FreeMCHostPaper is the most performant Minecraft server for the plugin community. FreeMCHost deploys it by default, pre-optimized, with a real-time console and integrated plugin manager.
Paper includes dozens of optimizations: asynchronous chunk loading, redstone refactor, entity activation, async pathfinding. In practice, a 30-player survival server runs on 4 GB instead of 12. It's the default choice for most major public servers.
In paper-world-defaults.yml, set view-distance: 6 and simulation-distance: 4. Enable per-player-mob-spawns to distribute load. Keep entity-activation-range at default values to avoid freezes during mass PvP events.
Paper is an optimized fork of Spigot. It supports the same plugins but offers 3 to 5 times more TPS thanks to native optimizations, better chunk threading, and improved memory management.
Yes, 99% of them. Paper is backward-compatible with the Bukkit/Spigot API. A few very old plugins using NMS classes may need an update.
Always the latest stable build matching your Minecraft version. Paper publishes daily builds with security patches.