Bukkit

Introduction

The item stacker component literally stacks items of the same type (and sub-type) into a single item to reduce the amount of items on the server.

What is done?

The internal workings of this plugin is fairly complicated, but I'll try to explain. First of all, there is an outer layer which supplies the inner layer of the item and experience orb entities to work with. These are automatically updated. Every now and then all these items and orbs are transferred over to the inner 'core', which consists of a separate process. In this process it recursively loops through all items and checks if they can be stacked. This is not done on the main thread to fight tick lag caused by this heavy operation. After stacking is performed, it automatically re-spawns the item for all nearby players.

Should you use it?

If you often deal with players dropping hundreds of items on the ground using Q, this will make sure their efforts are in vain. Combined with the item buffer it can completely rid the server of this issue, while keeping the actual items alive. Other than that, it reduces the amount of items visually shown to clients when they are mining, which reduces both client lag and server lag. And it is simply awesome you can drop items onto another item, after which the items are merged. :)