I have a test world loaded with a large number of player skull entities. Despite no one being on this world, it is contributing significantly to the tickEntities and tileEntityTick for this world.

I have had a suspicion that player heads are responsible for this in some form. I can understand that there might be some initial lag for textures to be loaded but then this should be cached.

Why should this world be causing lag with no one in it?

Note that you will not be able to enter this world due to the following Vanilla limitation: https://hub.spigotmc.org/jira/browse/SPIGOT-944

Here is what it looks like:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rDZF-lEZyQ

I understand that this is an unusual example. The purpose of this report is to highlight a possible bug with how tile entities are being handled on server ticks when no one is in the loaded chunk.