ATM10 server lag fix: digital miners, AE2, and chunkloaders

ATM10 lag almost always traces back to one of three causes: an unfiltered digital miner, an AE2 network past its size, or chunkloaded mob farms.

ATM10 lag almost always starts a few days into a fresh server: TPS sat at 20.0 on day one, sat at 12 to 14 on day five, and now nobody knows why. The cause is usually one of three things; check them in this order.

Step 1: a digital miner with no filter

Mekanism's Digital Miner is the single biggest TPS killer in ATM packs. With no filter set, it scans the configured 32x256x32 region looking for blocks every tick. One unfiltered miner can take a server from 20 TPS to 6 on its own.

Find them with Spark:

/spark profiler --timeout 60

Open the flame graph link, look for mekanism.common.tile.machine.TileEntityDigitalMiner. Each one will be a flame with a player's name nearby in the world data. Ask the player to set a whitelist filter (specific ores only) or pause the miner when not in use.

Step 2: an AE2 storage network past its size

Applied Energistics 2 networks scan their entire inventory on certain operations (craft, autocraft, some terminals). A network with 30 storage cells and 100,000 items is fine; a network with 200 cells, six subnets, and a million items will start to drag during peak interaction. Symptom: TPS dips when a player opens an ME terminal, recovers when they close it.

Two fixes that work:

Crafting CPUs. Move autocraft jobs onto dedicated Crafting CPU multiblocks so the main network is not doing the search.
Storage subdivision. Split bulk storage (cobble, dirt) onto a sub-network with one ME P2P tunnel so the main grid only indexes what is in active use.

Step 3: chunkloaded mob farms

ATM10 ships several modded chunkloaders (Mekanism Anchor Upgrade, FTB Chunks claims with always-load). A chunkloaded mob farm running 24/7 piles up entities and item drops. Visit each chunkloader (/ftbchunks server-info shows them) and check entity counts:

/spark tickmonitor

Anything sitting at hundreds of entities per chunk with nobody nearby is wasted simulation. Either add a kill chamber, throttle the mob spawner, or unload when not in use.

Step 4: check RAM as a last resort

If TPS is bad and the three causes above are clean, look at Dashboard → your server → Stats panel. If RAM is sitting at 95%+ on every tick, you are out of heap and the JVM is garbage-collecting too often to keep up. The only fix is more RAM: move to Extreme (14 GB) or split your active players across two servers.

Where to go next

ATM10 server setup if you have not done the initial tuning pass yet.
Fixing Minecraft server lag for the wider Minecraft lag triage.

Last updated 2026-05-23. Notice a mistake? Tell us.