I've noticed resources spiking on a vanilla 1.7.4 server ever since the 1.7.4 update. I've had to visit many peoples bases and check entity counts and X-ray to find the problem:
What I notice is heavily used areas that aren't well lit underground are becoming a big issue. Chicken Jockeys will randomly spawn, and when the baby despawns it will leave the chicken underground laying eggs.
This leads to the other random zombie spawns to pick up the eggs (In hard mode about 50% of them) and they won't despawn.
So not only do I have tons of underground chickens to deal with, but tons of underground zombies holding eggs.
I consider this an unintended consequence of the new chicken jockeys, and suggest they either despawn with the zombies and not lay eggs, or have some configurable option to turn them off.
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I just wanted to add when these zombies that don't despawn will cause areas of the map to become void of mobs except where the chickens are laying eggs and zombies are picking them up. This causes pockets of 100+ egg holding zombies in a very small area. When you find this Mega mob pockets fighting them although fun is almost completely impossible.
Found the same on SMP. I was getting block lag for the first time and did a force crash wondering if this was happening to me as well. Sure enough, I found a number small pockets (near each of my bases, reached via a nether hub) with dozens of zombies and 5-6 chickens in each. I was clearing them out manually, but it got to the point that I just switched to peaceful and visited all my primary areas to force them to clear. Of course this will be very temporary as there are still chickens in those places and the next time zombies start spawning in them, it will happen all over again.
To try and show the scale of this issue, and to try and help fix it: I've had one of my friends write a bukkit plugin that scans loaded chunks for zombies, checks their inventories for eggs and despawns them. I loaded my servers world in 1.7.2 bukkit and flew around places to try this "fix" and counted hundreds of zombies each time we ran the wipe command. In one area people frequent almost 24/7, there were almost 300 zombies with eggs underground. In a span of 15-20 minutes we killed close to a thousand in different bases, and this has only been in the last week. I am seriously considering reverting back to 1.7.2 and telling my users to stop using minecarts again. 😞
It seems that the chicken jockeys continuously spawn in more chickens, which begin laying eggs everywhere, which causes the zombies to pick them up, which causes pockets of persistent zombies who do not contribute to the mob cap. This generates much more lag than you would think because the server is loading in more hostile mobs than it should be.

Still lay eggs in 1.7.6 pre-1
still an issue in 19w46a
This issue can be confirmed on 1.17, can this be reopened?
[media]Issue back in 1.17 Please re open this issue. It has actually gotten so bad on our server it can actually crash.Â
Same problem. Hope be solved soon.
I was just about to report this also. Good Job reporting it and it explains the problem very well! 🙂