dylancode’s Minecraft server optimisation guide

I’ve been running a Minecraft server for a while now, and I became tired of the lack of quality Minecraft server optimisation guides out there. So I decided to write my own!

Credits

This guide would not have been possible without the work of some amazing people over the years. A huge thank you to:

• The PaperMC team for their incredible work on Paper, which is the only reason Minecraft servers can run beyond just a handful of online players.
• Aikar for his contributions to Minecraft server optimisation, mainly including Aikar’s Flags and his work on Paper.
• SpigotMC for their work on Spigot, which created the foundation for Paper and maintains the Bukkit API, making plugins possible.
• Spark by Lucko for being an amazing profiling tool that helps server admins identify performance issues.
• Paper Chan for its detailed explanation of various Paper configuration options.
• YouHaveTrouble for their optimisation guide, which served as inspiration for this guide.

So what does this guide do differently?

It is no doubt that all of the information you could ever need to know about server optimisation is already out there. However, it is scattered across various sources, and some of it is outdated or incomplete. This guide aims to bring together all of that into a single guide, which is:

• up-to-date with the latest Minecraft versions
• comprehensive (covers almost all aspects of server optimisation)
• easy to understand
• explains the reasoning behind each optimisation so you can change it for your specific server
• all in one place
• useful both as a ‘best starter config’ and as a way to properly understand what each config option does