Planning Anticheat Resource Use on Your Minecraft Host

Plan anticheat headroom before you install

Plan anticheat resource use as headroom on top of your server's normal load. Record what your host guarantees, what your server uses at peak, and how much spare CPU and memory remains. Then test the anticheat in staging at your expected player count. The plan is only as good as the peak numbers you measure on your own hardware.

Record what your host actually provides

Hosting plans describe resources in different ways. Some give dedicated cores, some give shared CPU time, and some cap memory per container. Write down the exact limits before you size anything.

Shared hosts can throttle CPU during busy periods on other tenants' servers. A test that passes on an idle day may fail at peak. Ask the host whether CPU is guaranteed or burstable.

Keep the host's support answer in writing, since a verbal answer is hard to check later. Note the date you asked and who answered. If a host changes its plan terms, your sizing record shows what you relied on at the time.

Write down the host's stated overcommit or burst policy as well, and the time of day your players are most active. Your staging test should run at that time, not only during the quiet hours when you find it convenient. If the host refuses to answer whether CPU is guaranteed, treat that as a reason to test harder at peak before launch, because you cannot rely on the plan description alone to predict peak behavior.

Budget the server, the anticheat, and spikes

Split your available memory and CPU into three buckets: the server software and world, the anticheat and its logs, and a reserve for spikes such as chunk loading or a player surge. Leave the reserve unassigned. An allocation that uses all the memory leaves no room for a garbage collection pause or a busy event.

Set the JVM heap to a fixed size that fits inside your limit, leaving room for native memory. The values below are placeholders. Replace them with values that fit your host's documented limit.

java -Xms<initial-heap> -Xmx<max-heap> -jar paper.jar nogui

Run a staged load test at planned player counts

Copy your production plugins and world to a staging server on the same host plan. Run the test with the anticheat enabled and disabled so you can attribute the difference. Use the steps below and log each result in the same format.

• Start the server with no players and record idle CPU and memory for ten minutes.
• Add the anticheat and repeat the idle reading. The difference is the baseline cost.
• Add simulated players in steps that reach your expected peak. Hold each step for at least fifteen minutes.
• At each step, record tick time, CPU use, heap use after garbage collection, and any errors in the server log.
• Run the same steps with the anticheat disabled and compare.
• Repeat the peak step once more after a server restart to check for drift.

Decide what to do when headroom runs out

A headroom failure does not always mean the anticheat is wrong. Decide the response before launch so staff do not improvise during an incident.

What we have not verified

This page gives no resource numbers for any anticheat, and FairPlay does not publish a sizing table for hosts. Plugin pages can list minimum server requirements, but a minimum describes an idle install, not a busy one, so it cannot replace your staging run. Your results depend on the server software, plugin set, player behavior, and hardware. Use the worksheet as a method, and treat each number as something you measured yourself.