LagDoctor

LagDoctor

Diagnosis + prescription for server lag — no profiler jargon.

LagDoctor measures your server from the inside (tick times, entity/tile-entity density per chunk, server config values) and turns the results into ranked, actionable recommendations instead of raw profiler data. Where a profiler shows you flame graphs, LagDoctor tells you things like:

The chunk at 5,-3 in region r.0.-1 contains 412 hoppers — raise ticks-per.hopper-check in spigot.yml to 8.

Everything runs inside the server: no external services, no web API, no spark dependency. Output language is selectable (English / Turkish).

✨ Features

• 📈 Tick sampler — measures every tick via Paper's tick events into a fixed-size ring buffer (default: last 6000 ticks ≈ 5 minutes). Reports MSPT average, p95, worst tick and spike count. No extra threads, negligible cost.
• 🔍 Chunk scanner — command-triggered, time-sliced scan (a limited number of chunks per tick) so it never freezes the server. Counts entities per type, dropped items, and tile entities (hoppers, spawners, furnaces) per loaded chunk.
• 📋 Config auditor — reads ~15 known-critical values from server.properties, bukkit.yml, spigot.yml and config/paper-world-defaults.yml (strictly read-only, never modified) and flags anything outside recommended ranges.
• 🩺 Rule-based diagnosis engine — a fixed rule set (hopper density, mob accumulation, item pile-ups, redstone-heavy chunk signals, oversized view distance, simulation distance vs. available RAM, and more) converts all measurements into findings sorted by severity, each with a one-line cause and a concrete action.
• 📄 Reports — paginated in-game chat report with clickable [TP] buttons to teleport straight to a problem chunk, plus a timestamped markdown file under plugins/LagDoctor/reports/ (old files rotate automatically).
• 🌍 Localization — every diagnosis string lives in messages_en.yml / messages_tr.yml; missing keys fall back to bundled defaults.

Intentionally out of scope: continuous background profiling, method-level profiling (that's spark's job), web panels, automatic config editing, and entity removal/cleanup.

🚀 Installation

1. Download the LagDoctor jar and drop it into your server's plugins/ folder.
2. Restart the server (or start it for the first time).
3. Optionally edit plugins/LagDoctor/config.yml and run /lagdoctor reload.

Requirements: Paper (or a Paper fork such as Purpur) 1.20.4 – 1.21.x, Java 21. Spigot is not supported — the tick-duration events LagDoctor relies on are Paper-only.

💬 Commands

All commands also work from the console (except tp). Everything defaults to OP-only. /ld is available as an alias.

⚙️ Configuration

language: en                # en | tr — language of all output
sampler:
  history-ticks: 6000       # ring buffer size (~5 min at 20 TPS)
  spike-threshold-ms: 100   # a tick longer than this counts as a "spike"
scan:
  chunks-per-tick: 20       # scan speed; lower = less impact, slower scan
  top-chunk-count: 10       # busiest chunks listed by /lagdoctor top
report:
  save-to-file: true        # write markdown reports to plugins/LagDoctor/reports/
  max-saved-reports: 20     # older report files are deleted automatically
  findings-per-page: 8      # findings per chat page
thresholds:                 # rule thresholds (advanced tuning)
  hoppers-per-chunk: 60
  entities-per-chunk: 150
  dropped-items-per-chunk: 200
  tile-entities-per-chunk: 100

messages_tr.yml and messages_en.yml are copied into the plugin folder on first start and can be edited freely.

🔒 Data & privacy

• No database. Measurements live in memory; only the last scan is kept.
• Reports are written as plugins/LagDoctor/reports/scan-YYYYMMDD-HHmmss.md; files beyond max-saved-reports are deleted, oldest first.
• Server config files are opened read-only — LagDoctor never modifies them.

❓ FAQ

Does scanning lag the server? No. The scan processes at most chunks-per-tick chunks per tick (20 by default), so even a world with thousands of loaded chunks is swept without a visible MSPT increase — it just takes a few seconds longer.

How is this different from spark? spark shows you where the time goes at the method level; LagDoctor tells you what to do about it at the gameplay/config level. They complement each other.