Improve Palworld server performance
Palworld servers slow down because of what is in the world rather than who is online, so the fixes that work are base and Pal limits, tidying up dropped items, a daily restart and enough RAM.
6 min read · Updated Oct 21, 2026 · By GuavaHost Team
Why a Palworld server gets slower over time
Palworld keeps simulating your world whether you are looking at it or not. Every base camp carries on with its Pals working, its machines running and its crops growing, and the server has to tick all of that (a tick is one step of the simulation, repeated many times a second). The more there is to tick, the less time the server has for each one.
So the load on your server is roughly the total of everything your players have built, not the number of people logged in. A fresh world with ten players online feels better than a six-month-old world with two, because the old world has dozens of bases full of Pals grinding away in the background.
That is the single most useful thing to understand about Palworld performance. If your server has got worse and nothing about your plan changed, the world got heavier.
The usual culprits
In rough order of how often they are the problem:
- Too many base camps. Each one is a permanent simulation cost. Three bases per guild across fifteen guilds is forty five little factories running at once.
- Too many Pals at bases. Worker Pals are constantly pathfinding, picking things up and putting them down. A base packed to its worker limit costs far more than a half-full one.
- Bases belonging to players who stopped playing. They keep running forever unless something clears them out.
- Dropped items lying around. Loot on the ground is tracked individually and does not always clean itself up quickly.
- Huge single structures. A thousand-piece megabase is heavy even when nobody is inside it.
- Breeding setups. Rows of incubators and cakes mean a lot of repeated work every tick.
Settings that genuinely help
These live in PalWorldSettings.ini, which you edit most easily through Server properties under Game tools in your server menu. Our PalWorldSettings.ini guide covers how that long OptionSettings line works and how to edit it without breaking it.
The names below are the ones to look for, and the values worth tuning:
| Setting | What it does | Why it helps |
|---|---|---|
| Base camp count per guild | Caps how many camps one guild can place | The biggest single lever you have |
| Base camp worker count | Caps Pals working at one camp | Cuts pathfinding work everywhere at once |
| Guild player count | Caps guild size | Indirectly limits total bases |
| Pal spawn number rate | How many wild Pals populate the world | Lowering it thins out background simulation |
| Dropped item limits | How many items persist and for how long | Stops loot piling up across the map |
| Guild auto-reset for offline players | Clears guilds with nobody logging in | Removes abandoned bases without you hunting them down |
| Server player count | Your player cap | Honest sizing beats an aspirational number |
Exact option names and defaults shift a little between Palworld builds, so rather than trusting a value you read anywhere (including here), open DefaultPalWorldSettings.ini in Pal/Saved/Config/ on your own server. That file is written by the build you are actually running and lists every option with its current default. Copy names out of it instead of typing them from memory, because a misspelled option is silently ignored.
Change one thing at a time, take a backup first, and give it a day before deciding whether it helped. Our backup and restore guide is the two-minute version of that.
Restart on a schedule
Palworld's memory use drifts upward the longer the server stays up. A daily restart hands that memory back and is the cheapest performance win available.
Open Scheduled tasks in the server menu and build a schedule with a console command step to warn players, then a power step to restart. The scheduled restarts guide has the exact steps. Pick a quiet hour. If you run a big world, every twelve hours is not excessive.
While you are there, add a second schedule with a Take a backup step. Restarts and backups are the two things you want happening without you thinking about them.
The RAM and CPU reality
Palworld is memory-hungry. It is normal for a server with a handful of players to sit at a figure that would run a whole Minecraft network. Our Palworld RAM guide has sizing by player count, so you can tell whether you are actually short or just surprised by a big number.
Watch the RAM reading in the Usage card on your server's Overview tab. If it climbs steadily all day and the server gets choppier as it climbs, that is a memory problem, and more RAM will fix it. You can change your RAM any time from Manage plan in the server menu, prorated, and your world is untouched.
CPU is the other half. Palworld's simulation leans hard on a single CPU thread, so clock speed matters more than core count. That also means more RAM will not help a world that is simply doing too much work per tick. Our guide on CPU versus RAM explains the difference and how to tell which one is biting.
What no setting will fix
Being honest about this saves a lot of frustration:
- A world with hundreds of fully staffed bases. No option makes that cheap. Lowering limits stops it growing, but existing bases stay until someone removes them.
- Distance. If your players are on the other side of the world from your server, their ping is physics, not performance. Pick a region near your players when you order.
- Client-side stutter. If one player hitches and everyone else is smooth, that is their machine or their connection, not the server.
- A mod that is doing something expensive. Remove mods one at a time to find it.
If you have trimmed the world, set a daily restart, confirmed you are not short on memory and it is still rough, come and talk to us in Discord with the time of day it happens. That detail usually points straight at the cause. Our team is online 24/7.
Common questions
Why does my Palworld server lag with only a few players online?
Because Palworld simulates every base in the world whether its owner is online or not. A mature world with lots of base camps full of working Pals is doing a huge amount of work regardless of who is logged in, so player count is a poor predictor of load.
Does more RAM make Palworld run smoother?
It stops a server that is short on memory from stuttering and crashing, which feels like a big improvement. It does not speed up a world that is heavy on simulation, because that work happens on one CPU thread. Check the memory reading on your Overview tab before buying more.
How often should a Palworld server restart?
Once a day suits most servers, and every twelve hours suits busy or long-lived worlds. Set it on the Scheduled tasks page with a warning command a few minutes beforehand so nobody is caught mid-raid.
Will lowering the base camp limit delete existing bases?
No. A lower limit stops guilds placing new camps beyond the new number, but camps that already exist carry on. To actually reduce load you need players to dismantle bases, or the guild auto-reset option to clear out groups who have stopped logging in.
Still stuck? Jump into our Discord at discord.gg/GuavaHost and the team will help you out.
- palworld
- performance
- lag
- settings
- ram
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