Palworld Dedicated Server Hardening: RAM Leak Mitigations & Anti-DDoS Port Protection

The Infrastructure Challenges of Palworld Hosting

When Palworld launched to over 2 million concurrent players, thousands of server admins rushed to host 32-player dedicated community servers. However, Unreal Engine 5 landscape generation and entity ticking created severe RAM Memory Leaks and UDP Flood Vulnerabilities.

Overcoming the UE5 Dedicated Server Memory Leak

Under heavy player activity (base building, hundreds of active Pals), the PalServer-Linux-Test process fails to free orphaned object memory from RAM, growing from 4GB to 28GB+ until the Linux kernel Out-Of-Memory (OOM) killer terminates the process.

• Cron Automated Garbage Collection: Schedule a cron job to restart the server gracefully every 4 to 6 hours with automated Discord broadcast warnings.
• Linux Swap Optimization: Configure an 8GB NVMe swap file (vm.swappiness=10) to buffer unexpected RAM spikes without freezing the OS.
• Tick Rate Throttling: Set bEnableInvulnerablePlayers=True and cap base Pal counts in PalWorldSettings.ini.

Shielding UDP Port 8211 from Volumetric DDoS

Palworld communicates over raw UDP port 8211. Attackers utilize UDP amplification attacks to overwhelm server bandwidth. Admins should place the game server behind a BGP Anycast GRE Proxy (like Path.net or OVH Game Firewall) to filter malicious packets before they reach the host origin IP.

Read our server defense guide on Rust server RakNet and RCON port security.

Test your server connection latency and verify your outward IP on our free online IP scanner.