Hello! I am currently looking to purchase a minecraft server and am planning on spending somewhere from $50-$80 a month. What I am wondering is about how much ram a server really needs? For 50 players? For 100? Ideally players would be generally grouped up in towns and things but I am sure some will spread out using more ram, about how much should I get though?
ARCHIE414 A good rule of thumb is 300MB-500MB per player but that could increase depending on what the server runs: plugins, worlds, ect...
Presumably an accurate answer would have to be of the form: M + N*p Where N is number of players, p is player memory footprint, and M is some base overhead amount just for having the server running at all. Also, the answer will vary by quite a lot depending on where the players are located on the world map. The server keeps alive a zone of chunks in memory around each player. However, if two players are standing near each other then the zone of chunks around them contains a lot of overlap and the server doesn't waste memory keeping alive two copies of the two players' overlapped chunks - it only needs each chunk in memory once. Ten players all sitting in a house together takes up a LOT less memory on the server than ten players each out standing in their own field.
300-500 per player? What? 500mb = ~1/2gb (roughly) 1000 = ~1gb 1gb = 2 players? I won a free 8gb server and it supports 50 players with loads of plugins just fine. Of course I coded them myself to be optimized, but I've never had an issue.
I've had 30 players on my server with 40 plugins, and only around 2 gigs of memory out of the 4 gigs I have allocated to the server process were being used. Essentials' /gc command tells you how much memory your server is using (allocated - free = in use). Start with a gigabyte or so, and if you notice that a lot of GC is going on and killing server performance then allocate more memory. Turning down view-distance in server.properties can really reduce the amount of memory being used as well as server lag. Mine is set to 8 with no player complaints. You could also check out NoSpawnChunks if you're in a situation where memory is a concern.
ARCHIE414 - I found that 2 GB was pushing it for 30 players, so this makes sense. 50-100MB should do you well. Again it does depend on the distribution of players in the world, how many plugins you have, and what you've set the view-distance to in the server.properties.
I heard about a guy that hosted a 400 players on his faction PvP server with 4 GB of RAM without a crash. O_O
ive got a server with 5 gig of ram and i run 100 players easy. ive got around 74 plugins and still don't have lagg.. so i think like 50 mb ram each player may be enough. but to be sure you better use 75 mb ram for eah player.
It doesn't depend of the amount of plug-ins, it depends on the plugin themselves / on the type of the plugins.