Its7up

I'm unable to try it again right now, but when we played I did measure the data stream, and it usually went into ~60 kilobytes/s when spawning in for the first time, and then idle around 5-20 while we were just playing around in both versions. I did find a setting in server.properties that said "network-compression-threshold=128" I changed it to 128 from 256 mid way through playing around, didn't seem to do much.

Thanks for your reply. The servers are run on beefy computers, my server being run on an i5-4670, the linux on an i7.

View distances are the same, being on 8, the normal view distance.

Unless I understood you wrong, Minecraft now has "natural textures" feature from Optifine like MCPatcher implemented in vanilla. Any block you look at will attempt to rotate its texture to create a diverse look, and sand is one of the blocks, making falling sand look different to its original counterpart.
_{Mod edit: Optifine copied that feature from MCPatcher}

/summon Fireball ~ ~-1 ~ {ExplosionPower:255,direction:[0.0,0.0,0.0]} and then /kill @e[type=Fireball]
or something like that.