minecraft-optimization VS quilt-serverside-mods

I'd recommend dropping the simulation distance and render distance and read up on this. Chunk loading is one of the most resource-intensive parts for the server - perhaps even the most.

You have troubles' guide

Follow this guide (read all carefully)

I have since found https://github.com/YouHaveTrouble/minecraft-optimization so I will be reading up on that too!

not a jobs one, no. you can check out the serverside mod list here https://serverside.infra.link/

Have a look at this list. It's got a ton of useful server-side mods which you can use on your server.

To be honest, the natural path for those that come from Bukkit and derivates for the future is to either switch to datapacks, migrate altogether to Bedrock (that already have interesting advances on its addon/pack system) or switch to Fabric server-only mods - There is a lot of possibilities already and there is also Polymer project that aims to "convert" some classic mods to server-side-only, so at the end maybe OP should look at it all and forget the Sponge thing.

This seems like a decent shop mod, for a larger list of mods you can look here. Another shop mod I found was https://modrinth.com/mod/diamond-economy

Once you have your server OS installed, look through the performance section of Quilt Serverside Mods (even though it says Quilt all the mods are Fabric compatible). Also make sure to set sync-chunk-writes to false in your server.properties.

I have been using this list to find some optimization mods but some mods in the performance sections seems to break the game (eg - Very Many Players ).

Here’s a good resource for server-side mods, some of them are for quilt but quite a few are fabric mods (originally the list was only fabric mods, also quilt is a fork of fabric, so if you wanted to give it a go, it has most of the same benefits fabric does)