Improving Rust Server Performance

In this section, we will review server performance and how it relates to operation of a Rust server. Consistent, good performance will help your server by reassuring your players that they have a safe place to play without the risk of losing fights to lag, or rubber-banding off of a cliff.

HARDWARE

You will see dramatically better server performance when using server providers that use faster CPUs clocked upwards of 4 GHz. This is because Unity core functions are single threaded, meaning they can only be ran on one core. At EUGameHost we use CPU's clocked up to 4.7Ghz for this reason.

Things like NPC/Animal AI and other 'map' related objects on the other hand can be ran across multiple cores, which is why all good hosting providers should offer the option to to have extra cores for higher population servers, and should only be hosting Rust servers on higher frequency CPU’s. If you are in need of hardware for your Rust Server Hosting we highly suggest EUGameHost who have been shown to be the best value-for-money provider here.

UMOD/OXIDE

uMod is a Rust modding addon that enables servers to run plugins developed mostly by community. Rust server performance will not be impacted with well and actively supported plugins. Without your awareness, a small piece of code in any of your plugins could severely degrade your server's performance. It's essential that you only use plugins that you know are optimised for performance. Even the smallest, lightest plugins can cause chaos upon your server's performance.

Avoid having to many plugins on your server since this can have a detrimental impact on performance.

EVALUATION OF PERFORMANCE

As a server owner, we have a variety of opportunities for monitoring and analyzing our server's performance.

SERVER FPS
This is the frame rate at which your server is operating; this has no influence on the frame rates for your players (but high entity counts in one area would, for example). Utilizing RCON, you can monitor your server's Framerate by using the 'FPS' Command.

PERFORMANCE MONITOR PLUGIN
The Performance Monitor for uMod is a rust plugin that provides real-time information about your server's memory usage, plugin hook time, and other timings that can affect server performance. Consider using it to locate any possible performance-degarding plugins, it will show which plugin is consuming the most time on a single hook.

DO NOT leave this plugin running indefinitely as it can also worsen server performance.

IMPROVING SERVER PERFORMANCE

The removal of inadequately optimized/resource-consuming plugins is the most significant improvement for most server owners. A plugin that seems to be lightweight can completely destroy your server's performance if it is coded poorly, as any experienced Rust server owner or plugin developer will tell you.

OPTIMIZING PLUGINS

Some plugins have performance-tuning settings such as timers and intervals. Make sure to enable these inside the configuation file.

SERVER FPS RESTIRCTION
Controlling your server's FPS is really a good idea overall . Generally to prevent making the server work harder than it needs to (at no benefit to your players). Facepunch says that your players would not realize if your server is limited to 30 frames per second. Setting 'fps.max' to a number within 30 and 100 is advised strongly.

DISABLING AI MOVEMENT

You may well have seen that animals do not react nor start fighting back on large servers in which you've played. This is due to fact that 'ai.think' has been configured to 0. This appears to have a significant good impact on improving server performance, particularly whenever the player numbers are high and players are in close proximity to animals on a regular basis.

DAILY RESTARTS

Sometimes, daily restarts for modded servers can help with server performance.

OTHER CONVARS TO HELP WITH PERFORMANCE

batching.colliders "0"

This removes the need for the server to batch entitys. This provides a massive performance boost since with it enabled when some one builds the server has to unbatch and then batch all related entitys. You must note that if your server goes over 265k entities you will need to re-enable it to get around the Unity entity limit.

nav_disable "true"

This will disable navmesh on your server. Doing this will stop animals/NPC's from moving, but providers a massive performance boost.

server.saveinterval "600"

You may experience server side FPS drops when the server saves on high entity servers. Increasing the duration between saves helps to keep this to a minimum and boost performance.

This guide is a work progress!