Building Minecraft Server Modifications - Second Edition

Synchronous versus asynchronous tasks

A task can be run either synchronously or asynchronously. Simply put, when a synchronous task is executed, it must be completed before the server can continue running normally. An asynchronous task can run in the background while the server continues to function. If a task accesses the Bukkit API in any way, then it should be run synchronously. For this reason, you will rarely run a task asynchronously. An advantage that an asynchronous task gives is that it can be completed without causing your server to lag. For example, writing data to a save file can be done asynchronously. Later in this chapter, we will modify the Warper plugin to save its data asynchronously. As for the AlwaysDay plugin, we must run ...