How to avoid sub-optimal pagebreaks that are inserted before a new section/subsection?

Question

I am using the book documentclass for my PhD thesis. The document is typeset by the luatex engine from TL2018.

I get unnecessary pagebreaks at the end of a section or subsection. Even when it appears (to my eye) that the next section heading as well as a couple of lines from the opening paragraph of next section can still fit into the same page.

The end result is that almost 25-30% of the page ending a section is blank and leads to an unnecessary increase in the overall page count. I tried the \nopagebreak option with counts all the way upto 4, but TeX does not obey these and retains the current behavior which seems sub-optimal to the eye.

How can I fix this?

Please make a minimal working example (MWE)... There are packages that result in this problem, but this is not default behaviour. — samcarter_is_at_topanswers.xyz, Jun 18 '18 at 15:33
@samcarter Will do so. I shall try to remove packages one by one and see when and where this problem occurs. But I don't completely buy that TeX is not to blame. The K-P algorithm is only for optimal line-breaking within each paragraph, and not for globally optimised pagination. I think TeX even typesets each page individually, and once that page is typeset, it is done. See Frank Mittelbach's answer here — Dr Krishnakumar Gopalakrishnan, Jun 18 '18 at 15:37
Try `\documentclass{book}
\usepackage{lipsum}

\begin{document} \lipsum[1-4]

\section{title}

\lipsum \end{document}` Tex has no problem with placing sections in the bottom 30% of a page. — samcarter_is_at_topanswers.xyz, Jun 18 '18 at 15:52

How to avoid sub-optimal pagebreaks that are inserted before a new section/subsection?

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