This patch adds world configuration options for max-tick-time.entity / max-tick-time.tile which allows setting a hard cap on the amount of time (in milliseconds) that a tick can consume. The default values of 50ms each are very conservative and mean this feature will not activate until the server is well below 15tps (minimum). Values of 20ms each have been reported to provide a good performance increase, however I personally think 25ms for entities and 10-15ms for tiles would give even more significant gains, assuming that these things are not a large priority on your server.
For tiles there is very little tradeoff for this option, as tile ticks are based on wall time for most things, however for entities setting this option too low could lead to jerkiness / lag. The gain however is a faster and more responsive server to other actions such as blocks, chat, combat etc.
This feature was commisioned by Chunkr.