Since the request went out for a official posting on lag, I'll roll through lag quickly and you can all add in your own thoughts on it. Lag is a general term for a performance dip during your play, this can take on many different forms, which is why we ask "Well what sort of lag are you expereiencing?". It's not just a catch phrase staff likes to throw out, but the first step in trouble shooting an issue. FPS Lag: A client side condition, you're running around at sixty frames or more a second and all of a sudden you feel like you are living in a flip book. So what causes FPS Lag? Well all sorts of things can contribute to this issue, outdated hardware, outdated drivers, insuficient memory assigned to Minecraft (especially true for 1.10 packs), too many entities rendering at one time, increased draw distance etc, having too many texture packs installed without the memory to support it, etc. How do you resolve those issues? Ensure your video drivers are upto date, ensure you have enough RAM reserved for Minecraft, older packs can be happy with 2GB or less, while 1.10 packs suggest rather strongly that you reserve at least 4GB of memory to start them. Check your draw distance, and slide it back to ten chunks, the default view distance on our servers, you can also do things like changing your particle effects, shadows, etc. If you use a resource pack, make sure you adjust your RAM accordingly, larger packs require more memory. Don't drop a thousand chisel and bits every few blocks.. TPS Lag: Ticks Per Second, if the server is running with a full head of steam you are getting twenty ticks per second, when it starts falling below fifteen TPS you might notice, lower than ten and you definitely will. As a player you can reduce these issues by building wisely, this means not looping cables and ducts everywhere. Setting up your AE crafting properly to ensure it isn't effecting the server, not doing silly things like shoving that twenty-first speed upgrade into that item node.. Limiting your sprinkler use to a responsible amount, not making huge water tanks etc,. Don't drop a thousand chisel and bits every few blocks.. Latency or Ping (Pong): This represents your connection to our servers, and no you can't entirely trust the meter next to your name, it is just a representation of the best guess the client can come up with. If your ping is high you can try resetting your MODEM and router, use a wired connection to your router or MODEM instead of a wireless one, this will make a dramatic difference. Check your proxy connection if you are using one, despite their best efforts sometimes one proxy location is running slow, depending on the company you use you may be able to connect to a different point. Other things: You might have family members eating your bandwith streaming Game of Thrones while playing Overwatch at the same time you are trying to dig a nice hole, or maybe your sister is downloading Taylor Swift's latest single (legally of course) these too can effect your Minecraft performance! Feel free to add comments and suggestions below.
Note that large farms can be especially bad for your FPS as well, as many crops will require redrawing the entire chunk whenever they grow. While this isn't terrible for most crops, if you happen to have complex models in the same chunk as the farms, you'll have noticeable FPS drops from it. Also take care with allocating excessive amounts of memory to Minecraft, it can cause large spikes in FPS lag as Java fills the memory and clears large amounts of memory at once.
When it comes to RAM sometimes you can have too much of a good thing, JAVA is lazy and will fill your allocated memory before it takes out the trash, so if you've ever experienced minecraft slamming on the brakes all of a sudden.. that's the garbage collection kicking in.
Just a small correction, at the start of the second-to-last paragraph, it should say "if your ping is high"
