Can enchanting tables lag servers?

Question

I was playing on a Minecraft server when I flew across a large cube of enchanting tables. I then asked in chat why did people build them and one of the players told me that it was a lag machine and told me to destroy it. I did what he said but I was confused. How can enchanting tables lag the server and lower its TPS? When I was destroying it, there was no lag and the server TPS stayed at 20. There has also been a player who claimed that enchanting table cubes were used for chunk-banning players. However, when I was there with another player, none of us got chunk-banned. Can enchanting table cubes really lag the server and chunk-ban people? Thank you.

Server is on MC version 1.16.4.

Answer 1

Enchanting tables have a relatively low (although still present) impact on TPS, but the animation of the book spinning closed when distant, opening and tracking the player when nearby, has enough impact on the client FPS, that clients that don't disable it (through a hack), in presence of a massive amount of enchanting tables can drop framerate to unplayable levels and even crash.

Even more massive numbers of the tables - measured in multiple chunks of volume - will accumulate server lag from tile ticking to a degree that can lag the server, although there are more efficient ways to achieve that.

Probably in your case the cube simply wasn't big enough for that.

FitMC describes the abuse of enchanting tables for this purpose in his video "How Mr. Beast Destroyed Minecraft's 2b2t" at 6:14