“Can’t keep up! Is the server overloaded?”: what it means and how to fix it

Minecraft Java Edition. Last checked October 2026.

The full message looks like Can't keep up! Is the server overloaded? Running 5043ms or 100 ticks behind. It means the server could not finish its work in time, so the whole game (mobs, redstone, crops, everything) is running slower than normal.

What a tick is

Minecraft updates the world 20 times a second, so each update (a tick) has 50 milliseconds to finish. If the average takes longer than that, the server falls behind. The message appears once it is a couple of seconds behind, and repeats every so often while it stays behind.

See how slow it is

On a vanilla server, run /tick query as an operator. It shows how long ticks are taking on average. Anything well under 50 ms is fine, and values near or above 50 ms mean you are overloaded. If you use a server with profiling tools, the spark profiler can show exactly what is using the time.

The usual causes

View and simulation distance too high. Every player makes the server keep many chunks loaded and ticking. These are view-distance and simulation-distance in server.properties (the vanilla default for both is 10). Lowering them is the fastest fix. Simulation distance matters most for ticking cost, and players can still see far with a lower one.
Too many entities. Big mob farms, a villager breeding hall, hundreds of dropped items, animals piled in one pen. Cap or clear them.
Exploring new terrain quickly. Generating chunks is expensive. Flying fast with an elytra over unexplored land is a classic way to cause lag. Generating a map ahead of time moves that cost to a quiet moment.
A slow processor. A tick is mostly done on one thread, so how fast one core runs matters more than how many cores you have. A cheap shared host with a slow core will struggle with a busy world.
Too little memory, or the wrong amount. If the game runs out, it spends its time cleaning up and stalls. Giving the server far more than it needs does not make it faster. For a handful of players on vanilla, a few gigabytes is the usual starting point.
Something else is using the computer. A server on the same machine as your game, a download, or a backup running at the same time.

What to try, in order

Lower simulation-distance (try 6) and view-distance (try 8), restart, and see if the message stops.
Run /tick query while it happens, so you know whether it is steady or spikes.
Look for one place with a huge number of entities and fix that.
Check the host: is another program competing for the processor?
If it only happens when someone explores, pre-generate the area.

If you would rather not run a server

Servers on JetRift cap how far they simulate so one world cannot take the machine, and you do not tune anything yourself. JetRift is a free Minecraft Java host we run: you make a server, send friends the address, and it starts when the first person joins. It is early, Java only, and has no mods. That also means you cannot raise those limits past what we allow.