How much RAM for a 1.21 paper server 20-50 players

Plugins don't really have an impact. Player count is going to mostly impact CPU requirements, and only their distance apart and the server's view distance will affect RAM usage. Tell us more about your server.

Its mostly like regular survival with minor plugins to spice the game up a little though not much

so just tpa commands, colored nicknames, faction protection, etc

You all gonna be pretty close together, or spread massively apart? What view distance are you hoping for?

pretty spread out

Also, 20-50 players TOTAL or CONCURRENT

concurrent

big community, dang

view distance you're hoping for?

12-16

16 gb i would do, cpu will def be the issue here tho

Okay, so that's gonna be 625 loaded chunks per player for view distance 12, and 1089 loaded chunks per player for 16. The higher your view distance, the more ram you need per player, though there's no hard number.

50 is a pretty ambitious concurrent player count without pretty significant optimization. 20-30 is much more reasonable but still needs some attention.

The thing with RAM allocation is that adding more adds CPU load. So while you can load more data into memory at once, you're gonna have to have a more performant CPU.

Start with 16GB I think, and make sure you use a performance oriented server jar like Paper, and tune the JVM correctly with https://flags.sh.

If you get CPU bottlenecked, try reducing simulation distance. If you get RAM capped too easily, try reducing view distance. For more ambitious tuning, come back and we can run a spark report and see what can be done.

10G is probably enough.

Thanks. I currently have 9GB in it. So far things are working great, just wanted to be safe

Do you have all of your expected players on it already?

Not all the time but I’ve had 30 before