[The-Jack-DeCk]

Essentially, I would like to know the answer to the question posted in the thread title.

I have included a poll for those who aren't entirely positive and wish to weigh their own opinions, but if anybody has the authority to provide the answer with absolute certainty, please do so in a reply to this post.

Thank you in advance for helping me solve what is a mystery to myself and perhaps a few others.

[cobaya18]

No, because they are not entities. Hence why they don't despawn ever in vanilla minecraft. Only dropped items or items in item frames despawn.

[The-Jack-DeCk]

No, because they are not entities. Hence why they don't despawn ever in vanilla minecraft. Only dropped items or items in item frames despawn.

Thank you sir. Are you sure there aren't any server plugins that despawn them though?

[eah]

MineRealm is a spigot server. This means there are efficient implementations to reduce lag. The downside is that this can interfere with vanilla behavior.

Spigot has implementations to have the game run updates on hoppers less frequently. Scroll down to the bottom of this page to see some specs. Under spigot and with default config values, some hopper systems will not function normally. I have indeed noticed items disappearing through hopper systems and that is probably due to spigot (possibly unintentionally).

You have 3 options:
1. Configure your machines to avoid the bug.
2. Convince managers of spigot to fix the bug.
3. Convince Intelli to change the spigot.yml config file to mirror vanilla hopper behavior. This probably involves changing hopper-check to 1 as I believe vanilla MC will check hoppers every tick. This may or may not fix items disappearing. I'm fairly certain it will fix the incorrect hopper timing.

For using hoppers to move items around, it's no big deal, but when it gets complicated with item sorters, auto smelters, and casino games, there will be casualties.

I don't have time to go through EXACTLY what spigot does, but SOMEWHERE on the internet is the complete source code. If you're ambitious enough, I suggest looking into it. Java source code is like reading english.