I know item-despawn-rate is higher than 1 minute, and agree that setting that aggressively low will also require keep-inventory to be on (therefore lowering risk and difficulty). Some thoughts as I read it:ДЇeels like Xel already lowered merge-radius. Thusly-covered hoppers are essentially lag-free because they are rarely activated. Covering a hopper with an inventory-slot block deactivates the hopper until an item is in the neighbor block's inventory. Gamepedia Minecraft Wiki has another review of the problem, showing that 'activated hoppers' are the problem, and if you understand what 'activated' means in this context, it matches with the rest. Make it a rule to put 'inventory slot' blocks on top of hopper chains, and discourage uncovered hopper machines instead. If you feed the server's region files intoВ the blockfinder tool, looking for hoppers, you'll probably find much of the ongoing lag problem: instances of uncovered hoppers, increasing over time.

The player placing items into a sorter or furnaceВ 'input' chest is the same as the player toggling an on/off switch. A single-hopper chicken egg machine is probably creating more lag per-machine than any item sorter would do (if all of the item sorter hoppers are covered properly), because the sorter is effectively the same structure as an auto-furnace, and its redstone circuit is nearly always emitting no signal. Simply place furnaces on top of the hoppers on the top row, and the entire mechanism will be relatively lag-free. Furthermore, one of the most common reasons to build a long hopper chain is not creating significant hopper lag:ДЄВ hopper-driven inventory sorter creates hopper lag only on its top row of hoppers, and that can be fixed with inventory slot blocks, per Accidental Gaming's demonstration.

Filtered hopper better with mods