How Much RAM Does a Game Server Need? (2026 Guide for Every Game)

RAM is the single setting that decides whether a game server feels smooth or falls over. Too little and the server stutters, rolls back or crashes. Too much and you are paying for memory that sits idle. This guide gives realistic numbers for every game we host, explains where the memory goes, and shows how to tell when you have outgrown your plan.

Quick answer

For a small group of friends playing an unmodded game, most servers are happy with 4 to 8 GB. Big survival sandboxes like ARK and Palworld want 12 to 16 GB. Lightweight games like Terraria, Factorio and vanilla Minecraft run on 2 to 4 GB. Mods, player count and world age push every number up.

RAM by game

These are the ranges we see work well on real servers. The "starting point" column is where we would put a typical friends group; move up a step for mods, bigger groups or old worlds.

Every plan we sell is sized from these numbers, so the plan marked popular on each game page is a safe pick for most groups. See choosing a plan for how our plans work.

What uses the memory

Knowing where the RAM goes makes it easier to guess what your server needs.

• Loaded world. The area around every player is held in memory. In Minecraft that is chunks, in Rust and ARK it is the whole map plus everything built on it. Spread out players load more world than players who stay together.
• Entities. Animals, creatures, dropped items, vehicles, pals, dinos and zombies all live in memory. A farm with hundreds of mobs can cost more than an extra five players.
• Player built structures. Every foundation, conveyor and chest is data the server keeps track of. Old worlds and big bases grow steadily.
• Mods and plugins. Each one adds its own code and data. A 400 mod Minecraft pack can need four times the memory of vanilla before a single player joins.
• The game engine itself. Unreal Engine games like ARK and Palworld have a large baseline before anything else is loaded.
• Save and backup operations. Writing a large world to disk can briefly push memory higher.

Player count matters, but usually less than people expect. Ten players standing in one base cost far less than ten players exploring in different directions.

Signs you need more RAM

Watch for these, especially after adding mods or players:

1. The server crashes with an out of memory error. In Minecraft you will see java.lang.OutOfMemoryError in the console. Other games often just stop without a clear message.
2. Lag spikes that come and go. Short freezes every few seconds are often the server running out of room and cleaning up memory. In Minecraft the console may print Can't keep up! Is the server overloaded?.
3. Rubber banding and rollbacks. Players snap back to where they were a moment ago, or lose a few minutes of progress after a crash.
4. Slow joins and slow chunk loading. New areas take ages to appear, or players time out while connecting.
5. It gets worse over time. A server that is fine after a restart but struggles after a day is usually short on memory, or leaking it. Scheduled restarts help, but if you need them every few hours you likely need a bigger plan.

When more RAM will not help

Not every slowdown is a memory problem. If memory use sits well below your limit and the server still lags, look elsewhere:

• CPU bound games. Factorio, Satisfactory and busy Minecraft servers are limited by single thread CPU speed. A huge redstone machine or a megabase can lag with plenty of free RAM.
• Bad mods or plugins. One badly written plugin can tank performance on its own. For Minecraft, the spark profiler that ships with Paper shows exactly what is using the tick time: run /spark profiler start, wait a few minutes, then /spark profiler stop.
• Network problems. High ping for one player but not others is usually their connection, not your server.

Giving a Java server far more memory than it needs can also make garbage collection pauses longer, so bigger is not always better. Size for what you actually run, then step up when the signs above appear.

How to set RAM

On a home server you set memory yourself. For Minecraft that means the -Xms and -Xmx flags, for example java -Xms4G -Xmx4G -jar server.jar nogui. Our Minecraft server guide covers this step by step. Most other games simply use whatever the machine has, which is why running them on the same PC you play on can starve both the game and the server.

On a hosted server the plan is the setting. Each plan has a fixed amount of RAM reserved for your server alone, so neighbours on the same hardware cannot eat into it.

Picking a plan

If you are unsure, start with the plan marked popular on your game's page. It fits most groups, and you can always move up once you know how your world behaves. Browse every game on the games page, or read dedicated server vs peer to peer if you are still deciding whether you need a server at all.