How do chunks get chonky?

There are various other issues that contribute, however these ones below are the ones with the most player agency involved, i.e. the ones you can change the most by altering your behaviour.

Whenever you move items to and from your inventory into that chunk, into a container, or placed on the floor, the server stores the data of that movement. However, once the item is removed, it doesn’t delete the data afterwards.

The more times you move items to and from containers, the more this list builds up. This eventually causes performance issues. As the number of interactions per chunk increases, everyone loading that chunk will see lag, slow loading, stuttering and potentially crashes. This eventually leads to the inability to log in.