RAM is a subject of frequent questions among aspiring server owners. In this article we'll shed more light on this issue!
❓ What is RAM used for?
RAM memory is used by your server to hold the currently used data about your server's worlds, players, mobs and plugin data. The more RAM you have, the more capacity your server has to operate.
📈 More RAM = Better?
This is obviously a bit of a simplification, but you could say so. In realty RAM is only going to help the performance to some extent. RAM can't speed up your server, it can only bottleneck it if you don't have enough of it. But 'spare', unused RAM does not make the server faster.
Another common misconception is believing that having your RAM capacity filled means the server is inefficient. But this is not true. It's intended behaviour for software to ask the operating system for more RAM if plenty is available. This allows the application to have some buffer of RAM to ensure stable and quick operation.
📊 How to find out how much RAM do I need?
For the beginning, let's assume that you should have at least 3GB of RAM for a modern, plugin-enabled server. The final calculation depends on serveral factors:
👋 Number of players:
Please assume that each 5 players online require another 1GB of RAM.
So a server with 20 players will need around 7 GB of RAM.
🗺️ World size and complexity
The world size and the complexity of builds will increase the RAM requirements.
⛓️💥 Mods and plugins
- Vanilla servers have the least requirements.
- A Spigot-based server (server which allows plugins), will need more RAM, for every demanding plugin you have. Some plugins are lightweight, but some are quite performance heavy (for example Model Engine)
- Modded servers will usually be the most demanding and require you to have plenty of RAM installed.
📐 View distance and other engine settings
Higher view distance means your server has to process a lot more data at once, for every single player on your server.
Please notice that surface of the world grows exponentionally with view distance. It's just like with pizza, as you surely know, 20cm pizza isn't twice the size of a 10cm pizza, it's actually 4 times as big because the surface grows much faster than dimensions!
Is RAM everything?
Server owners believe that you only need to choose the amount of RAM and call it a day, but it's not that simple. RAM is only going to help you to some extent, but the engine of your server is your CPU. It does all the work, and if it's not powerful enough, your server will not perform as fast as it should. In short: it will lag. You can read on how to choose your CPU, RAM and disk space in our guide linked below:
➡️ Check out our complex guide on choosing your server hardware
➡️ Check out our guide on choosing your server hosting