How much RAM does a game server need? Minecraft, Palworld, and picking a size that doesn't waste money

Before you start any game server, the first question to answer is "how much RAM?" — too little and the server stutters until your friends drift away; too much and you're paying (or buying sticks) for nothing, because extra RAM doesn't make a game smoother. This article collects numbers that hold up in practice per game, the symptoms that say RAM is running out, and how to pick a size without wasting money.

How much RAM each game uses

The "minimum" column is what genuinely boots and plays; "recommended" is what runs smoothly for normal use in that scenario:

Rows marked "and up" are games whose RAM use grows mainly with world size and what's been built, so no fixed number would be honest — starting at the minimum and growing when symptoms appear (next section) always beats padding in advance.

If you run the server at home, these figures are what must be left over for the server after Windows and everything else take their share. And for Minecraft Java you have to set the JVM's ceiling yourself when launching, e.g. java -Xmx4G -jar server.jar nogui — otherwise the game won't use the RAM you intended for it.

Why Palworld eats several times more than Minecraft

Minecraft only loads the chunks around each player, out to the view distance; regions nobody is in get unloaded from memory. Palworld instead has to keep the state of every captured Pal, every base, and the items in the world resident at all times. The more Pals you catch, the more bases you build, the longer the save runs — the more memory it holds, growing with the save itself. The developer's own official server documentation recommends 16GB, noting that 8GB can run but risks out-of-memory over sustained play — which is why Palworld's 8GB is a real minimum rather than a padded number.

The symptoms of running out of RAM

• Rhythmic, regular lag spikes — short freezes repeating every few seconds are Java's garbage collector being forced to run more and more often as free space shrinks. This is the earliest sign of a Minecraft server going RAM-tight.
• TPS drops — ticks per second slides down from 20 and the whole world slows: crops grow late, mobs stutter.
• The server dies or restarts itself — Java's end state is OutOfMemoryError in the log, while a game like Palworld whose process grows past its ceiling gets killed by the system and started again. A server that keeps dying on a cycle should make you suspect RAM first.
• On a home PC — Windows starts swapping instead, and the entire machine turns sluggish, not just the game.

These are distinct from a CPU shortfall: with CPU as the bottleneck the world is uniformly slow all day, rather than stuttering in bursts and recovering.

Player count matters less than you think

What actually consumes RAM is the mods you install, the number of chunks held loaded, the structures and automation in the world, and a world that grows every day it's played. Each player contributes mainly through the chunks they personally keep loaded — ten friends in one town are lighter than four friends exploring different corners of the map, because the number of simultaneously loaded chunks differs several-fold.

So when sizing, don't ask only "how many players" — ask "played how". An exploration-heavy server, or one full of redstone and modded factories, always out-eats a build-together-in-town server.

How to pick a size without wasting money

Oversizing RAM does not make the game smoother — a Minecraft server with a heap far larger than it needs actually spends longer on each garbage-collection pass. The cheapest approach is to start small and grow on evidence:

1. Start at the "minimum" or "recommended" figure for your scenario.
2. Play normally for two or three days and watch for the symptoms above.
3. When a symptom shows up, step up one size.

At home, growing means buying and fitting more RAM sticks. On a host that bills RAM by the hour, like uniz.host, starting small saves real money because you pay for the size you picked only for the hours the server is online — 2GB at ฿0.50/hour, or 4GB at ฿0.90/hour (at most ฿13 per 24-hour round, even left on for the whole round), while Palworld's 8GB floor is ฿1.70/hour. When a symptom appears you resize in place, no world migration — current prices for every size are on the pricing page (you can start with the minimum ฿20 top-up).

Read next

RAM sorted, the next boss fight of self-hosting is letting friends join from outside your home: what is port forwarding and how to set it up. And if Palworld is the plan, specs and pricing live on the Palworld page.