A server that has been up for three weeks is measurably slower than the same server after a restart. Nothing is broken — several small things accumulate, and a restart clears all of them at once.
What you are seeing
- TPS is fine after a restart and slowly degrades over days.
- Memory use climbs steadily and never comes back down.
- Pauses get longer and more frequent the longer uptime gets.
Why it happens
Long uptime accumulates memory fragmentation, plugins that leak a little, chunks that stay loaded because something referenced them once, and a heap that grows until garbage collection has to work harder each pass.
What to do
- Create a schedule in the panel
The panel can restart the server on a cron schedule. Once a day is plenty for most servers.
- Pick a genuinely quiet hour
Look at when your players are actually online, not at what looks quiet to you. The schedule runs in the timezone the panel shows, so check that before setting the time.
- Warn players before it happens
A plugin that announces the restart a few minutes ahead turns a disconnection into an expected event.
TPS after a week of daily restarts stays close to what it is on the first day.
If a restart is the only thing that fixes your lag and it comes back within hours rather than days, that is a leak worth finding rather than papering over. Profile it before settling for restarts.