1.14.3 Performance Issues

EDIT: Performance issues have been improved, but not fixed with 1.14.4. Please keep using these tips!

To start off, let me just say, this sucks. Most of you have probably, and unfortunately, become aware of the major lag spikes occurring on the server lately. The admin team has been hard at work at trying to delve into issue and resolve it. However, after deep diving into it, we have made note of a very common consistency among all of the lag reports that we generated. That single consistency is entity lag.

The issue with 1.14:
As you know, we tried to pretty quickly update to 1.14 with a large new map. One of the things we did not anticipate was severe performance issues with vanilla 1.14 servers. These 1.14 issues mainly focus around issues dealing with chunk loading/unloading as well as entity handling. A lot of complaints have arisen that 1.14 has significantly worse performance on production servers than 1.13. Many of these complaints come with the recommendation to not use 1.14 on production servers, but we did so anyway, just for you guys.

So since all of us want to still play on 1.14 and it's pretty much near impossible to go back to 1.13 (while keeping the current map), we need you, the players, to help us/you out.

What's the solution?
The admin team needs you to reduce the amount of entities. This unfortunately means a lot of more changes than you think. There are two types of entities: regular entities (animals and hostile creatures) and tile entities (blocks). Tile entities are probably the least known. They are stuff like hoppers, smokers, signs, furnaces, barrels, repeaters, observers, and even chests. Basically, they are anything that requires the server to check the block on every 1/20th of a second for an update (e.g. the server needs to constantly check if anything is on top of a hopper or if that hopper is transferring things to a chest).

What are some examples of things we could do?

• Turn off redstone auto-farms
• Try to keep the max animals in a chunk to 20 or less
  
• Turn off your villager farms and kill any unused villagers
  
• Reduce the number of signs, item frames, and banners you use.
• Try not to use that many hoppers. Make sure to cover any open hoppers with a solid (full) block too.
• Limit the number of furnaces you have. I know multiple furnaces make it faster, but less lag also means it won't take forever to mine a block.
• This one is hard, but try to limit the number of chests you use. I know it will destroy your OCD, but do condense items into chests.

Will we have to do this stuff forever?
We hope not. We are just as anxious as you are in hoping that mojang or spigot quickly figures out a way to fix the performance issues. However, until then, there is nothing we can do but follow these tips and hope for the best.

Is the staff team going to enforce any of the tips mentioned?
The answer is it depends. The admin team is going to monitor lag on the server very closely and see how we can do some backend stuff to make the server less laggier. This being said we will also continually monitoring for areas that have a very high rate of entities. We will let occupants of that area know that they have a lot of entities and that they should reduce them in order to reduce server lag. If we find that entity lag rates in those areas are severely up and the occupant have increased their contribution, then the staff team will decide on how to handle that situation.
In short, you most likely won't be punished if you don't follow any of the tips above. However, you will have a lot of angry players at your back wondering why you're making the server more laggy.