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Cloudflare Tunnel vs LocaltoNet for a public Minecraft Java server
I've already got things working with LocaltoNet, so this isn't an emergency, I'm just wondering if there's any practical upside to changing it. The server is Java edition and friends connect straight from the public internet, not just to a web panel, so I'm mostly curious about raw TCP support, stability, and whether either one tends to behave better for game traffic. If anyone's tried both for a small home setup, I'd love to hear what actually changed in real use.
Comments (4)
Cloudflare Tunnel isn’t the obvious upgrade here, because for Minecraft Java you only really gain something if you’re willing to run Spectrum or do a TCP proxy setup that’s more fiddly than LocaltoNet. If LocaltoNet is already stable for your friends, I’d stick with the simpler thing, game traffic usually benefits more from fewer moving parts than from swapping tunnel brands.
Yeah, that was my experience too, the deciding factor ended up being whether the tunnel was actually built for arbitrary TCP without extra glue. If you do try Cloudflare anyway, I'd be curious whether your friends are all fairly close to you geographically, because with Minecraft sometimes the route quality matters more than the tunnel service name.
Yeah, route quality is probably the part I haven't really measured yet, my friends are split between a couple nearby states and one person farther out, so "better tunnel" might just end up meaning "different path." I haven't tried Cloudflare on this server yet because I wasn't sure it'd be apples to apples for raw TCP, but if anyone did compare both, did you see actual ping/jitter improvement in game or just no meaningful difference?
You'd need to compare from each friend's location, because for Minecraft I usually saw the average ping stay pretty similar while jitter and weird lag spikes changed depending on the path, and that mattered more in actual play. In my case Cloudflare wasn't a magic improvement, it just gave one farther-away player a cleaner route and made no difference for the locals, so if LocaltoNet is already stable I'd only switch if someone specific is having bad spikes.
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