How to Improve Your Survival Server’s Performance with Folia

🚀 How Does Folia Improve Performance on SMP Servers with Large Worlds?

If you’re running an SMP (Survival Multiplayer) server with many players and a large world, you know performance can become a real challenge. Folia, a variant of Paper developed by PaperMC, is designed to change that drastically. For example, the 2b2t server could handle up to 200 simultaneous players before Folia, but with Folia, it can support 800 without issues.

🔧 What is Folia?

Folia is an experimental fork of Paper that introduces a region-based parallel execution system (called Regionized Multithreading). This allows servers to fully utilize multi-core CPUs and handle many players simultaneously without lag.

🧠 How Does It Work?

🧩 Region Parallelization

• Folia splits the world into independent regions.

• Each region runs on its own thread if it doesn’t interact with other regions.

• This allows multiple areas of the world to be simulated at the same time.

📌 Example: If you have 100 players spread across the map, each in different chunks, Folia can simulate dozens or even hundreds of these chunks in parallel—something impossible with traditional Paper, which runs everything on a single main thread.

💥 Benefits for SMP Servers with Large Worlds

✅ Real Scalability

• More cores = more active players without TPS drops.

• Ideal for servers with huge maps or many players exploring at the same time.

  
  

✅ Reduced "Ticking Lag"

• Fewer processing queues for chunks loaded simultaneously.

• Ticks aren’t delayed by events happening in other parts of the world.

  
  

✅ Better Use of Modern Hardware

• Modern CPUs like Ryzen 9 (our dedicated servers) have 16+ cores; Folia uses nearly 100% of them.

• Paper and Spigot use only one core for the main tick, while Folia distributes the load.

  
  

⚠️ What You Should Keep in Mind

🔌 Plugin Compatibility

• Folia isn’t compatible with most Paper/Spigot plugins.

• Only plugins specifically designed for its multithreaded model or that use thread-safe APIs will work.

  
  

🧪 Still Experimental

• Folia is actively developed.

• It’s stable for many uses but not as extensively tested as Paper.

  
  

🛠️ Ideal Use Cases

• SMP servers with 100+ simultaneous players.

• Very large, spread-out maps (several thousand blocks of exploration).

• Events with many separated players (e.g., clan-based survival).

  
  

📈 Performance Improvement Example

In real tests with a 300-player SMP server on a 20k-block-radius map:

Server	CPU (Ryzen 9 5950X)	Average TPS
Paper	1 core at 100%	10 TPS
Folia	14 cores at 70%	20 TPS

🔚 Conclusion

Folia is the future of high-performance Minecraft servers. If you’re running an SMP server with a large world and many players, migrating to Folia can drastically improve stability, player capacity, and overall experience.

💡 Tip: Test Folia in a staging environment before migrating your main server, and make sure your plugins are compatible. We hope this guide has been helpful! 🚀 Remember, don’t hesitate to ask questions on the HolyHosting Discord or contact our support team.

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