7 Reasons Your Minecraft Server Might Be Lagging

In this article we will be going over 7 reasons why your Minecraft Server could be Lagging, although your server host could be causing the lag, a lot of the time its a problem with plugins, mods or your world, Lets get right into it!

1. Plugins (outdated), when your server starts to lag, it could be happening because your using an old version of a plugin, try going through all your plugins and updating them. Even if your server isn't lagging, updating all your plugins will help performance!

2. Plugins (Memory leak), when adding new plugins, don't add them in bulk, add them a few at a time, and let your server run for a while with them, sometimes plugins can leak some memory as they work, meaning, the longer your server is running, the more lag there will become, although this is a rare form of lag (on a large scale), it is sometimes one of the worst ones to fix.

3. Corrupt Worlds, it is possible for certain chunks within Minecraft worlds to become corrupt and have massive lag spikes. It is often caused from certains mods or modpacks that may be buggy and coded poorly. If you notice certain areas of your world are very laggy, try and find out what could be causing it. Some of our customers here at Minecraft Server Australia have had success fixing the world chunk issues by downloading the world to their computer from their Server FTP connection, and loading it into a single player version of the modpack which can fix issues with chunks, and then re-uploading it back to the server. Also loading the world into the program MCEdit you can find corrupt chunks and remove them. If this doesn't work you can try restoring the world from a backup before the corruption occurred.

4. Too Many Mods, if you try to run too many mods at once you may run into lag issues. The more mods a Minecraft server is using at once the more Ram and CPU required to host the server without it lagging. Make sure your server has enough Ram allocated to it and it is running on a fast dedicated server. Also sometimes certain mods can overload, things like too many quarries, too many chunks loaded at once, too many machines, etc, can also cause lag issues. Try to remove any lag machines like this that could be causing problems.

5. DDOS Attacks, (stands for distributed denial of service), if your server has more then 30 players on most times of the day, expect to get hit with a DDOS attack at some point, this one is harder to explain, but overall, just make sure your host has DDOS Protection otherwise your server may lag and have downtime during a DDOS Attack (Minecraft Server Australia does have DDOS protection!)

6. Server Ping to Players, the further away from the server you are in real life, the worse your ping is (We have players that play on our Australian public Minecraft server AusBlock from across the world), but more often then not, they will have more lag than our Australian players, so try to get a server near where you and most your players will be playing from!

7. Server Host Issues, As I said at the start of the article, a lot of the time it is a problem with your plugins, mods, world or server location, not the host, but some of the other cheap hosts out there will do things like RAM Share, where is sounds like your getting a good deal, but really you aren't. Some server hosts, just don't have good server hardware and a good bandwidth connection / network, find a host that uses good hardware and has a network with a 1 Gbit/per sec or more connection.

If you are in Australia and you want a reliable Minecraft Server with no lag then we can help. There may be other reasons that Minecraft servers lag, but these are the top reasons we have discovered over our 4 years of hosting Australian Minecraft Servers.