest?

A world backup is recommended before using this plugin. Install the plugin on your server. All newly-placed chests will use a FasterChest tile in place of vanilla chest tiles. This new tile is indistinguishable from chest tiles to players.

What about existing chests? Run /save-all then /fasterchest convert <world> to convert all existing chests in a specific world to FasterChest tile. This process can take a while depending on how many chunks (and how many chests) are in your world.

What if I do not want to use the plugin anymore? Run /save-all then /fasterchest revert <world> for all worlds on your server. This will revert all FasterChest tiles to vanilla tiles. Running this command is necessary if you choose to uninstall the plugin (otherwise you risk corrupting chests in your world).

When FasterChest Does Not Cut It

Servers that utilize plugins that automatically scan and modify many chests frequently will notice lesser performance gain from FasterChest. Being strategic with reads and conservative with writes can however help reduce deserialization or serialization costs (or both!).

Developer Docs

Programatically convert and revert chest tiles in a world using Loader::convertWorld() and Loader::revertWorld() asynchronous methods.

/** @var Loader $loader */
$loader = $this->getServer()->getPluginManager()->getPlugin("FasterChest");
$world = $this->getServer()->getWorldManager()->getDefaultWorld();
Await::f2c(function() use($loader) : Generator{
	$world->saveChunks(); // converters read some tile NBT from disk
	$conversions = yield from $loader->convertWorld($world);
	echo "Converted ", $conversions, " chest(s) to FasterChest";

	$world->saveChunks();
	$reversions = yield from $loader->revertWorld($world);
	echo "Reverted ", $reversions, " chest(s) to vanilla chest";
});

FasterChest lets you specify a custom serialization mechanism for chest items if you so wish to. Switch from the default serializer to a custom inventory serializer by creating your own FasterChestSerializer instance and assigning it to FasterChest::$serializer during your plugin's onLoad().

FasterChest::$serializer = new MyFasterChestSerializer();