The Killd Board / Arrows
How many arrows does it take to crash a Minecraft server?
More than we were willing to spawn. The tick rate first fell behind at 9,733, and we stopped at 50,000 with the server still running. Arrows are one of two entries on the board that survived.
Paper 1.21.11 · AMD Ryzen 7 9700X · 6GB allocated
Why arrows cost so much
An arrow in flight is doing work: moving, checking for collisions, applying gravity. An arrow stuck in a block has almost stopped being an entity at all. It sits there counting down to despawn. Since a pile of arrows becomes a pile of stuck arrows within a second or two, the cost per arrow collapses almost immediately after you spawn them.
How we tested it
Everything spawned into a single chunk, in one pile, with the server left running until the tick rate gave up. The server ran Paper 1.21.11 on an AMD Ryzen 7 9700X with 6GB allocated, which is the same hardware and the same RAM policy as an ordinary Hostd plan. We watched TPS and tick times rather than guessing, wrote down the count where the server first fell behind, and kept spawning until it either died or made it clear it was not going to.
This is why skeleton farms quietly accumulate tens of thousands of arrows without anyone noticing a problem. They are cheap, right up until something loads them all at once.
What this means for your server
If your own server is printing Can't keep up! Is the server overloaded? the cause is the same shape as this one: something in the tick loop is taking longer than its 50ms budget. Roastd reads your RAM allocation, view distance, player slots, JVM flags and logs and names which of those it is. No account, no world upload, no charge.
Questions about arrows
Do arrows cause server lag in Minecraft?
Barely, once they land. A stuck arrow is one of the cheapest entities in the game and mostly waits to despawn. Our server did not fall behind until 9,733 of them, and it survived 50,000. Arrows still in flight cost more, so a wall of skeletons firing continuously is a different situation from a floor full of spent arrows.
Should I clear arrows from a skeleton farm?
It is worth doing, but it is not usually the thing lagging you. Arrows are cheap; the mobs producing them are not. If a skeleton farm is hurting your TPS, look at the mob count in the collection area and the hoppers moving the drops before you worry about the arrows on the floor.
Elsewhere on the board
Keep reading
Rent the machine we keep breaking
Same AMD Ryzen 7 9700X, same hard-reserved RAM, same NVMe. Yours will not have 50,000 arrows in one chunk, which gives it a considerable head start. Online in under a minute, with a free address, DDoS protection and a 7-day money-back guarantee.