Agreed. Please at least give it a test run for a week or a month if the normal hopper transfer rate is gonna lag the server.
This is my sentiments, and most likely what we will implement is a test of vanilla hopper behavior to see if the server can handle it. I want to step back and just quickly offer some context to explain the current hopper behavior. Depending on how they are configured, hoppers can be extremely laggy. A hopper with no container (such as a chest or composter) above it will constantly scan the entire chunk for items to pick up. A non-empty hopper pointing into a full container will constantly try to push items into the container. Conversely, a "locked" hopper (powered by redstone) is virtually lagless. Unfortunately, not every player is aware of these mechanics, and we certainly don't expect players to be experts in reducing lag.
That being said, when the server lags all of our players suffer. We as staff have to make difficult decisions about how to balance player enjoyment with server stability. Minecraft has had severe performance issues starting in the 1.13 update due to complex factors. The general consensus among experts is that-despite Mojang spending nearly a year trying to improve performance-Minecraft performance in 1.15 is about 50% worse compared to 1.12. These hopper settings have been in place for a long time (not sure how long actually), and weren't meant as a "gimmick", but were genuinely intended to help the server run at a decent level.
With the 1.15 update, we switched server software from Spigot to Paper, and made some changes to server configuration that should hopefully keep vanilla behavior but improve performance. For example, we have enabled the
faster-eigencraft-redstone, which is an extremely meticulous effort to reduce lag caused by redstone dust. This setting fixes the bug
MC-81098, and improves the performance of redstone dust by approximately 95%. Even better, this optimization keeps vanilla behavior exactly the same, which is something everyone wants. We have also tweaked settings so that only chunks which have players in them are loaded. All of these changes have been to improve the quality of life on the server, without them it wouldn't be feasible to test vanilla hopper behavior. I hope this is informative, and helps to explain my thoughts on this suggestion.
