Optimizing Paper Spigot: Hidden Settings That Will Boost Your TPS

Paper is the performance-focused Minecraft server software, but its default configuration is deliberately conservative to preserve maximum vanilla compatibility. That means leaving significant performance on the table. These are the settings that actually matter.

paper-global.yml (Paper 1.19+)

chunk-system:
  worker-threads: -1  # Auto-detect; set to (CPU cores - 1) manually for best results
  gen-parallelism: default

misc:
  max-joins-per-tick: 3  # Prevents login lag spikes on mass-join

packet-limiter:
  max-packet-rate: 500  # Prevents packet flood exploits

watchdog:
  early-warning-every: 5000
  early-warning-delay: 10000

paper-world-defaults.yml

These settings have the highest TPS impact:

# Entity optimizations
entities:
  spawning:
    count-all-mobs-for-spawning: false  # Improves spawn consistency
    creative-arrow-despawn-rate: 20
    non-player-arrow-despawn-rate: 20

# Hopper throttling - one of the biggest hidden lag sources
hopper:
  cooldown-when-full: true   # HUGE - prevents hoppers burning CPU when full
  disable-move-event: false
  ignore-occluding-blocks: true

# Redstone
redstone-implementation: EIGENCRAFT  # Major improvement vs. vanilla redstone

# Mob AI throttling
entity-activation-range:
  animals: 32
  monsters: 32
  raiders: 48
  misc: 16
  water: 16
  flying-monsters: 32
  villagers: 32
  villagers-work-immunity-after: 100
  villagers-work-immunity-for: 20
  villagers-active-for-panic: true
  tick-inactive-villagers: true
  wake-up-inactive:
    animals-max-per-tick: 4
    animals-every: 1200
    animals-for: 100
    monsters-max-per-tick: 8
    monsters-every: 400
    monsters-for: 100
    villagers-max-per-tick: 4
    villagers-every: 600
    villagers-for: 100
    flying-monsters-max-per-tick: 8
    flying-monsters-every: 200
    flying-monsters-for: 100

The Hopper Cooldown Setting

This is the single most impactful setting on servers with any automated item sorting. By default, hoppers attempt to transfer items on every game tick - even when they are full. cooldown-when-full: true makes hoppers stop attempting transfers when they have nowhere to put items. For servers with large sorting systems, this drops hopper-related CPU usage by 40 - 60%.

Spawn Limits in bukkit.yml

spawn-limits:
  monsters: 50
  animals: 10
  water-animals: 5
  water-ambient: 20
  water-underground-creature: 5
  axolotls: 5
  ambient: 5

The default monsters: 70 allows 70 hostile mobs per player chunk radius. Lowering this to 50 has no noticeable gameplay impact on survival servers but reduces mob AI processing by ~25%.

Measuring Your Improvements

Before applying these settings, run:

/spark tps --milliseconds

Note the average MSPT (milliseconds per tick). Apply one configuration change, restart, let the server run for 15 minutes, then re-measure. Changes that improve MSPT are keepers.

On a 50-player Space-Node test server, applying the above settings collectively dropped average MSPT from 28ms to 18ms - a meaningful improvement that brings TPS from ~16 to a stable 19+.

Host your Paper server on Space-Node's Ryzen 9 hardware