Minecraft can be a lot of fun with friends, but the fun only lasts as long as you have a good playing experience. While the game itself will run fine on most PCs, running a Minecraft server is a different task altogether.
A question that gets thrown around quite a lot when talking of Minecraft servers is the amount of RAM one needs to have a good experience. And the answer might not be as straightforward as you’d expect.
Also read: How long is a Minecraft day?
Is 1GB RAM good for a Minecraft server?
There are several different factors that impact the performance of a Minecraft server, but the most common ones are:
- View distance
- Number of players
- Entities
- Mods
All four of these contribute heavily to RAM demand. If you were running vanilla Minecraft with no mods and only three to four players, around 500MB to 1GB of RAM will do nicely. However, as you add more players, more mods or more entities (or all of these), RAM demand will skyrocket.Â
All things considered, if you’re looking to run a really heavy server with several different mods and want to have more than just a couple of players around, 2GB RAM should suffice. However, throwing more RAM at the problem might not be the solution everyone’s looking for, or in some cases, it might not be the best solution at all.
How to optimise Minecraft server software?
You see, Minecraft’s server platform is provided for free by Mojang. While this is great for people looking to build their own servers, Mojang’s implementation is also very poorly optimised. After one point, adding more RAM doesn’t give an equivalent performance boost.
So instead of getting a heftier hosting package or adding more RAM to your home server, you can choose to upgrade the server software instead. Instead of using vanilla servers, use alternatives like PaperMC instead. Paper contains a number of different performance optimisations and improvements that’ll significantly boost server performance without changing any hardware.Â
Also read: 15 best Minecraft seeds you must check out
