Rust Server Requirements: RAM, CPU and Map Size

A small vanilla Rust server needs 8 GB of RAM. Most community servers, running Oxide plugins on a 3.5K map, need 12 GB. Larger maps, more plugins and more players raise that to 16–32 GB. Rust also needs a CPU with fast single-core performance.

Size the server for the most players online at once, which is usually on wipe day. If you fall between two tiers, choose the larger one.

How memory use changes during a wipe

Every building block, box, furnace and dropped item is an entity. A fresh map has few entities. By the end of a busy wipe there can be hundreds of thousands, and memory use, save time and CPU load increase with them. Plan capacity for the end of the wipe, not the start.

Wipe frequency affects this. Facepunch forces a map wipe on the first Thursday of each month, and many high-population servers also wipe weekly. A server that wipes weekly never reaches the entity count of a monthly server in its fourth week, so it needs less headroom.

Map size

Map area grows with the square of server.worldsize. A 4K map has about 30% more land than a 3.5K map, and a 6K map has four times the land of a 3K map. More land means more terrain, monuments and loot in memory. Choose a map size that fits your player count: the pairings in the table above are a reasonable starting point.

CPU

Most of the simulation runs on one main thread, including physics, AI, building decay, entity updates, plugin hooks and networking. When that thread falls behind, server FPS drops and players see rubber-banding, delayed hits and desync. Raids put the most load on it.

Because of this, single-core speed matters more than the number of cores. Use the RCON command serverinfo to check server FPS and entity count, and track them over the course of a wipe.

Plugins

Oxide (uMod) has the largest plugin library. Carbon is a newer framework that runs most Oxide plugins. Install only one of them, and update it after every Rust update, or plugins will stop loading.

Plugins use CPU time as well as memory, and a single slow plugin can lower server FPS even when plenty of RAM is free. Add plugins one at a time. On Oxide, the o.plugins command shows the total time each plugin has spent in hooks, which helps identify the slow one.

Storage and location

World saves grow large late in a wipe and can cause stutters on slow disks, so use NVMe storage. Rust combat is sensitive to latency, so host the server close to most of your players.