About memory usage

What is memory?

Each server uses some memory — also called RAM. Your server always uses some memory when it's online, even when nobody's playing. When players join, your server uses more memory. Some mods and maps also use more memory — sometimes lots more.

You can track your server's memory usage, along with its CPU and disk space usage, on the Stats page in the control panel.

Memory isn't unlimited :(

We host game servers on physical servers — which we call 'boxes' or 'machines' to help tell the difference between these and game servers.

We can host many game servers on each boxes, because our boxes have powerful CPUs, lots of memory, and fast network connections.

When someone signs up for a new game server, we install their server on the box with the lowest recent resource usage, so that all of our boxes are evenly balanced.

Sometimes this isn't enough. There might be a bad game server, or two, which start using lots of a box's resources. This might be because it has a bad map or mod installed.

If a game server uses too many resources, that means other game servers can't use them, which isn't fair. Our control panel will restart game servers that are using the most resources.

How much memory can my server use?

There isn't actually a set limit. But we do need to make sure that all of our game servers run smoothly, so we have a process to keep things fair.

Your server's game package has an amount of base memory set aside for it. You can see this amount on your server's Subscription page in the control panel. This is the amount of memory your server can always use. Your server won't ever be restarted by our control panel if it's using less than its amount of base memory.

If your server ends up using more than its base memory, it might be stopped. But it won't be automatically restarted the moment it exceeds it base memory. Read on for an explanation on how we decide to restart servers.

When will my server be restarted?

First thing's first — like we said before, if your server's memory usage is below its base memory, we'll never restart it automatically.

For the rest of this section, we're talking about the machine that hosts your game server as well as others — the box.

If the box has lots of memory available, we won't restart any servers.

If lots of servers are using lots of memory, so the box's available memory is running low, we'll restart a server.

First, we'll make a list of all of the game servers on the box, and figure out how much their memory usage has gone over their base memory. For example, Server A's game package has base memory of 3 GB and the server is using 8 GB, so it's using 266% of its base memory. Server B's game package has base memory of 6 GB and it's using 9 GB, so it's using 150% of its base memory.

For any servers that have had no players online in the past 24 hours, we'll add another 1 GB to their memory usage. This is so that servers that have had no players online will be stopped before we stop one with players on it. We think that's pretty fair.

We'll sort our list of servers to find the one with the highest memory usage compared to their base memory, and we'll restart that one. We'll email the server owner when we restart their server, and they'll see a message in the control panel.

We only restart one server at a time, which is usually enough.