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Zach Lowery
Game Experience Engineer
Optimizing spigot.yml To Reduce Lag
If you’re running a Spigot server, you have a handful of options you can use to optimize your server to ensure optimal performance. This guide will show you the settings offered by Spigot that you can take advantage of to optimize your server’s performance.
Note
This article is specifically for Minecraft Java Edition servers, and depends on Spigot or Paper to work.
Below is a list of settings from the spigot.yml and their recommended values for optimal performance in the order of most impact to least impact on performance. For help editing this file, reference our guide on modifying your Spigot configuration.
For more detailed and advanced options you can adjust, feel free to check out this useful server optimization GitHub guide by YouHaveTrouble and contributors.
| Option | Description | Default | Optimized / Recommended |
|---|---|---|---|
| save-user-cache-on-stop-only | Prevents constant saving of user data while online. Improves performance, but may risk data loss if the server crashes. Make backups and stop the server regularly. | false | true |
| entity-activation-range | Controls how close entities must be to players to activate AI. | animals: 16 monsters: 24 raiders: 48 misc: 8 | (same as default) |
| merge-radius | Increases how close items/XP must be to merge, reducing ticking entities. Too high values may cause bugs (e.g. teleporting through blocks). | item: 4.0 exp: 6.0 | (same as default) |
| nerf-spawner-mobs | Disables AI for mobs from spawners, improving performance on spawner-heavy servers. | false | true |
| max-tick-time | Controls max tick time before skipping logic. Setting it to 1000 disables the feature to avoid breaking gameplay. | tile: 50 entity: 50 | 1000 (disabled) |
| mob-spawn-range | Sets how far (in chunks) from a player mobs can spawn. Keep lower than view distance to ensure effectiveness. | 8 | 6 |
| arrow-despawn-rate | Controls how long survival arrows stay before despawning. Reduces entity lag. (300 ticks = 15s) | 1200 | 300 |
| item-despawn-rate | Sets how long items stay on the ground before despawning. Reducing helps performance but may annoy players. (4000 ticks = ~3.3 minutes) | 6000 | 4000 |
| tick-inactive-villagers | Prevents ticking of villagers outside activation range. Greatly improves performance in 1.14+ servers. | true | false |
You can further improve performance on your Spigot server by optimizing Bukkit and Paper. Learn more about how to optimize your Bukkit configuration with our guide on optimizing Bukkit’s bukkit.yml here.