GUIDE

Minecraft server lag alerts: TPS and MSPT in Discord

Get a Discord or Slack message when your Minecraft server's TPS drops or its ticks take too long, and another when it recovers. What the numbers mean, which servers report them and which limits to set.

Lag rarely announces itself. Mobs stutter, blocks pop back after they break, and by the time someone types “is the server lagging?” in chat, half your players have already left. Two numbers show it before players do: TPS and MSPT. MineOps reads both from your server and posts to Discord or Slack when they stay bad, then again when they recover.

What TPS and MSPT mean

TPS, ticks per second

A Minecraft server updates the world in ticks, 20 times a second when all is well. Below 20, everything in the world runs slower than it should. Players start to notice below about 18.

MSPT, milliseconds per tick

How long each tick takes to compute. Twenty ticks a second leave 50 ms for each one, so a server whose ticks take longer than 50 ms falls behind and TPS drops. MSPT warns you earlier: a server at 45 ms still shows 20 TPS, but has little room left.

Where MineOps gets the numbers

TPS and MSPT come from the MineOps plugin, which runs on Paper, Purpur and Pufferfish 26.2 or newer and reports the 1, 5 and 15-minute TPS and the average tick time. Paper and Purpur servers that MineOps creates get the plugin by themselves. For a server you already run, choose Add the MineOps plugin where it is missing when you set up the agent on its machine.

Vanilla, Fabric, Forge and older versions don't report TPS to MineOps, and proxies don't tick at all. Every other alert, such as a server going offline, a crash loop, memory or low disk, works from the agent alone. See what MineOps measures for the full list.

Set up lag alerts

1. Connect a Discord or Slack channel under Alerts → Where alerts go, as the Discord alerts guide shows.
2. Open the machine that runs the server and go to its Alerts tab. TPS and CPU rules are set per machine.
3. Add TPS low. It fires when TPS is at or below 15 for 5 minutes. You can set the limit anywhere from 1 to 20.
4. Add MSPT high too if you want the earlier warning. It fires when ticks take 50 ms or more for 5 minutes, and takes a limit from 1 to 10,000 ms.

The messages say what was measured and the limit you set:

• TPS low: 12.4, at or below 15.
• MSPT high: 73.2 ms, at or above 50 ms.

Why it doesn't cry wolf

• It waits. The TPS rule reads the 1-minute average, and the condition has to hold for the whole duration of the rule, 5 minutes by default, before an alert opens. A single slow tick while a chunk generates doesn't count.
• Old data never fires. If the plugin stops reporting, MineOps doesn't guess, and an out-of-date number neither opens nor closes an alert.
• One alert at a time. A rule has at most one open incident per server. You hear once when it starts, once when it recovers, and the rule waits its cooldown before it can open again.
• Maintenance stays quiet. A maintenance window pauses alerts while you work on a server, for up to 7 days.

Choosing your limits

The defaults suit most servers: 15 TPS for 5 minutes is lag that players feel and that isn't going away by itself. A small server for friends can keep them. A busy server that wants to hear sooner can raise the TPS limit to 18, or rely on MSPT high at 50 ms, which tends to trip before TPS falls. Shorter durations catch more and also tell you about more short spikes, so change one thing at a time.

When the alert fires

Each server's page opens with a health score and What needs attention. Lag shows there as a warning below 18.5 TPS and as critical below 15, or as a warning when ticks take over 50 ms. It points at the usual causes: what changed recently, such as a plugin, a crowd of entities or a burst of new chunks. If the view distance is above 10, it suggests lowering it and links to the server settings. A machine that is short of CPU or memory makes every server on it lag, so check the machine alerts too.

Where alerts go

MineOps alerts go to Discord and Slack only, never by email or SMS. Alerts are on every plan: Free has five alert rules for two Minecraft servers on one machine, and paid plans have more. The pricing page has each plan's limits.

Want to check a server from outside first? The free server status checker shows whether it answers, with its version, players and response time. And if players can't find it in their list, the MOTD generator helps you write what they see under its name.