High Ping on a Minecraft Server: What It Is and How to Lower It

Ping or server lag: not the same thing

Ping is how long a message takes to go from your computer to the server and back, in milliseconds (ms). It depends on the path: your wifi, your router, your internet provider and the distance to the data centre.

Server lag is something else: the server can't keep up and the whole world goes in slow motion. It's measured in TPS (ticks per second; 20 is normal) and everyone notices it the same, even if each player's ping is low.

The quickest clue: if it only happens to one person, it's their connection. If it happens to everyone at once, look at the server first; that's in the Minecraft server lag guide.

How to see your ping

1. In the server list

   In “Multiplayer”, the green bars to the right of each server. If you hover the mouse over them, the game shows the milliseconds.

2. Inside the server

   Hold down Tab: the little bars next to each name are each player's ping. That way you see whether it's only yours or everyone's.

3. With a plugin

   EssentialsX's /ping only answers “Pong!”, but there are simple plugins that give each player's exact milliseconds.

How much ping is too much

Below 50 ms you don't notice anything. Between 50 and 100 ms survival and building play fine; in PvP you start to notice a little. From 100 to 150 ms hits and blocks start to lag behind. Above 200 ms, playing gets tiresome.

What weighs most is distance. From Spain, a server in Europe usually stays at a few tens of milliseconds; one in the United States or Asia easily adds 100 ms or more, however good your fibre is. Light doesn't travel faster because you pay more.

If the high ping is only yours

It's the most common case, and almost everything is fixed at home:

1. Cable beats wifi

   Wifi, especially through walls or far from the router, adds ping spikes and packet loss that feel like stutters. Use a network cable or, if you can't, move closer to the router or use the 5 GHz band.

2. Don't let anyone fill the connection

   A Steam download, a console update, a 4K film or uploading videos sends up the ping of everyone sharing that line. Pause whatever is downloading and measure again.

3. Restart the router

   If it's been on for weeks and the ping is worse than other days, switch it off for a minute. It's not magic, but sometimes that's enough.

4. Mobile data, carefully

   Tethering your phone's 4G or 5G works, but ping goes up and down much more than with fibre. To play seriously, the home connection is better.

5. Try without a VPN

   A VPN or a connection booster adds a detour. It only helps if your internet provider routes traffic along a bad path, and that's rare towards European servers. If you use one, compare your ping with and without it.

6. Rule out your computer

   If the game runs at low FPS, it also feels delayed even with good ping. Press F3: the FPS shows at the top. If it's low, lower the render distance or the graphics.

If the high ping is everyone's

If you all have high ping at the same time, check where the server is. A server hosted on another continent, or in someone's home with a slow upload, gives high ping to everyone outside that home. That's why the first thing when choosing hosting is the location of the data centre, not of the company.

If ping is good but everything is in slow motion (mobs move in jumps, crops don't grow, blocks take ages to break), it's not the connection: the server is running below 20 TPS. Type tps in the console of a Paper server and, if it's low, follow the spark guide to find out what's causing it.

A proxy like Velocity or BungeeCord, or an external anti-DDoS service, adds one more step along the path. It's usually a few milliseconds if they're close to the server, but if they're far away you notice it.

The server settings that do help (and the ones that don't)

No server.properties setting lowers ping: ping is the path between your home and the server. What you can do is make the server send less data, and that helps anyone playing on a tight connection.

The view distance (view-distance) decides how many chunks are sent around each player. With 8 to 10 it plays well; with 16 or more, when joining or flying through new areas a huge amount of terrain is sent and slow connections choke. The simulation distance (simulation-distance) doesn't change what's sent, but it does change what the server loads.

Compression (network-compression-threshold) comes at 256 and works well almost always: it compresses large packets and leaves small ones as they are. Setting it to -1 (no compression) only makes sense on a local network; over the internet it uses more bandwidth and doesn't lower ping.

How it works at NapNodes

NapNodes servers are in Europe (OVH), designed for playing from Spain and the rest of the EU. Your plan's RAM is yours alone: it isn't sold twice, so another customer doesn't take memory from you when more people are playing.

To see whether your server responds quickly without joining the game, the free tool Is my Minecraft server online? tells you whether it's on and how many milliseconds it takes to answer. Note: that figure is measured from our website, not from your home, so it shows the server is answering promptly, not your connection.

1. Look at the meters

   In “Home”, your server's screen, you see the memory, the processor and the disk. If the processor is maxed out with few people, it's server lag, not ping.

2. Adjust the view distance

   In “Settings”, “Performance” section, change “View distance” (8–10 works well) and leave “Compress packets from (bytes)” at 256. It saves by itself; restart with “Restart” for it to apply.

3. Ask if it doesn't add up

   If you all have high ping from Spain and the server isn't under load, write to us in “Help” with your ping and where you play from, and we'll look into it.

Frequently asked questions