ok i talked to a buddy of mine who runs a server of his own. he said he is having a ton of similar problems. then he got rid of obsidian so no one can go to the nether. and his problems have pretty much went away. especially the large amount of lag.

i do have one request if u decide to do this please sell glowstone. i love the way it looks on my texture pack.

the server has things  install to stop people from useing xray mods etc.  to be honest before we started using nether portals it wasnt bad either. then we all started doing the nether thing and it went to ****.  im just going off of what my buddy had to do on his server to help make it stable.

   The thing is, this is after 1.6, so some of the variables that caused lag in 1.5 differ slightly than that of 1.6. Anyhow, Tgdavison is attempting to present a solution. We can't sit back and reflect, "it's always been this way so let it be". Lag is a symptom, not a diagnosis. It is like a headache, it can be a symptom of diseases from brain tumors to just mere dehydration or hunger. It all depends upon the extremity of the disease when treating it. Some of the lag issues are within the operator's control and some are just too much out of reach. Understand, like all medicines, some solutions may cure the lag  but cause more symptoms in turn making the situation no greater or no less than the status quo.

the lag depends on if you have any mods installed, when i had no mods at all i had no lag, but after i uploaded toomanyitems i got some lag, the server is fine for me at lease