How to raise your Minecraft server's TPS

TPS below 20 is almost never fixed by buying more RAM. On most servers we look at, the cause is three or four configuration settings and one or two badly designed farms.

The first place to look is view-distance. Dropping it from 10 to 6 and setting simulation-distance to 4 usually hands back several TPS immediately, and players rarely notice if you use a plugin that adjusts distance dynamically.

The second is entity limits. Mobs piling up in gold or hostile farms are the number one cause of drops. Configure merge-radius and per-chunk limits in spigot.yml before touching anything else.

Install a diagnostic plugin like Spark and run a two-minute profile during peak hours. It'll tell you exactly which plugin or which chunk is eating tick time, and it's usually something you'd never have guessed.