If you’re getting lag, and you’re not CPU-bound or GPU-bound, then it’s I/O. And that, in this case, means network. As others pointed out, having lots of storage containers is the usual culprit, because the server has a lot of data to send to the client.
Follower limit formula for official servers is 50 per clan + 15 per clan member. And that’s the soft limit. The hard limit is 100 over the soft limit.
This means that they’re either in a 4-player clan, or they used temporary clanning to go over the soft limit.
The debug HUD overlay can be activated in single-player and it stays on for the rest of the session, unless you turn it off in single-player. However, the only thing it shows is the ping. Server FPS is absent, and so is the number of connected players.
It’s not about the code that stores them. It’s about sending a bunch of data over the wire. And my guess is that the problem isn’t the amount of stuff you have in those containers. It’s having so many containers in the first place. I believe that the overhead of sending the inventory for each one of them adds up.
That might be true. However, if I’m right about the underlying cause of the problem, optimizing that would be Really Fuсking Hard™ 
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