Minecraft Server RAM Calculator

A small vanilla or plugin server for a handful of friends runs comfortably on 2GB to 3GB. A busy survival server with plugins and twenty or so players wants around 4GB. Modded servers start higher, usually 6GB or more, because the mods themselves consume memory before a single player joins.

Yes, for a small vanilla or lightly modded survival world with roughly five players online at once. If you plan to run a large modpack, or expect more than a handful of players at peak, start at 4GB or above.

Most modpacks need at least 6GB, and larger packs of 150 mods or more want 8GB upward. The mod count matters far more than the player count, because every mod loads its content into memory whether anyone is playing or not. If your modpack publishes a recommended memory figure, follow that.

More than almost anything else you can change. Every player keeps a square of chunks loaded around them, so the memory that square uses grows with the square of the view distance. At the default of 10 each player holds 441 chunks loaded, at 6 that drops to 169, and at 16 it rises to 1089. Lowering view distance from 10 to 8 cuts roughly a third off the chunk memory your players use, and most people do not notice the difference on a survival server.

Most curated modpacks want 6GB as an absolute minimum, around 8GB once you have five to ten players, and 10GB beyond that. This holds across packs that look very different: a lean pack and one with nearly 300 mods often want the same amount, because loading the mods themselves accounts for most of the memory before anyone joins. Large expert packs of the All the Mods variety are the exception and can want 12GB or more.

View distance is the largest factor after your mods or plugins, followed by how spread out your players are, since players standing near each other share the chunks they keep loaded. Extra worlds each hold their spawn chunks in memory whether anyone is in them or not, a live map plugin such as Dynmap or BlueMap adds a few hundred megabytes on its own, and worlds became taller in 1.18 which made every chunk more expensive to hold. The Advanced mode of the calculator above lets you account for all of these.

Only up to a point. Memory lets your server hold more loaded chunks and entities, but the usual limit on player count is CPU speed rather than RAM. Adding memory to a server that is already CPU bound will not raise its player capacity.

It depends on the cause. If your server is running out of memory you will see it pause and stutter, and more RAM helps. If memory use is comfortable but the tick rate is still low, the cause is usually a heavy plugin, an overloaded farm, or too many loaded entities, and more RAM will not change that.

Yes. You can upgrade your plan at any time from your account and your world, plugins, and settings all carry across. It is fine to start on a smaller plan and move up once you see how busy your server gets.