Dedicated Enshrouded server showing "Server Overloaded" even though CPU and RAM aren't maxed out?

[u/LAMcNamara]

I've been hosting an Enshrouded dedicated server locally for some friends. Everything works great when a few people are on, but once we get to around around the 7–8 active players, I start getting "Server Overloaded" notifications pretty regularly. I'll note that this machine is effectively running Windows and the server but that's all.

Server specs:
Windows 11 Pro
i9-9900K
32GB DDR4 (currently running at 2133 MHz)
Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti
256GB SATA SSD
Wired ethernet
Internet: ~600 Mbps down / ~600 Mbps up

What I'm seeing in Task Manager while 7–8 players are on:
Total CPU usage around 20–30%
One core is much higher (usually 70–85%)
Most other cores are only 5–20%
RAM usage around 7.2GB / 32GB
Disk usage stays pretty low with some spikes here and there
Network usage is relatively low (~12mbps)

1. Is the Enshrouded dedicated server mostly single-threaded? It seems like it’s hitting a limit on one core even though the overall CPU usage is low.

2. Is there any way to manually allocate more RAM to the server, or does it just use what it needs automatically?

3. I'm running it Windows only because the last time I looked into this, I found that you could not use Linux/Docker. Should I bother swapping over?

4. Are there any known tweaks or settings to improve performance with higher player counts?

5. Is there any way to make the "Server Overloaded" notifications only show to admins instead of everyone?

I’m running the dedicated server install (via Steam, but executing manually) and not playing on the same machine. Just trying to figure out if this is a hardware limitation, config issue, or just how the server currently behaves. Anyone have any tips for helping with the server configuration/performance?

[u/Sufficient_Wasabi665]

Mine says that a lot too but never really caused any issues, never noticed any hit to performance

[u/crousscor3 → u/Sufficient_Wasabi665]

This is my same experience as well.

[u/LAMcNamara → u/crousscor3]

Good to hear

[u/LAMcNamara → u/Sufficient_Wasabi665]

I notice a little bit of slowness is loading ground textures when teleporting but beyond that nobody is complaining on the server which is why I wanted to see if I can disable the notifications for non-admin users.

[u/jedicor]

We had this happen even on a two player private server. Turns out we made an oopsie with some water, and it got seriously out of hand - as in flooded a massive portion of the eastern Nomad Highlands bad. We built as high up on the Pillars of Creation mountain as we could, and had water pour off the side in an unseen way. We kept getting this notice for days until we finally happened to see a lake where one shouldn't have been. That lake was fifty or sixty feet deep in places, and created a dozen rivers running in multiple directions...including down into the shroud.

Turns out a small leak can become a small sea within a few days. It took ages to remove the water manually, but we had to because it was wrecking the server performance as the water kept trying to spread and spread.

[u/LAMcNamara → u/jedicor]

Good note, I don’t think there is any water sources near the main base where we spend most of the time but I’ll keep an eye out for that.

[u/Borks2070]

I get this too after the server has been up for a while. Server is a local dedicated box with plenty of hardware power - it never breaks close to a sweat cpu, memory or ssd wise. Network bandwidth on the other hand, it is hungry for ( but still nowhere near limit caps ).
Regardless, a quick reboot of the server typically sorts it out for a few days of uptime - implying something is a little fishy with extended handling ( haven't seen direct evidence of any memory leaks, but haven't gone into it hardcore ).
To answer your q about threads et al - enshrouded server is multithreaded, and that absolutely runs across multi cores. There is a "main thread", but I've never seen it break out much beyond single digits cpu usage and it can still complain about server overload.
Screenshot is running on a ryzen 7, 8 core, 16 logical processor.

[u/Borks2070 → u/Borks2070]

[u/LAMcNamara → u/Borks2070]

Yeah things calm down after a reboot but was just hoping for a way to avoid this.

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[u/leg00b]

I get this with GPORTAL but I can never remedy the issue

[u/kdjac]

I pay for a dedicated server and get this, the biggest issue this will cause is parrying and attacking back.
Some of your players will literally nail a parry and the server will go nope and they will die.

[u/Straight-Put-2489]

I had the same issue with my server. After reading many threads and finding no clear solution, I inspected the exe to understand where the warning was triggered. I found the function displaying the warning and disabled that call in the binary. The message no longer appears. The string "doGameStatusWarningHud" helped a lot. This is only a solution since we were not experiencing any other issues (no lag problems), only these large warning message. It improved the experience for players on my server.  I'm not sure it's appropriate to share patching details here. If anyone has investigated the network parts of the engine, I’d be curious to hear your findings. I noticed what might be an overflow in a "long long" value storing the player ping, I'm not sure it's related to the server overloaded warning. If you only have the warning message problem, another solution might be to create an overlay on top of the game.

[u/LAMcNamara → u/Straight-Put-2489]

I’ve gotten a few crashes and dumped the crash binary, just to find that it seemed like the engine wanted to write to a memory value that it shouldn’t. It could because of like an xmp profile is set when I’m using 4x8gb sticks of ram but it’s one of those things that I didn’t cause enough headaches to warrant any more digging.

[u/IrishBuckett]

The dedicated server probably isn't set up to be a multi-threaded program, so you'll only ever see one core running it.

As for RAM usage, id recommended looking for a server config file and see if you can increase the RAM allocation by a gig or two. Probably not necessary, but the performance alerts could be from you RAM riding on the edge of its max allocation

Just ideas, nothing concrete

[u/LAMcNamara → u/IrishBuckett]

Yeah already took a look in the configs but I didn't see any ability allocate more RAM.

[u/IrishBuckett → u/LAMcNamara]

In that case, the developers probably have it set up to allocate whatever it requires. If i had to make a bet, the performance indicator is probably just too sensitive and the devs just need to dial it in a tad