Tuinity VS Starlight

According to the GitHub Repository, it hasn't been updated since Aug 27, 2021 (currently 15 months ago) and the Repository is Archived, which pretty much means you won't get any support there.

For the server version, there are tons. You've got PaperMC, Tuinity (will be upstreamed to paper soon), Purpur and a lot more forks of a fork of a fork. I personally use Purpur because they're better optimized and faster than Paper. You can read more about them on their respective links.

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

Running vanilla with a lot of players is going to start creating a lot of tps lag. I would recommend running Paper or even Tuinity if you are having higher player counts. Depending on the player count and other factors like plugins, etc, you would want to go for 4-8GB of ram + a higher end CPU.

It's completely free. The server software like Paper, Tuinity, Airplane, and Purpur are completely free and open source. There are tons of them out there, and most remain as open source projects. Excluding the hardware and electricity required to run it, the servers are completely free to host.

With 16 players online at once, it's going to put a lot of stress on the server. So run Tuinity or Airplane (airplane currently supports 1.17), 8-16GB of ram, and a good amount of storage

Always go with a server. The vanilla server software can't handle that much at this point. On realms, there's not much u can do in order to have it run smoothly. But with servers, u can swap the vanilla jar out with Paper or Tuinity, which allows for less lag

Tuinity: https://github.com/Tuinity/Tuinity

1.17 builds are stable enough now! Repo

I would always say that if you want to stick to plugins, always go for Paper. It's much faster than spigot (and here's the reason why), open source, and fixes bugs and exploits that spigot or upstream vanilla won't fix. It's a fork of Spigot, so you get all the features of spigot, and the lag reduction is really good on paper. I would recommend using Bungeecord or Waterfall as the proxy (which is a speical server software that allows players to hop between servers without having to join and quit. if you have played on network servers like hypixel, they use proxies, but it's on a more massive and complex scale), and use Paper or Tuinity as the backend servers (the actual servers you'll play on). Have the lobby server set as the default server, and either use 8 different servers or use 2-4 different servers with Multiverse and create 2-4 different worlds on within the servers.

Link to Starlight

From the docs

i can confirm what mrspinn has posted but I would use rubidium and not magnesium(both ports of sodium, just a different authors on the ports.), this works with magnesium/rubidium extras as well for things like a better zoom function(runs off the sodium base so both ports are fine). Then if you'd like shaders with this you can use oculus(port of iris), this works with optifine shader packs. Road runner is good for cleaning up a lot of the overhead in things like game physics, AI, block ticking, etc (port of lithium, don't know why this one didn't keep the chemical name). Starlight again is good at what it does, even to the point of being integrated into papermc(which is why it's on their github and not the spottedleaf's personal anymore), don't know if you've sent much time around plugin servers. I also then use Ferritecore this greatly helps bring down memory requirements of the pack(I can run on 4gb, given I have fairly fast memory).

There is a comparison between Starlight, Phosphor and Vanilla on Starlight's Github page

The Mods I would especially recommend for 1.16+ are FerriteCore, Magnesium OR Rubidium (these are incompatible with optifine, for shaders you can use rubidium with Oculus. I would recommend using Magnesium when possible) and Magnesium Extras, as well as Starlight (Starlight X Create if you are on 1.16.5 and are using create) and LazyDFU

And yes, it's safe to use Starlight. I haven't had any data loss, world corruption, etc. and it's a lot faster than Phosphor (At least according to these graphs)

It's just that. It's a free and open source optimization mod that aims to improve fps, and fixes other issues. Along with that, Sodium is free and open source (available on GitHub). By default, Sodium does not provide shader support, and shader support can be done with Iris (Iris is also open source and free as well). But if you want to optimize your fps even more, you can bring in Lithium and Starlight (Lithium targets overall optimization, like the AI and other stuff without breaking the game, and Starlight is a complete rewrite of the vanilla lighting engine to be even more faster and fixes so much stuff with the lighting engine). And you can tack on more mods, like FerriteCore, Enchaned Block Entities (EBE) in order to optimize other parts of the game

Starlight v1.0.0

Source? I can't find it for paper. the Github says it's only for fabric https://github.com/PaperMC/Starlight