Should I Get the Minecraft Server in an EXE or JAR?

Solution 1:

You said in your post that you wanted the best performance. Because of this, I would recommend that you get the .jar file. It allows you to customize the amount of RAM the server has, allowing you to tweak it to your heart's content.

You will also be allowed to use the following switches:
-d64 If your computer has a 64-bit architecture and you want to take advantage of that.
nogui if you don't want the graphical interface.
-o true/false to set the online/offline mode.
--port to choose which port you want to use.
--world to change the directory the world is in.
--bonusChest to enable the spawning of bonus chests in the world.
-Xmx####M or -Xmx##G to set the maximum java heap size (basically adding more RAM).
--demo, which changes the following properties in server.properties:

Seed          => -343522682 (a hash of "North Carolina")
Game Mode     => Survival
Map Features  => Enabled
Hardcode Mode => Disabled
World Type    => DEFAULT

In addition to the switches listed above, you can pretty much add any Java switch for ultimate tweaking.

To implement these, you would make a Windows batch script similar to this:

@ECHO OFF
CD /D %~dp0
JAVA -Xmx2048M -d64 -jar Minecraft_server.jar  -o true nogui

This would start the server without a graphical interface, with whitelist set to true, and with 2 gigabytes of memory to start out with.