[ehnto]

What kind of player count are you getting?

I have been running 4 players with one of the most taxing modpacks on a mid tier digital ocean VPS with no hitches. Not many players I guess but in case you were curious if you could use a VPS. Even when we had multiple excavators sending thousands of entities through sorting pipelines it was stil doing surprisingly well.

[PureParadigm]

Thanks for the suggestion. I'll look into whether a VPS is viable, but we often have poor internet at our LAN parties and get the best experience when the server is local.

It's a vanilla server and I also get around 4 players. The real problem occurs when people are generating new terrain while flying on an elytra, sometimes causing the server to crash altogether. When not exploring, it will frequently report "Can't keep up!" messages even when hanging around spawn, which I think might be due to the truly insane amount of hoppers we have (although haven't seen this as much in the recent update).

If you're curious, the CPU is a i5-3570K @ 3.40GHz. The game is certainly playable, but it struggles under load like I described.

[imtringued]

A max size reactor in minecraft consists of 50000 Tileentities and it only produces a few million RF/t enough to power a handful of max tier void miners. Thousands isn't exactly impressive.

[ehnto]

Well we had a max size reactor powering our excavators so I guess we had those entities too. I didn't realise it took so many entities to run. Not to mention the hundreds of other pieces in our worlds automation puzzle and it was all spread out quite far apart, with chunk loaders maintaining the networks presence. Things were routed, crushed, smelted, crafted and eventually stored or utilized, all automatically.