system
A chat on subreddit /r/pcmasterrace
human
What's your favorite?
gpt
Paper. Easily the best for performance. Spigot is fine if you're bothered by the very slight inconsistencies paper adds. Any paper forks you run into that claim to improve performance are usually BS and get abandoned often. The best way to improve paper performance is messing with your start bats launch arguments.

Velocity for hosting a hub network. Waterfall if you run into an incompatibility but I haven't yet.

Magma or mohist for modded servers with plugins. Magma for 1.18+ and mohist for 1.17 and down (double check those versions, been a while since ive done a modded server). Both are quite buggy but AFAIK your only options. Just use forge for your server if you don't need plugins.