How to reduce lag on your Minecraft server

A healthy Minecraft server runs at 20 ticks per second (TPS). Below that, players see rubber-banding, slow mobs and delayed blocks. These fixes help the most.

1. Use Paper

Paper is faster than the vanilla server and fixes many performance problems. If you don't need mods, switch to it.

2. Lower view and simulation distance

In server.properties, set view-distance to 6 to 8 and simulation-distance to 5 or 6. This is the biggest single improvement on busy servers.

3. Pre-generate your world

Generating new chunks is expensive. A plugin like Chunky can pre-generate the area around spawn so players don't cause lag by exploring.

4. Limit entities

Huge mob farms and thousands of dropped items hurt TPS. Set limits in the Paper config and clear item drops regularly.

5. Find the real cause

Install the spark profiler plugin and run /spark profiler to see exactly what is using the CPU, instead of guessing.

6. Make sure you have enough RAM

If you see out-of-memory errors or the server freezes now and then, upgrade your plan. Our RAM guide has simple ranges.

7. Review plugins

Remove plugins you don't need. A single badly written plugin can use more CPU than the rest combined.

Keeping Minecraft and your plugins up to date also helps, since performance fixes arrive in updates.