Add a configuration that sets a time after the chunk was generated for it to be loaded (defaulting to 0, meaning disabled)

This should help with some other parts of lags with chunks, as now, we noticed that the lava in new nether chunks gets a significant part of lags of our server, and pregenerated chunks with chunky don't have the lava processed, so we start to have millions of lava that wasn't preprocessed

that's what's happening on our server, even if the chunks were pregenerated

Sorry I have seen this but forgot to reply; I will look into this to see if anything further can be done, however post processing (fluids, block physics, etc) are not technically part of the chunk generation process so this is pretty normal.

Sorry I have seen this but forgot to reply; I will look into this to see if anything further can be done, however post processing (fluids, block physics, etc) are not technically part of the chunk generation process so this is pretty normal.

with leaf's patch we don't see right now a big difference between pregenerated and not pregenerated world, however this part that is after generation still creates lots of lags

You shouldn't notice either way since chunk generation is largely not done on the main server thread.

That said, I did find some time to look into this. To my surprise fluid ticking is not locked behind simulation distance, so it doesn't actually require a player to be present.

I've gone ahead and added a flag for now to set a ticking load duration for chunks:
-Dchunky.tickingLoadDuration=X where X is the number of seconds to keep the chunk loaded at a level where chunk ticks can occur.

Why a flag and not add to the configuration? Well, I understand the use case for this and it does seem handy to support, however keeping chunks loaded in a ticking state comes with some strings attached (the chunks are ticked in full, so this is not only processing fluids). Also, setting the value too high may crash the server, since you can essentially keep all chunks loaded and ticking almost infinitely.

Anyways, thank you again for the suggestion and I hope this helps you! You can download the latest dev build to start using this now.