Advanced Checklist
This section covers plugins that you can modify/replace to improve performance. Only recommended at higher player counts.
TAB
The plugin author’s optimisation guide is linked below.. The anti-override options are especially important as TAB’s overriding is quite intensive. An additional config worth changing to false is unlimited-nametag-mode.
Regarding anti-override, first make sure that none of your plugins mess with the tablist or scoreboard other than TAB itself. Some common culprits might be BetterTeams, eGlow, Paper’s collision rules and CMI.
You will have to remove eGlow in order to take full advantage of this optimisation. Once you’re done modifying/removing such plugins, make sure enable-player-collisions in Paper’s configuration is true. After you do that, you can disable player collisions in TAB’s config by changing scoreboard-teams.enable-collisions.
Finally, switch anti-override from true to false. If your tablist does not have proper order, an external plugin is probably still modifying the tablist.
ProtocolLib & it’s Dependants
ProtocolLib is not very well optimised. Lots of plugins also abuse ProtocolLib a lot, causing even worse performance. Examples are DeluxeCombat (If ProtocolLib hook is enabled) and InteractiveChat. Removal has resulted in significantly better performance in all large servers.
Consider finding alternatives to plugins that use ProtocolLib, or fork them to use PacketEvents.
Citizens
Citizens often eats up >5% of ticks on larger servers. It is recommended that you use ZNPCsPlus instead if you don’t mind a smaller catalogue of supported plugins. Overall, ZNPCsPlus was using 0.03% of the ticks at 330 players according to a spark report.
ajLeaderboards
Although ajLeaderboards has seen great optimization patches in recent times, it is still a tad laggier than it really should be. We recommend LeaderHeadsRevamped instead. Yes, LHR still works perfectly even though it hasn’t seen an update in ages.
If you insist on using ajLeaderboards, make sure register-lp-contexts is set to false.
AntiCheat
Vulcan as an anti-cheat does not scale well at higher player counts, where every bit of performance matters. >1.6% ticks eaten at 350+ players is supoptimal. AstroAC on the other hand only eats 0.03% of ticks at 330 players while having checks that are almost as good as Vulcan’s.
Polar might also be worth it but we have yet to check it’s performance at higher player counts
Spartan (Both Java and Bedrock) is an absolute no-go for even medium-sized servers. Performance is extremely poor and checks are subpar.
FastAsyncWorldEdit
Although FAWE performs far better than WE when it’s actually being used for building, it’s performance is, rather ironically, significantly worse than standard WorldEdit’s at idle due to FAWE listening to player interaction events.
If you nor any of your plugins are actively using FAWE, consider switching to standard WorldEdit.
Vanish Plugins
It is recommended to use AdvancedVanish instead of plugins like SuperVanish and PremiumVanish as their performance is rather poor in comparison.
Geyser
To offload Geyser’s performance impact on your Spigot/Proxy server, you can use Geyser Standalone. Worth it for servers that have a lot of bedrock players.
DiscordSRV
If you are fine with losing a few features, consider replacing DiscordSRV with Essentials Discord as it isn’t as bloated.
Auction House Plugins
zAuctionHouse is recommended as it runs the smoothest while also having the most features. PlayerAuctions is an alright alternative if you want a free plugin, but it’s performance is marginally inferior. Consider enabling zAuctionHouse’s cacheItems setting as well.
Stacking Plugins
Stacking plugins can be very detrimental to server performance depending on their implementations and configurations. RoseStacker is the best we’ve used thus far, but might end up lagging the server a bit more than if you didn’t have it installed.
WorldGuard
WorldGuard allows you to prevent it from listening to certain events in it’s configuration file. Could prove useful for very specific servers, but not something the average server should tinker with.