Configure Server Performance Settings

Locate Your Configuration File

Spigot stores most performance settings in spigot.yml, found in your server root directory. This file controls how your server handles entities, chunks, and ticking.

Adjust Key Performance Values

Open spigot.yml in a text editor. Look for the entity-activation-range section—this controls how far from players entities remain active. Reducing these ranges saves resources but may affect mob behavior at distance.

Find chunk-gc settings to enable garbage collection, which prevents memory leaks from unused chunks. The max-tick-time value sets how long a single tick can run before the server warns of lag.

Optimize Tick Settings

Locate world-settings to fine-tune per-world options like growth-chunks-per-tick and decay-chunks-per-tick. Lower values reduce server load but slow natural processes like crop growth and leaf decay.

Disable random-light-updates if you don't need dynamic lighting changes—this is a common performance drain.

Apply Changes

Save the file and restart your server. Monitor your TPS (ticks per second) using the /tps command. Aim for 20 TPS; if you're below that, reduce entity ranges or chunk processing further.