Too many entities, mob farms and item build-ups

Lag near farms, villagers, animals or lots of dropped items.

Entity counts are the most common cause of low TPS; limit farms, breeding and dropped items.

Before you start: Paper or Purpur (for the config options) and op on the server.

Step by step

1. Find hotspots: spark shows entity ticking; Paper's /paper entity list or a plugin like ClearLag counts entities per chunk.
2. Go to the worst chunks and reduce them: kill excess animals, cap villager halls, and add kill chambers to farms.
3. Lower mob caps in bukkit.yml (spawn-limits) and entity activation ranges in spigot.yml if needed.
4. In Paper's config (config/paper-world-defaults.yml) set limits for items and experience orbs merging and despawning.
5. Stop endless breeding with a per-chunk animal limit plugin or rules for players.
6. Restart and measure TPS again.

Check it worked: Entity counts are reasonable and TPS recovers near farms.

Why it happens: Every mob and item is processed each tick; hundreds in one area overload the server.

More guides on RAM, CPU, performance, and lag:

• Find out why your server lags
• Out of memory errors
• RAM always shows high in the panel
• High CPU usage
• Redstone and hopper lag
• View distance and simulation distance