Minecraft CPU Benchmarks: Chunk Generation Speed

Test Information

This is a rather primitive chunk generation throughput test, mostly here for scientific purposes rather than useful data. Using a PaperMC server with the Chunky plugin to generate chunks in a 500 block radius around [0,0], time the process and calculate chunk per second throughput from it.

This data may be somewhat useful for readers looking to deploy a small private survival server for a handful of players, as chunk generation is likely to be the most demanding process it will do, especially if multiple players are exploring at the same time.

The server is configured to use 4 worker threads so that the data can be compared between CPUs with different core and thread counts. The default amount of worker threads at the time of writing is 1/4 of your logical CPU threads.

PaperMC 1.20.4-462
Using Chunky 1.3.136 for chunk generation
Java: 1.18 (18.0.2.1)
JVM settings: Aikar's optimized JVM settings from papermc.io, 4GB RAM
bStats plugin disabled
config/paper-global.yml -> chunk-system -> worker-threads: 4
Seed: 404

Performance Results

The CPUs are more or less differentiated by their raw core performance, no cache tricks to help the Ryzen X3D CPUs here.

There isn't really a recommendation one can draw from the data, though given I run most of our private servers on a Xeon E3-1275 v6, I can fairly safely say you probably should consider the Ryzen 5 3600 to be the minimum for a smoothly running private server for friends, since we do notice chunk generation lag from time to time on my older quad-core Xeon.