What Is Minecraft TPS?

A server's TPS (Ticks Per Second) is used to quantify the overall health of your server's performance. Like a heartbeat, your server ticks at a fixed rate of 20 ticks per second, meaning one tick every 0.05 seconds. On each tick, various aspects of the server advance a little; mob movement, grass growth, the changing position of moving objects, mobs checking their surroundings and updating their behavior, health and hunger, and much more. Your entire server revolves around the rhythm of your server's TPS. When it's at peak performance, at 20 TPS, you'll get nominal gameplay with no server lag. But if your server's TPS drops, even by several ticks, you'll start to notice server lag.

As the server's TPS drops, you'll start to notice the 'rubber-banding' effect. Your server will skip ticks in an attempt to correct itself, often reverting in-game actions a few seconds back. Most associate this event with mobs teleporting, blocks breaking but not dropping the item until a few seconds later, combat hit delay, or the sun jumping across the sky counter-clockwise. All actions and events that take place on the server are governed by the server's TPS. As it drops, so does the speed of your server — time on the server essentially slows down.

What Determines TPS?

TPS on the server is primarily determined by the speed and capabilities of the hardware used to host it. While server hardware plays a major role in the server's TPS, it's not the absolute determinant. What happens on the server also plays an equal role in determining the server's TPS. Poor management of your server can be just as detrimental as having adequate hardware. TPS drops can occur as a result of various in-game events due to the use of plugins, mods, complex redstone structures, and much more. Determining the source of the TPS drop is not an easy task, but it can be easily avoided with good server management practices.

What Causes TPS Drops?

When adding mods or plugins, you need to think about the long-term effects of your choices. Many new server owners wrongly assume that the number of people on their server will determine its performance. Before stating that 'there are only a couple of people online and the server is lagging a lot,' you should consider that the number of players on the server plays a small role in overall server performance. The main causes of TPS drops are the result of what is happening in your world. For modded servers, this is more apparent with all the new blocks and functionality they provide.

For every modded block you add that provides some type of function, the server has to allocate resources to make sure that function is carried out. Now, by itself, that block has little consequence. But if that block forms a series as is often done with solar panels, then the server will have to dedicate more resources to carry out the functions of that series. When we break it down, we can get an idea of how much is really going on in the background.

If you have a series of 1000 solar panels, each panel when placed is constantly checking the time of day. It then checks the immediate surrounding blocks for cables to deliver power. If a cable joins another series, then that main line is updated with the sum power of both series. These updates occur every 0.05 seconds and when combined with everything else, it all adds up. It's not surprising the strain that can put on a server that Minecraft was not designed for.

Avoiding TPS Drops

Solid management practices. When you add anything to your server, whether it be in-game or from the backend, you need to think about the long-term implications that addition can have. How you determine this is based on your understanding of the addition. For mods and plugins, this means reviewing what the mod/plugin does and making an educated guess of its long-term effects. While in-game, you should consider the size of your worlds and the blocks you place in them. Some modded blocks can require more resources than others and just one could potentially wreak havoc on the server's TPS. Furthermore, having multiple players on your server with individual bases can increase resource consumption. So, if possible, build relatively close and share machines in a community environment. Build conservatively, only what you need, avoiding unnecessary builds that could otherwise strain your server's resources.