Optimizing a Paper or Spigot Minecraft Server

How do you optimize a Paper or Spigot Minecraft server? Pre-generate your world, lower view and simulation distance, tune spawn limits and entity activation range, and reduce max-auto-save-chunks-per-tick. Use Aikar’s JVM flags, then profile with Spark to confirm what’s actually costing tick time before changing anything else.

Work out which kind of lag you actually have

“Lag” is three different problems. TPS is your server’s own speed, the only one you control. Ping is network latency. FPS is the player’s own PC, unrelated to your server.

Rubber-banding points to ping. Choppy visuals point to their PC. Frozen mobs and slow block breaks point to TPS, which is what this guide covers.

Tip: Healthy TPS sits at 19.9–20.0. Below 18 consistently, players notice.

Pre-generate your world before you open the gates

Generating new terrain live is expensive; loading existing chunks is cheap. Pre-generate with Chunky, then set a world border so players can’t trigger new generation by wandering off.

View distance and simulation distance are your biggest levers

View distance and simulation distance (added in 1.18) scale roughly with distance squared, so small drops recover a lot of performance. Try 6 to 8 for view-distance and 5 to 7 for simulation-distance.

Tune how many mobs exist, and how far away they still matter

Spawn limits cap how many mobs exist. Entity activation range controls how far away they’re still fully simulated versus mostly dormant.

Leave villagers near default. Aggressive limits quietly break iron farms and trading halls.

Tip: Paper’s own settings moved from paper.yml to config/paper-world-defaults.yml in 1.19. Search your panel’s config editor for the key if it’s not where you expect.

Stop world saves from causing a stutter every few minutes

That periodic stutter is usually autosave. Modern Paper only saves changed chunks, but the number of chunks saved per tick is still tunable. Lower it to spread the load.

Never disable autosave, and never rely on /save-all on a timer instead.

A handful of small settings that add up

None alone is huge, but stacked together on a populated server they add up. A bigger merge radius means fewer dropped-item entities. Suppressing the hopper move-item event removes a notorious farm-lag source, though it breaks plugins that listen for that event. Alternative redstone implementations can change how some contraptions behave, so test your farms first.

Use proper JVM flags, not just more RAM

Same as modded servers: the default garbage collector isn’t tuned for Minecraft. Use Aikar’s flags.

-XX:+UseG1GC -XX:+ParallelRefProcEnabled -XX:MaxGCPauseMillis=200 -XX:+UnlockExperimentalVMOptions -XX:+DisableExplicitGC -XX:+AlwaysPreTouch -XX:G1NewSizePercent=30 -XX:G1MaxNewSizePercent=40 -XX:G1HeapRegionSize=8M -XX:G1ReservePercent=20 -XX:G1HeapWastePercent=5 -XX:G1MixedGCCountTarget=4 -XX:InitiatingHeapOccupancyPercent=15 -XX:G1MixedGCLiveThresholdPercent=90 -XX:G1RSetUpdatingPauseTimePercent=5 -XX:SurvivorRatio=32 -XX:+PerfDisableSharedMem -XX:MaxTenuringThreshold=1

Profile before you tune blind

Every setting above is a starting point, not a guarantee. Install Spark (the modern successor to Timings) and profile a live session to see exactly what’s costing you tick time.

Frequently asked questions

What view distance should I use on a Paper server?

Try 6 to 8 for view-distance and 5 to 7 for simulation-distance in server.properties. Both scale roughly with distance squared, so small drops recover a lot of performance.

Why does my Minecraft server stutter every few minutes?

That periodic stutter is usually autosave. Lowering max-auto-save-chunks-per-tick from its default of 24 to around 6 to 8 spreads the load. Never disable autosave.

Should I lower mob spawn limits on a Paper server?

Moderately. Dropping monsters from 70 to 50 and animals from 10 to 8 helps, but leave villagers near default, because aggressive limits quietly break iron farms and trading halls.