Operations7 min read
Why your game server keeps restarting, and what we do about it
Out-of-memory kills, crash loops, and how RE:NODE detects a server restarting on its own within two minutes - plus what you should check first.
A server that restarts on its own is one of four things, and they are worth telling apart before you change anything: it ran out of memory, it crashed on something in its own files, it was restarted by a schedule, or the game itself gave up.
Out of memory is the common one
When a container reaches its memory limit the kernel stops it, and it comes back clean. That is deliberate here - upstream Pterodactyl ships the opposite, where a container at its ceiling sits and swaps and drags the whole machine down with it. A short outage that recovers by itself beats a slow decline that takes the neighbours with it.
You will see it in the console as an abrupt end with no stack trace: the process is not asked to stop, it is stopped. If that is happening repeatedly, either the plan is too small for what you are running or something is leaking.
How we notice before you do
Nothing in the daemon tells the panel that a server died, so we infer it. A watcher polls every two minutes and looks for two signals: uptime that has gone backwards since the last poll, which means the container was replaced in between even if it was never seen down, and a server that was up and is now offline.
- A restart you asked for is not counted. Anything within the grace window of a logged power action is a button being pressed.
- An unreachable node is not fifty stopped servers. A failed poll records nothing and leaves the watcher's memory intact, so a network blip cannot suspend half a machine.
- Three restarts in an hour raises a warning on the server page and opens a support ticket. Six suspends it - and you have been told twice by then.
What to check first
- 1.Read the last twenty lines of the console before the restart. A crash usually names its own cause.
- 2.Look at the memory graph in the moments before it. A vertical climb into the limit is an OOM kill.
- 3.Ask what changed. A new mod, a new plugin, a world imported from somewhere else - in that order.
- 4.If none of that explains it, open a ticket and paste the console. We would rather look at it with you than guess.
A server pinned at 100% CPU is not about to be suspended. The container is throttled to the share you bought, so it runs slowly rather than breaking - we say so on the warning rather than letting a red graph imply otherwise.