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Massive Entity Lag

TPS drops and the server struggles because far too many entities are loaded at once. Large mob farms, item build-ups, or runaway breeding push the entity count past what the CPU can tick in time.

What does this error mean?
Every entity, mob, item, projectile, is updated each tick. When thousands accumulate in loaded chunks, the per-tick cost grows until the server cannot keep 20 TPS. The reported count is a symptom of unmanaged farms or accumulation. 
Entity count over 15,000
Most Common Causes
  • Oversized or unbounded mob farms.
  • Piles of dropped items that never despawn fast enough.
  • Uncontrolled animal breeding.
  • Mods/plugins spawning extra entities.
  • Mob caps set too high for the hardware.
How To Diagnose
  1. Use spark or a plugin to count entities per chunk and per type.
  2. Identify hotspots, farms or storage areas usually dominate.
  3. Check item-drop accumulation near AFK/farm areas.
  4. Review mob-spawn and despawn settings.
Recommended Fixes
  • Cap or redesign farms
    Limit farm output and add kill/collection mechanisms so entities do not pile up.
  • Tune entity settings
    On Paper, adjust per-chunk entity limits and item-merge/despawn rates.
  • Clear excess entities
    Carefully use /kill with type filters (never plain /kill @e) to remove surplus mobs/items.
  • Lower mob caps
    Reduce spawn caps in server.properties or Paper config to fit your hardware.
Analyze My Log
Frequently Asked Questions

No, it removes players' items, paintings, and more. Always filter by type, e.g. /kill @e[type=item].

It depends on hardware, but tens of thousands of entities will lag almost any server.

Yes, Paper offers per-chunk entity limits and merging that vanilla lacks.