de-spawn item time

I died in my Minecraft world and quickly found my where my items were, except it hadn't even been over three minutes on my clock and every single item that was dropped had disappeared (the spot I died in was very clear and wouldn't have dropped anyhere else) except for some cobble which I even saw dissapear
what I expected was at least five minutes before an item might even glitch out of the game but rather all of the items de-spawned after only 3 minutes.