Minecraft – the smallest iron golem spawner

Other than the typical solutions such as installing optifine, you can also dive deeper into the game mechanics and modify those to improve performance.

Vanilla achieves 'random' growth by selecting several thousand blocks each server tick, checking if they can grow or decay, and if they can, applying the growth or decay. This is the 2nd biggest drain on CPU, behind entities.

Seeing as its a farm... there's going to be a lot of calculations going on.

You can of course reduce this number of blocks per tick by installing Spigot and changing the config there, at the cost of slower growth of your crops on your farm.

There are various options you change to be checked at slower intervals, just a few are:

• Snow form
• Ice melt
• Reducing number of mobs that spawn (those in caves under your farm still use up resources)
• Leaf decay

Of course, upgrading your hardware is probably the most effective solution. It is most likely that the CPU will be your bottleneck, but RAM may also be the issue. Use F3 to check the RAM usage in-game.

Some servers restrict iron drops from iron golems to prevent the building of giant automated farms, or restrict any drops from environmentally-killed monsters, again, to prevent the creation of giant automated farms.

This might be done for gameplay reasons (no supplies of infinite free stuff) or for server lag reasons (no concentrations of hundreds or thousands of monsters collected in a tiny spot).