Best optimization and performance plugins for servers to stop lag and get better gameplay with lots of players online.
How Can Plugins Help Optimize My Server?
Minecraft itself is a complex game with many different things going on in what seems like an endless world. To make the world seems endless you can end up growing your world file massively with exploration causing the server to handle with the large file worse.
Alternatively having many players with active mods around them, animation, Redstone and whatever else will also stress the server out causing rubber-banding and general lag.
Plugins can help as the developers will usually look at a specific or general faults that could be improved or optimised and then creates a plugin to help with this. Before we get into this I just want to suggest using a Paper jar type for any servers that you plan on playing online with others, Paper servers come well optimized.
1. ClearLagg PLugin
1.8 – 1.16
ClearLagg is a simple but great plugin to have on any server. On first impressions it seems that its only used to pick up floating items, which is a good resource in itself.
How ever when you look at the config and commands you realise you have a lot more configurability than you first thought. With this plugin you can limit hopper activity, red stone activity and many other well known lag causers.
You can limit mod spawnners and also find what chunks are causing lag to find the culprit. Provided is a tps and ram reader that can execute commands once limits are hit to save your server from crashing.
2. Fast Chunk Regenerator Plugin
1.16 – 1.19
Another way to optimise your server is to use a world re-generating plugin such as Fast Chunk Generator. The way this works is by loading chunks around you meaning your cpu or server cpu has less to deal with, rather than generating them as the player is moving it simply pre generates and just loads that part of the map.
With this plugin you can choose how many chunks to generate and has a tone of configurable options so you can make sure it runs smoothly what your world and really increase performance. It also works well for multiple worlds and it supports async chunk calls for Paper to maximize generation speed.
3. StackMob Plugin
1.16 – 1.19
The idea behind any stack mob plugin is to relieve the server by decreasing the amount of active mobs. All mobs have a cycle they follow meaning that one player may have multiple mobs around him all with different animations, noises or movement.
If you image a server has 20 players on around the world and each player could have 10 or more mobs all around them the server will start to struggle with loading everything.
There for to optimise the server you can stack your mobs into one. By this i mean any of the same mobs in a certain range of where will combine into 1 mob with a number on top indicating how many of the mobs you have available.
So now with mob farms or just normal farms rather than having 20, 30 or more mobs loaded up in the chunk your in, it will only need to load one of each mobs type. Suddenly you go from 20 players with for example 20 mobs of 4 kinds loaded around them player, equalling 400 different mobs running on the server at one time. With stack mob plugins this would be reduced down to 80 mobs loaded on the server.
4. LaggRemover Plugin
1.8 – 1.14
This might be an old plugin, but for those of you that use viaversion and viabackwards with older servers this is a fantastic way to reduce lag on servers.
Unlike ClearLagg this focuses more on chunks than entities, it also claims to be able to detect lag and stop it before it even becomes an issue. Unfortunately there has been more more update since 1.14 but if your running a version of that server or lower then i highly recommend trying this plugin to optimise your server.
