Utilizing Minecraft bots to optimize game server performance and deployment

To simulate a realistic game server environment, we utilized open source software libraries to create automated players (bots) for the globally renowned online game: Minecraft. The fairly simple design of the Minecraft server as well as its massive development and support community facilitates considerable research and analysis prospects. As such, the goal of our investigation was to emulate and then analyze the real-world stress that game-players actively create on hosting servers. We achieved this through creating scripted movements of Minecraft characters that are connected to the Minecraft server(s) hosted within our virtual infrastructure. After this was achieved, we explored altering the methods of running the active Minecraft servers to control CPU load; we primarily explored manually setting the CPU affinity of the Minecraft server thread to run on specific virtual cores. Collecting CPU workload data while the bots were running around on our servers gave us consistent and predictable readings that confirmed the success of our methods we used to control performance. Evidence of this is illustrated through the use of graphs and other experimental data outlined in the body of this document.