This problem is what finally pushed me away from the game once and for all after a couple years. Minecraft itself is pretty heavy and slow given enough player load (sometimes not even that.. forest fires, lava flows and such can also bog everything down) - mods exacerbate the problem to the point of unplayability.
Which is really too bad, because things like Feed The Beast add an insane level of extra functionality and downright awesome things to the world.
Somehow I think it would be a different game if not for Java overhead. I've spent a truly ludicrous amount of time tweaking heap sizes, obscure garbage collection flags and such trying to keep the blasted thing from consuming all of the memory and crashing (and therefore corrupting the state of the world) on a relatively low-popularity server.
Which is really too bad, because things like Feed The Beast add an insane level of extra functionality and downright awesome things to the world.
Somehow I think it would be a different game if not for Java overhead. I've spent a truly ludicrous amount of time tweaking heap sizes, obscure garbage collection flags and such trying to keep the blasted thing from consuming all of the memory and crashing (and therefore corrupting the state of the world) on a relatively low-popularity server.