Atlas updates so slowly that you can explore for 1000+ blocks at walking speed and it will have barely mapped anything in your path. this gets especially inconvenient since you can't place Pins on area that isn't mapped, so if you find something interesting you can't mark it, even if you try and wait around for a few minutes.
if you're in a chunk that someone has spent a long time in already (or everyone else leaves the server) it updates at a normal speed, even if the other players don't have atlases.

I recognize that to some degree there will always be realistic limitations, and I am super grateful to have this mod at all 🙏 but if you have any tips for server operators/ players to make atlases run smoother I would appreciate hearing them!

I have mostly been testing with a 1:1 scale map atlas
version 5.12.4, with moonlightlib 2.8.67 (though "apple" pins don't seem to be renamable to anything else, unless i'm missing something) and supplementaries 2.7.7
server has up to 5 people at a time but still struggles with only 2
server has a good amount of RAM allocated, but lmk if you need more info and I'll ask the server operator for the specs

Please send a spark report. Also try turning off multithreaded update

okay thanks! I'll try that and try Spark when i get a chance 🙏

any update on this?

sorry no, the person who actually runs the server was away for holidays (i can try both those things this week)
(they just host on their machine and i take care of everything else, janky way to do things I know 😅 )
also I finally figured out that named pins are done with a hotkey lol sorry for the confusion there