I've moved Alice to a "RAM disk," where basically Alice's files now sit upon the server's memory rather than its hard drive. If you're not aware, RAM is several magnitudes faster to access than a hard drive, and because Minecraft is very heavy on data access, this should provide speed benefits to the server. The more technical savvy folk may know that RAM is "volatile," as in whatever you put on it will disappear if you turn off the system. No worries -- the files are periodically copied back to the hard disk. For numbers, the hard disk maybe puts out 160-200 megabytes/second. RAM can easily put out 3600 megabytes/second. Vincent will be receiving the same treatment shortly.
