Improving Resource Usage

You should read these guides first:

If you're reading this you've probably had your server restarted automatically by our panel. This happens because your server used more than the allocated RAM. This guide will give you a few easy steps on how to reduce usage, and show you how to upgrade if needed.

Show Resources

To find out how much RAM and CPU your server is using head on over to your TCAdmin Panel and click the Show Server Resources button.

Once open you'll see it's full of interventions where your server was restarted for using too much RAM or CPU for an extended time.

This can happen for several reasons, but by far the most common problem is having too many entities on your server. Your entity count is made up of everything on your server, every wall, deployable, AI, everything. It’ll naturally go up as the wipe progresses on your server but it’s drastically increased with player count.

Reducing the entity count, lowering the map size, and removing unneeded plugins are all good ways to keep your memory usage as low as possible.

Finding Entity Count

The first thing you need to do is find out how many entities you have Rust has a command to show you all the relevant server information needed.

To do this run the following command as an admin in-game via F1 or by RCON

serverinfo

This will return a response similar to this

If your entity count exceeds 200,000 you may want to think about things you can do to reduce it.

Entity Controlling Plugins

If you find you have too many entities its time to install some plugins to help keep your entity counts in check:

Entity Cleanup
This allows you to clean up existing entities on your server outside of TC range.
Entity Reducer
This allows you to reduce some of the naturally spawning entities.
Entity Limit
This allows you to limit how much of each entity a player can have.
Auto Purge
This allows you to remove bases of players offline for X time. This will not help in this instance but will allow you to get ahead of the issue on your next wipe.

If you were unable to load your map without being restarted you will need to wipe or go direct to a slot upgrade.

Your next best step is to take a look at the size of your map, large maps are a very common cause of high resource usage, reducing your map size down to 2000-3500 will help, and to make things even easier Rust Maps has a great filtering system to find the perfect smaller map for your server.

Please note below 3500 you will not get Military Tunnel and Launch Site spawns

Population Control

You could also look into reducing some of the Animal/Vehicle populations. You can do this by adding the following to the bottom of your server.cfg found within your Configuration Files.

Here are some examples of things you can turn off without much user impact

hotairballoon.population 0 chicken.population 0 simpleshark.disable 1

Restart your service after doing this to turn off hot air balloons, remove chickens, and disable sharks.

To find more population convars to turn off you can search via RCON

find population

Decay

Decay is also good to aid your entity count. By default, decay is very forgiving.

You can scale the whole decay system up with a single value.
decay.scale 2Or you can get more advanced and change the duration each tier lasts while decaying and how much it costs to upkeep.

The following 5 commands control how fast each tier of building takes to decay when they are not protected by upkeep.

The value is hours

Reducing the number will make it decay FASTER

decay.duration_metal 8 decay.duration_stone 5 decay.duration_toptier 12 decay.duration_twig 1 decay.duration_wood 3

The following 4 commands control how many resources it cost to keep upkeep going on a users base. The bracket for each building grade will go up the more of each type you add.

Increasing the number will make upkeep run out FASTERdecay.bracket_0_costfraction 0.1 decay.bracket_1_costfraction 0.15 decay.bracket_2_costfraction 0.2 decay.bracket_3_costfraction 0.333

The following command controls how many minutes of resources a TC "eats" when destroyed offering protection after being raided

Decreasing the number will make the base start to decay FASTER

decay.upkeep_grief_protection 360

Please be careful with these commands increasing or decreasing them too much will make your decay VERY AGGRESSIVE. Do things slowly in small increments and test each time.

Identifying Heavy Plugins

Plugins are a massive impact on your server resource usage. You could have lots of plugins or even just a couple of heavy ones and begin to experience performance issues, it depends entirely on what they’re doing on the server, how well they’ve been coded, and what the configuration of them is.

Things to look out for

Automation Plugins

Examples: Autodoors/QuickSmelt/AutoSorter

Automating anything is going to be heavy, interacting with every single door, or furnace increases the load on a server quite an amount.

How much RAM do I have?

Your RAM is tied directly to your slot count, the more slots you have the more RAM we allocate to your server.

60 Slots: 8GB RAM
80 Slots: 9GB RAM
100 Slots: 10GB RAM
120 Slots: 11GB RAM
140 Slots: 12GB RAM
160 Slots: 13GB RAM
180 Slots: 14GB RAM
200 slots: 15GB RAM

If you'd like to request a RAM upgrade please contact us by the ticket system on your panel.