Tuinity VS Airplane

Could also pregenerate your world with chunky. To make it quicker add Starlight, Lithium, tic-tacs(This might be incompatible with some worldgen mods, but it massively speeds up terrain gen speeds if it works), and Carpet(use the "/tick freeze" command to freeze the game so there's more resources for terrain gen). Then switch to a paper style Tuinity server and set the worldborder to keep people from moving past pregenerated chunks.

You can try out Tuninty for extra performance

Tunity - Github Repo - (no website)

Strip out all plugins, make backups of & reset your yml's. Does the bug still occur after doing that? Then report on their issues tracker: https://github.com/Spottedleaf/Tuinity/issues

Tunity: https://github.com/Spottedleaf/Tuinity

Tuinity is a fork of Paper that includes optimizations that are generally tailored for servers with high player counts. It also includes Starlight: a complete rewrite of the lighting engine which greatly improves the speed of chunk generation. One benchmark has shown that Starlight can generate light 35x faster than vanilla.

Tuinity

For server jar I would recommend using Tuinity (or maybe even Purpur). As Tuinity has some more optimizations that help for larger servers and Purpur is a fork of it that I believe has even more experimental optimizations.

https://github.com/Spottedleaf/Tuinity/blob/master/patches/server/0061-Rewrite-the-light-engine.patch here is the patch, at the top he writes a description that can help you read more about it.

Use Tuinity (it's a fork of Paper, optimized for higher play counts)

Purpur includes Airplane, when is great for lag because it dynamically limits how much entities "think" or make decisions based on how far they are from players through a feature called D.E.A.R. Regardless of the choice you make, here is a great guide with a bunch of config changes which greatly improves server performance (and explains what each one does)! Wish you all the best with your server!

Try using this guide and also use a paper fork like purpur or airplane. You can also use these premade performance configs.

If you need even more performance, you may want to look into https://airplane.gg.

Use software like paper or airplane or purpur. All derivatives of each other. Paper is a fork of spigot with preformance improvements and bug patches. Airplane is a fork of paper with minor preformance improvements. Purpur is a upstream of Paper and airplane adding various customizations. Use aikar's flags. DO NOT use optimization plugins, they tend to only make things worse. Pre generate your map, but this has the downside of terrain being stuck through generation changes like 1.18.

What i would recommend doing is finding an old laptop or pc that isnt going to be used, and hook it up to ethernet. Then grab a server jar like Paper, and fire it up. Paper is going to be recommended in this case, since you are using not the best hardware. i run my servers off of old pcs (Intel Core i5-4950T @ 2GHz, 16GB DDR3 SDRAM, and 256GB SSD) use Airplane and haven't seen any lag so far. If that's not possible, then find a paid third party hoster like Pebblehost and use that instead

Look into different server software. Vanilla will start lagging when there are more than 10 players at a time. Use Airplane or Purpur in this case. Figure out what plugins you want and learn how to install and configure plugins

Full description: https://airplane.gg/

Just be sure to get airplane-purpur as it's way more performant than purpur. You can get it at https://airplane.gg -> Downloads -> Purpur. I use it for my small 2 GB server with 2 cores and its runs buttery smoother with 6 players and a render distance of 16

Actually try Paper instead of spigot. Paper is a fork of Spigot which focuses on high performance and bug fixes. And usually runs faster than Spigot. If you rlly need something to run faster than Paper, Tuinity or Airplane will work