Direct answer

A large world folder is primarily a storage and backup concern. TPS depends more on active chunks, entities, world generation and plugins than the total number of region files on disk.

How to check it

  1. Measure world-folder disk usage with du -sh world* on Linux, adapting the folder name and path to your setup.
  2. Compare /spark tps under normal travel and idle conditions. Profile while a slowdown happens, especially during fast exploration or world generation.
  3. Check available storage with df -h and verify backups have room to finish. Do not treat free disk space as proof of fast storage I/O.
  4. Identify unused dimensions or copied worlds before considering any destructive world-pruning process.
du -sh world*
df -h
/spark tps

What to change

Prefer world pre-generation for heavy first-time exploration, and keep a restorable backup before removing any files. Never delete region or dimension data simply because it looks old: players may have builds there.

Software and version notes

Region file count and chunk activity are different metrics. Compression, backup scanning and antivirus can increase I/O without affecting tick processing in the same way.

Verify the result

Track backup duration, free storage and MSPT under the same exploration workload. Successful storage cleanup should not remove player builds or saved dimensions.

References