Many *Fantasy Beast Palu* server administrators have encountered similar situations: when the server first starts, memory usage is around 8-10GB, and the online experience is smooth. After running continuously for more than ten hours, memory usage spikes to over 20GB, players begin to experience frequent lag and crashes, until the server eventually collapses. This type of problem is not an isolated case, but is widespread throughout the player community.

A rule of thumb even circulates in the community: 8GB of memory can last about 2 hours, and 16GB of memory can last about 10-15 hours. One server administrator reported on NGA that "the server crashes automatically every 7-10 hours, so at least 32GB of memory is needed." Judging from the phenomenon, this is clearly not normal memory usage fluctuation—a normal server program should stabilize its memory usage after completing resource loading in the initial stage of operation. However, the *Fantasy Beast Palu* server exhibits a "linear and continuous increase," which is a typical characteristic of memory leaks.

Root Cause 1: The official server has a clear memory leak bug.

Classifying the community's technical analysis, the problem can be attributed to three levels. First, the official server code itself contains a memory leak bug. According to the technical definition of a memory leak, certain objects or data are no longer useful, but because references in the code are not released, the memory cannot be reclaimed by the operating system.

Since Pocketpair has not publicly released its server-side source code, the community can only speculate on the problem through reverse engineering and runtime monitoring. Behavioralally, the leak point is likely distributed across multiple subsystems. High-load scenarios are more likely to trigger leaks—outpost attacks generate a large number of Palu entities and perform AI calculations, significantly increasing memory usage; directly disabling outpost attacks can effectively reduce memory pressure. Additionally, when the guild accumulated over approximately 7000 Palu captures, sales, and discards, the archive file Level.sav was at risk of corruption, which may be related to improper memory management.

Root Cause Two: Extremely Unreasonable Memory Usage Strategy

Besides the leak bug, what troubled the technical staff even more was the problematic memory usage strategy of the server itself. Community analysis pointed out that a simple way to determine whether it's a memory leak or unreasonable memory use is to see if memory usage increases continuously without limit or stabilizes after increasing to a certain level. The situation with the Palu beasts leans towards the former.

These issues often manifest in the world chunk loading strategy. The server loads corresponding chunks when players explore new areas, but after players leave, the data in these chunks isn't unloaded promptly, leading to a large accumulation of "useless" data in memory. As the player's exploration area expands, memory usage increases linearly. While Unreal Engine provides a memory management mechanism for UObjects, flaws in the cleanup logic can result in objects not being properly garbage collected.

Root Cause Three: The Unique Complexities of the UE5 Framework

The Palworld server is developed based on Unreal Engine. UE5 itself includes complex object lifecycle management—each UObject carries additional metadata, and improper handling or flaws in the cleanup logic can lead to memory leaks. There is also a risk of multi-threaded contention in the server environment: during game system initialization, the creation of the dynamic item subsystem may compete with other systems, causing memory access conflicts.

Another noteworthy technical detail is the Oodle compression library warning. When running the Palworld server in a Docker environment, this warning frequently appears in the system logs, indicating that the server is attempting to decompress data using non-standard memory regions. This typically occurs when memory resources are scarce, and the system begins using unconventional memory regions. Official Fixes and Community Patches

Pocketpair claimed to have fixed a memory leak issue in version 1.3.1 in January 2024, but player feedback indicated that memory usage remained severe in version 1.4.0. An update around May 2024 included an entry to "fix a memory overflow issue on the server." The 0.5.3 update in April 2025 again listed "fixing a memory leak on a dedicated server" in the patch notes. The repeated inclusion of the same issue in multiple updates indicates that the fix is ​​still ongoing.

On the community front, Bilibili UP user "Wilfis" created an unofficial server optimization patch that reduces memory usage and CPU load by approximately 50%. The third-party project Palworld-go rewrote some of the server-side logic. However, these unofficial fixes pose compatibility and stability risks, and game data should be backed up before use.

Practical Suggestions for Server Maintenance

For practical maintenance, based on various community experiences, the following solutions can be summarized:

Scheduled restarts. This is currently the most reliable temporary solution. It is recommended to set up a cron job or scheduled task to restart the server process every 6-8 hours. Before restarting, be sure to actively trigger a save using the `Save` command. However, note that the execution interval between the `Save` command and the `DoExit/Shutdown` command should be at least 3 seconds; otherwise, there is a 100% risk of save file corruption. Real-world testing shows that directly killing the process and restarting is actually safer.

Hardware Expansion. The official minimum recommendation is 4 cores and 16GB of RAM. For 4-6 players, 16GB is recommended; for 8-10 players, 32GB; for 16-18 players, 64GB; and for 32 players, 128GB. It should be noted that hardware expansion only delays crash times and does not fundamentally solve the problem.

Virtual Memory. Configure SSD space as virtual memory on the Windows server. For servers with 16GB of physical RAM, a maximum value of 64GB is recommended. This method can be used as an emergency supplementary solution.

Limit In-Game Load. Disable outpost attacks, control the number of worker Palu (recommended not to exceed 15), and limit DropItemMaxNum to no more than 5000. These configurations can significantly reduce memory consumption.

The Palu server is notorious for its "memory leak" issues. The root cause is a genuine memory leak bug in the official server-side code, compounded by extremely unreasonable memory usage strategies, and the complexity of memory management within the Unreal Engine framework, all contributing to this problem. From January 2024 to April 2025, the official team has repeatedly claimed to have fixed the issue, but community feedback indicates that the problem is not yet fully resolved. For current server maintenance, scheduled restarts remain the safest approach.