Improve Dragonwilds server performance

A Dragonwilds server has very few settings to tune, so smooth play comes from giving it enough memory, restarting it regularly, playing on a nearby location and being careful with mods.

6 min read · Updated Oct 21, 2026 · By GuavaHost Team

Start by naming the problem

Three different things get called lag, and only one of them is the server's fault.

• Everyone stutters at the same time. The server is behind. Keep reading.
• One player stutters and nobody else does. That is their connection or their PC, and it follows them to other servers.
• Everything is delayed but smooth, like playing underwater. That is distance. The fix is a closer server location, not a bigger plan.

The Usage card on your server's Overview and Console tabs shows live CPU and RAM with a history chart. Watch it with your normal group online and in a normal session, not while the server is idle. That one reading decides most of what follows.

Memory first, because Jagex gave us the formula

Dragonwilds is unusually easy to size. Jagex's own dedicated server guide puts it at 2 GB plus 1 GB for each player, and a dedicated server holds up to six players, so a full one wants 8 GB.

That makes memory the first thing to check and the easiest to fix. If four people are playing on a 4 GB plan, you are below the published figure and no amount of tuning will rescue it. How much RAM a Dragonwilds server needs has the tier by tier version, and changing plan is prorated and leaves your world untouched.

What running short actually looks like: saves that take longer and longer, a server that hitches when somebody rides into new ground, and eventually a start that fails or a process that stops on its own.

What drives the load

Unreal Engine survival games spend their server time on the same handful of things, and Dragonwilds is no exception:

• Players spread across the map. Six people exploring in six directions means six slices of world loaded and simulated. The same six in one camp share most of it. Exploring sessions are always the heaviest.
• New ground. Terrain nobody has visited yet costs more than terrain the server has already generated and saved, which is why the first weeks of a world feel the busiest.
• What your group has built. Every structure, container and crafting station is state the server holds and saves. A long-lived world with several big bases is doing more work than a fresh one with a camp.
• Creatures and combat. A large fight is a short, sharp spike rather than a steady cost. If your stutter happens exactly when things get violent, that is what you are seeing.
• Mods. Server-side mods run their own logic on every update. One heavy mod can cost more than everything above put together.

There is very little to tune, and that is worth knowing

Jagex documents five settings in DedicatedServer.ini: the owner ID, server name, world name, admin password and world password. None of them is a performance dial. There is no view distance to lower, no tick rate to raise and no entity limit to set.

So be sceptical of guides that promise a config fix. On a Dragonwilds server the honest levers are memory, restarts, your location, your mod list and how many people are on. The DedicatedServer.ini guide covers the file and explains which lines the panel writes from Startup settings on every start, which is also why editing those by hand does not stick.

The game is in early access, and Jagex may add server settings in future updates. If you see new lines appear in the file after an update, they belong in the same section, and anything you add by hand stays as you wrote it.

Nightly restarts

This is the cheapest real improvement available, and it matters more in early access than it will later. A server that has been up for days holds memory it is no longer using and saves more slowly than one that started this morning.

1. Sign in at customer.guavahost.com, open My servers and click Manage on your Dragonwilds server.
2. Open Scheduled tasks in the server menu. The Restart every night starter gives you one at a quiet hour in a single click.
3. For your own timing, click New schedule, name it, choose Daily under How often and pick an hour when nobody plays.
4. Leave Skip if the server is offline ticked so it does not switch on a server you deliberately turned off.
5. Choose Restart the server and create it.

Put a backup a few minutes before it while you are there. Setting up an automatic daily restart shows how steps are ordered inside one schedule.

Mods, carefully

If the server was smooth and is not any more, and you have added mods since, that is your answer. Work through it the boring way:

1. Take a backup.
2. Remove the most recently added mod, restart and play a normal session.
3. Repeat until it is smooth, then add back one at a time to confirm which one it was.

After a game update, assume mods need updating too. A mod built for the previous build can fail quietly, load badly or cost far more than it did last week. Installing mods on a Dragonwilds server covers adding, updating and removing them.

Location and ping

A server in the wrong part of the world feels bad no matter how well it is running. If most of your group is in Europe and the server is in Australia, every action has a round trip behind it.

You pick the location at checkout and you can change it later, so this is fixable rather than permanent. Choosing a server location explains how to pick one and how to measure rather than guess.

Reading the console when it stutters

Open the Console tab while the problem is happening rather than afterwards, and look for:

• Lines repeating quickly. A warning printed hundreds of times a second is both a symptom and a cost in itself, and it usually names the subsystem or mod at fault.
• Long gaps followed by a save line. That is a slow save, which points at memory or at a very large world.
• Anything about running out of memory. Treat that as the answer rather than a clue.

If the console is a wall of text and none of it means anything to you, bring the last page of it to our Discord and we will read it with you. Our team is online 24/7.

When a bigger plan will not help

If memory sits comfortably below the limit and the server still spikes during busy moments, you are looking at processing power rather than memory, and more RAM changes nothing. The things that help then are fewer mods, a group that plays closer together and a world that is not being explored at full speed by six people at once.

Common questions

Is there a view distance setting on a Dragonwilds server?

No. Jagex documents five settings in DedicatedServer.ini and none of them controls view distance or tick rate, so server-side performance comes down to memory, restarts, location and mods rather than config tuning.

How many players can a Dragonwilds server hold?

Six on a dedicated server. Jagex's memory formula of 2 GB plus 1 GB per player means a full six-player server wants 8 GB, and running below that figure is the most common cause of a server that stutters.

Will a nightly restart lose anything?

No. A restart saves and reloads the world, so nothing is lost beyond anyone being disconnected for the minute it takes. Schedule it for a quiet hour and tick the option to skip it when the server is offline.

My server lags only when we explore. Why?

Because new ground is the most expensive thing the server does: it has to generate, simulate and then save terrain nobody has visited yet. It settles down once an area has been explored, and it is worse when several players are exploring in different directions at once.

Still stuck? Jump into our Discord at discord.gg/GuavaHost and the team will help you out.

• dragonwilds
• performance
• lag
• ram
• restarts

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