Palworld: the game that eats RAM
Palworld surprised everyone, including its own developers: the dedicated server consumes 8 GB of RAM at idle and climbs past 16 GB as soon as 10 players roam the map with their Pals. The documented memory leak makes it worse: without regular restarts, consumption doubles within 24 hours. It's the exact opposite of Minecraft — here, CPU frequency isn't the bottleneck, available memory is.
That's why we recommend the Quantum: 32 GB of DDR5 RAM and 8 EPYC Genoa vCores. You leave 20 GB for the Palworld server, 4 GB for the system, and keep headroom for the memory leak between restarts. A Titan (16 GB) works for 4-6 players if you schedule a daily 5 AM reboot.
Installation in three commands
The dedicated server installs via SteamCMD, no paid Steam account required:
sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386 && sudo apt update
sudo apt install steamcmd
steamcmd +login anonymous +app_update 2394010 validate +quitThe server then runs from ~/Steam/steamapps/common/PalServer/PalServer.sh. Create a systemd service with Restart=always plus a daily restart timer: it's the simplest workaround for the memory leak.
The settings that matter
In PalWorldSettings.ini, three parameters dominate the experience:
ServerPlayerMaxNum=32: don't go beyond 20 on a Quantum if you want to keep 60 server FPS during boss fights.PalSpawnNumRate: every extra point multiplies active entities — and RAM consumption.bEnablePlayerToPlayerDamage=False: unless you enjoy chaos.
Backups: the weak spot
The Saved/SaveGames folder can reach several GB and Palworld has no built-in rotation. Our automatic daily snapshots cover disaster, but add an hourly rsync to a second NVMe volume to cap potential loss at one hour of progress.
Anti-DDoS: not optional
Popular Palworld servers attract the same booters as Minecraft. Our in-house anti-DDoS filters UDP floods on port 8211 with sub-second mitigation, without an external proxy that would add combat latency.