Short answerFor 1 to 10 players on Paper or Spigot, 4 GB is enough. Busy survival servers need about 6 GB, and modpacks need 8 to 16 GB.
Quick sizing table
| Server type | Players | RAM |
|---|---|---|
| Vanilla, Paper or Spigot with a few plugins | Up to 10 | 4 GB |
| Survival with 20 to 40 plugins | 10 to 25 | 6 GB |
| Light modpacks (Fabric or Forge, under 100 mods) | Up to 10 | 6 to 8 GB |
| Large modpacks (ATM, RLCraft, 150+ mods) | 5 to 15 | 8 to 16 GB |
| Network lobby or minigame server behind a proxy | Varies | 4 to 8 GB per server |
| BungeeCord or Velocity proxy only | Hundreds | 512 MB to 1 GB |
What actually uses RAM
- Loaded chunks. Every player loads chunks around them. A higher view distance and simulation distance multiply memory use.
- Mods and plugins. Modpacks are the biggest factor: 200 mods can need 8 GB before a single player joins.
- Entities and farms. Mob farms, item frames and redstone contraptions use memory and CPU.
- World size. Pre-generating the world reduces lag spikes, but large explored worlds use more RAM.
How to run smoothly on less RAM
- Use Paper or Purpur instead of the vanilla server jar for better performance.
- Lower the view distance to 8 and the simulation distance to 6 in server.properties.
- Pre-generate the world with a plugin such as Chunky.
- Do not give Java more memory than the plan offers: leave some headroom for the operating system.
- Watch TPS (ticks per second). 20 TPS is perfect; consistently under 18 means you need more CPU or RAM.
Minecraft plans at Hunati
Hunati Minecraft Java servers run on AMD EPYC 7351P processors with DDR4 memory, 20 GB NVMe SSD storage and 5 backups. Plans range from 4 GB (2 vCores) to 16 GB (4 vCores), plus a 512 MB BungeeCord proxy server for networks. You can upgrade your plan later from the dashboard.
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