My server is lagging. What can I check?

Start by working out whether it’s everyone or one person, then work through the list below. Most lag comes down to a handful of causes, and you can rule out the common ones in a few minutes.

Everyone, or just one player?

• Just one player. It’s most likely their connection or their PC. Ask them to check their ping in the game, close anything downloading in the background, and try a wired connection instead of Wi-Fi. Players a long way from the server always see higher ping.
• Everyone at once. It’s the server, and the steps below are for you.

Work through it

1. Check our status page. If something’s wrong on our side, it’ll say so there. It’s linked at the bottom of every page.
2. Restart the server from your Game Panel. A server that’s been up for days picks up clutter, and a restart clears it. Scheduled restarts come with every server, so you can set one for a quiet time each night.
3. Think about what changed. A plugin, a mod or a game update just before the lag started is the usual suspect. Take the newest one out, restart, and see if it settles.
4. Look for memory trouble. Crashes, or “out of memory” in the console, mean the server is short of RAM. How much RAM does my server need? explains what pushes it up.
5. Check the heavy settings. Some settings make the server do far more work:
   • Minecraft: view-distance and simulation-distance in server.properties (both default to 10). The Minecraft Wiki recommends lowering them if players have major lag.
   • Rust: a bigger map needs more memory, and Facepunch notes that “the more players, the faster your computer CPU needs to be”.
   • Any game: very high player limits, or spawn and loot rates turned well up.

If it’s our hardware

We never overload our machines. If your server lags because of our hardware, we fix it at our cost. Open a ticket with roughly when it happens and what players see, and we’ll look at the machine your server runs on.