Help CenterPlugins are wonderful modifications to Minecraft servers that can add a bunch of new and exciting features! From more commands, working in-game shops, to even custom items, plugins add a fresh experience to your server! There is a bit of a downside to plugins however! With too many plugins installed on a server, it can cause the server to become strained. This can lead to things such as server slowdowns, and lag for everyone on the server. In this guide, we'll be showing you some tips and things you can do to optimize your Minecraft server with plugins installed!
📄Important Note! Throughout this guide, we will be assuming that your server already has a version installed on it that supports plugins. If you do not have a version installed on your server that can run plugins, you can follow our guides on how to install either Paper or PurPur onto your server!
👓View / Simulation Distance, and Other Config Settings
View Distance and Simulation Distance are both settings that can be found in your server's "server.properties" file. This will be in your server's root directory, the area you get to when you click on the "File Manager" tab of the game panel. You can click on the file to edit it within the File Manager.
There are two settings inside this file that can impact server performance heavily. You'll want to tweak both of these to ensure that your server is running as optimally as possible.
view-distance: 4-8
Your view distance affects how many chunks load around players. For survival worlds, 6-8 should be the ideal setting here. However, on servers where view distances is less important, turning it down to 4 can be a huge performance boost.
simulation-distance: 3-5
This affects the distance in chunks around players in which things around the will happen. For example, things like crops and saplings growing, furnaces working, animals growing up, and more will only happen if a player is within this amount of chunks of it. Setting this lower and your view distance higher allows players to see further without using a ton of server performance.
You can make the adjustments by changing the number to the right of the colon after the setting name, and then hitting the purple "SAVE CONTENT" button in the top right. After you save the content, you need to restart your server for the changes to take effect.
Additionally, Paper and PurPur introduce a ton of other configuration settings that allow you to tweak very specific server functionality. A lot of these settings also have a small to large impact on server performance and lag, so it may be worth checking them out! We have a separate guide on those configuration settings and other optimization tips here!
🌎World Pre-generation
Loading new chunks in your Minecraft world can be quite an intensive process! A chunk in the context of Minecraft is simply a section of the world. These sections are 16x16x256, or 16 blocks wide, 16 blocks long, and 256 blocks tall (including air 'blocks'). All together, each chunk will have approximately 65,536 Blocks! When exploring new parts of your world, the server will need to generate 65,536 blocks for every single chunk you explore!
As you can imagine, this is usually a very demanding process on the server. However, when you explore parts of your world that you or other players have already explored, the server will not have to generate entirely new chunks. The server will instead just pull the already existing chunk data from your server, which is a much less intensive process!
The process of chunk "pre-generation" is a method of generating a large amount of the world without having to have players walk around and explore. This will cause the server to be able to be under much less load and will lead to a much more optimized experience overall! We have a guide available for pre-generating the world on your Minecraft server on the SimpleGameHosting help pages! This guide is made for modded servers, but chunky has a plugin version available that will also be linked below. You can install it just like any other plugin and follow Step 4 of the guide below to start pregeneration.
📈LagFixer Plugin
LagFixer is a great plugin that makes tweaks inside the server to ensure better performance! It makes so many changes that I won't be able to list them all here, but I will list out a couple of the "modules" that the plugin implements below!
- Completely replaces the default Minecraft entity AI with a more optimized AI for servers.
- Limits the amount of entities allowed in chunks.
- Removes items off the ground after a while if they are not interacted with or picked up.
You can find more information and the download for LagFixer at the link below!
Since LagFixer is a plugin just like any other, you can simply just install it onto your server and get all the benefits of the plugin applied immediately upon successful installation!
However, some of the changes that LagFixer implements can drastically change how your Minecraft server functions. Some players may find the things that LagFixer does to be annoying or disruptive. Luckily, LagFixer is a very flexible plugin that lets you enable or disable specific functionalities in-game! To start configuring LagFixer in-game, you can simply run the command below!
/lagfixer menu
⛔ If you get a message in your chat after trying to run the command that says "Missing permission to this module: lagfixer.command" then you will need to op yourself! You can learn how to op yourself with our guide here!
Upon entering this command, you'll get a little window in your game that will look something like this!
Hovering over each of the heads in the middle can provide you with some cool information about your server; however, the main configuration settings will be on the white head to the far left. If you left-click on that head, a new window will pop up!
Hovering over each of those heads in this window will tell you which module they correlate to, and more information about what they do. If you want to disable one specifically, you can click on it. And another window will pop-up, for example, if I click on the chest head in the middle that represents the EntityLimiter module of the plugin, this screen will pop up.
The top heads are all individual configuration settings, and changing those are outside of the scope of this guide. To disable the module all together, hover over the green head at the bottom.
If you click, the head will turn red and then the module will be turned off!
Now that the module is disabled, the module will not be active anymore, and the server will no longer be affected by it. If you'd like to turn it back on, you can click the red head at the bottom, and when you do so it will turn green and the module will be enabled again!