Same in Military Tents... very frustating to find nothing but shoes every day for day

Can confirm this exact thing has been happening on private servers I play on as well. I noticed loot wasn't cycling at the NWAF or the surrounding area so I grabbed a few items and hid them at the base of trees/bushes in the area the evening of 08/26/2015. It is now 08/29/2015 and the same items are still sitting exactly where I left them.

this loot system is broken because loot is not disapearing after a server restart.

Yes absolutely, we have 3 private servers that are normally and always 50/50, but last night and today our player numbers are down to 10-15 players even at peak times, because players can't find food, backpacks, weapons.... Nothing!

Private server here - I fresh spawned in Cherno earlier today.
Found the 'normal' loot situation to be on the low side but bearable.
After not so long I was energised/hydrated/healthy with a loaded Mosin and backpack, supplies etc.
However Pavlovo milbase, Zeleno milbase and on to Vybor milbase had no weapons whatsoever. The server has been very quiet all day (numbers came back immediately after patch but now have died). The only things worth picking up from all three sites was a plate carrier and a single SVD mag (which was invisible as it appeared to spawn under the floor in the 'new' barrack building at Zeleno).
Another friend on same server was at NWAF as I was travelling from Zeleno to Vybor and he found nothing of use in all of the airfield/tents but did find ruined gear that had been left behind from previous gunfights.

Loot Persistance is on a 3 day timer (72 hours) so if someone drops and item it is supposed to take approximatley 72 hours for it to be wiped

Tested one scenario last night on a private hive.

Cleared out a couple buildings of all loot (minus one backpack) and dropped the loot nearby in the woods under two separate trees. Came back an hour later and all loot was gone minus a couple mags that were among it, which makes sense as guns - and presumably their parts - are on much longer timers. The mags also helped account for someone stumbling on the stash.

The loot consisted mostly of clothing, medical supplies, and some food.

Oddly a roll of duct tape dropped nearby by someone else, closer to the cleared building, did not decay.

Ruined magazines have persisted over 48 hours on the ground. Private hive. Ruined gear should despawn faster (maybe an hour?) Some gear that has been interacted with despawns, but majority of it is not. Maybe the lag from large camps is causing this.

I did also some tests today and the shoes/clothes I dropped on the ground was cleaned up within 30 minutes.

But if you directly swap a spawned item with another item from your inventory (by dragging the item from your inventory on the item on the ground) the dropped item does not get cleaned up!

That's probably also the reason why I found wet clothes although it did not rain on the server for multiple hours.

I dont know if its the same matter... but i cant find a single weapon when running around the map with my friends.
We enter in every single house and sometimes split to cover more cities at the same time. And still nothing.

We play on private hives most of the time, oldschool/monstergaming and so on...
After server restart on monster gaming the loot started to spawn again for a couple hours then stopped.

I played experimental and i didnt had this problem. Tomorrow i will play on public servers to see if the same thing happens.

guns hardly spawn in houses only Sporter's trumpets and shotguns, and i usually find these in the log cabins most of the other houses do not spawn guns.

Did some testing the other day. I went through an area and picked up every piece of loot that I found and dropped it in the same spot. Some of this was obviously player-dropped loot - a 'wet' hunting jacket in a garage (this had been there for two days as I came across it before), damp jeans in a hunting stand, etc... but most was spawned loot. I covered a fairly good-sized area, going through houses, garages, a few barns and a police station.

In one area I dropped four hats, two inside a deer stand, and two about 30m away near a tree. In each instance I dropped one directly, swapped it with one in my inventory, then dropped it again.

When I went back through the area about 45 minutes later, every single piece of loot I picked up and then dropped was gone, regardless of how I dropped it. Every, single, one.

There's definitely something strange going on, as I said some of this was absolutely player-dropped loot and I know at least in the case of the hunting jacket, it had been there for at least 2 days. So perhaps it's only when you swap something that is equipped and it drops to the ground? I'll hopefully get to test that tonight.

For now Ill update the reproducibility to random.