Method document
Stable player: how capacity will be counted
A "stable player" is a proposed unit of real capacity: one player a server can hold while it keeps up with its work, with no crash, across repeated runs. GameServerBench has not measured a stable player count for any host or plan. This definition exists so that the thresholds are set before any result can influence them.
Why slot counts don't answer the question
A slot is a permission for one more person to join. It says nothing about whether the server copes when they do. A RAM figure has the same weakness, because many games stall on CPU long before memory runs out. Buyers end up comparing the price of a number that doesn't describe capacity.
The proposed definition
A plan's stable player count is the highest player count, in a tested series, at which all of these held in three separated runs:
| Condition | Proposed test |
|---|---|
| The server keeps up | 95th percentile tick or frame time stays within the game's budget for the whole run |
| Spikes stay rare | Ticks over budget stay under a fixed share of all ticks, set before the first run |
| It stays up | No crash, out-of-memory restart or forced restart during the run |
| Players get in | Every simulated or recorded player joins and stays connected |
The 95th percentile is used because an average can look healthy while players feel the spikes. spark's documentation describes a lag spike as a small number of ticks taking a long time, and says a tick over 50 ms is where the server has to start catching up.
The budget for each game
Minecraft has a clear budget: a healthy server averages 50 ms or less per tick, because it aims for 20 ticks a second. Other games are less clear. Palworld reports serverfps and serverframetime, and GameServerBench found no official target for either. A threshold for those games would have to be chosen, justified and published first, and it would apply only within that game.
What is still open
- The share of ticks allowed over budget.
- The length of a run for each game, which must include its expensive moments. See load profiles.
- The budget for every game other than Minecraft.
- Whether a count stands for a plan in general, or only for that plan in one region on those dates. The cautious reading is the second one.
What it would be used for
Stable player counts would feed the price per stable player calculator, which divides a plan's renewal price by the players it can hold. Until the data exists, that field stays empty and the calculator normalises published prices only. The planned method lists what has to happen before any count can be produced.