The Orange Pi 5 is one of my first and favorite servers to create shenanigans…. and host Minecraft servers. I’ve tested this little SBC over the years and because I’m bored, I decided to write about it. Here are my benchmarks and overall thoughts!

Configuration

To test the performance of my Orange Pi 5 I installed:

• Pufferpanel
• Paper 1.21.4
• Chunky (to stress test)
• Heatsink on CPU and RAM

With the configuration of the Minecraft server:

• 8GB RAM
• Seed: 1
• Chunky with all the default settings
• Server Properties with all the default settings

Performance

Without cooling:

When starting the server for the first time, and thus generating the overworld, nether and end, it launched in: 31.125s. Not a bad result compared to free hosts like Aternos which generated just the overworld after 25s, not to speak about the queue times.

When starting chunky, a certain trend was visible: temperature throttling. The server starts of great with 18-20 cps (chunks per second), but quickly drops to 12-17cps when it gets warm, resulting in an average of 16.8 cps. Still not bad, but it can’t perform well for a long without good cooling. It finished the task after 3:24. During the test, the server stayed at a steady 20 TPS.

See here a graph of the Chunks Per Second:

With cooling:

To test my theory, I dug around in my computer stuff to find two fans I connected to the GPIO pins of the Orange Pi. The fans are far from perfect, but they did their job.

Booting the server from scratch had almost the same boot time: 31.813s. This isn’t surprising, since the Orange Pi 5 doesn’t throttle for smaller stress tests. Using Chunky, the result becomes much clearer: 25-27 cps highs and 12-17 cps lows (probably because my fans weren’t powerful enough). This results in an average of 17.5 cps. Looking at the graph you can clearly see that the Orange Pi performs more stable, but eventually drops off:

A real example

Me and some online friends wanted to make a Minecraft server to play on called “WildCraft”. It grew more than expected and gave me valuable insights on how to host a Minecraft server on an Orange Pi 5.

The server had 8GB of RAM, about 20 plugins and was running version 1.19.4. I noticed that the Orange Pi started to stutter after about 6 people were playing. So I optimized:

• Pregenerating the world with Chunky (A must do!)
• Buying and using decent cooling
• Checked which plugins players were actually using and deleting the unused ones

These optimizations allowed us to play with 12 online players. With some lag though.

Mods?

The Orange Pi 5 and mods aren’t the best friends. Mods are CPU intensive and since the Orange Pi 5 doesn’t have much to work with, it’s unplayable. Yes, some small lightweight mods will work great, but adding a large gun mod, even on older versions is a no-go.

Bedrock?

The architecture of the Orange Pi 5 makes it impossible to run Minecraft Bedrock servers. The Orange Pi 5 has an ARM architecture, which was specifically designed as a CPU for low-power devices (although it’s gaining popularity in the server space for it’s energy efficiency). A Minecraft Bedrock server doesn’t support ARM architectures and therefore won’t work on the Orange Pi 5.

Nukkit?

And what about Nukkit? The software is written in Java and therefore runs on ARM architectures. One problem: it’s outdated.

GeyserMC?

The only option you have is to run a Java server and install the GeyserMC plugin. It works great on the Orange Pi 5, but it is much more resource consuming compared to Java players and isn’t an ideal solution for larger servers.

Conclusion:

The Orange Pi 5 does a great job running a Minecraft Java server between 5-10 players when optimized, but anything more? Nope. It’s still a metal board that uses less than 30W of power, so that’s to be expected.

I hope you have a nice day. Goodbye!