Diagnosing Network Lag

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Resolving Minecraft Lag

You might experience lag while playing Minecraft for a variety of reasons. This article describes causes and potential solutions of network lag. For information about other types of lag, read through our article Resolving Minecraft Lag.

Sometimes you might run into an issue that isn't caused by your game client or a server you want to connect to. To play on a remote server, you have to make a connection to it through the internet. While most of the time, the internet Just Works™️ while you are browsing the internet, streaming videos, or doing other simple tasks, games tend to require a fairly consistent connection. Any dropped packets or other issues that you might not experience doing other things become a much larger problem with online games like Minecraft.

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We're here to Help

It can be difficult to determine the cause of network lag. There can be a number of potential culprits, and sometimes the cause isn't related to your network at all. If you're running into a problem and you've purchased a server through us, make sure to contact us for support!

Transient network connection issues or if you're physically far away from your server can make your Minecraft server appear less responsive. Before continuing with the directions below, we recommend trying to use a wired connection and making sure that the users on your network aren't downloading large files or consuming a lot of bandwidth. Most issues can be resolved by following our connection troubleshooting guide.

To provide further diagnostic information, run the traceroute commands and send us the results.

High Ping to Server

When you're playing Minecraft on a server, you can hold down the Tab button to get a listing of everyone that is connect to the server and the quality of their connection. The connection quality is represented with several colored bars. The more bars you have, the better your connection is, while having only one red bar means that your connection is bad.

However, it's important to note that the server reports your connection quality based on how long it takes for information it sends to the player to get to the player and back again. If your server is lagging, you can have a poor connection even if your network is perfectly fine. So you need to first determine if the lag is on your server by getting the server tick rate.