Scheduling Automatic Restarts for Your Palworld Server

Why Regular Restarts Help

The Palworld dedicated server has a known memory leak (see our memory leak article for details). RAM usage climbs over hours until the server crashes or becomes unresponsive. Regular restarts clear the leaked memory and keep the server stable.

Even without the memory leak, restarts help clear stale entities, refresh AI states, and ensure clean world saves. Servers that run for days without restarting tend to develop subtle performance issues.

How often depends on memory growth, mod load and player activity. Watch the Resource Usage card on the server Overview tab and pick an interval that keeps memory clear of your allocation, rather than a number from a guide. GameGrid offers 6, 12 and 24 hours - see below.

Manual Restart with Warning

In game, as an authenticated admin:

/Broadcast Server restarting in 5 minutes - please finish your current tasks.

Then, after giving people a moment to read it:

/Shutdown 300 Server restarting in 5 minutes

/Shutdown takes a delay in seconds and a message. The server broadcasts it, counts down, saves the world and shuts down cleanly. Players see the countdown on their screen.

From the panel instead: the Console tab accepts Broadcast <message> and Shutdown, both WITHOUT a leading slash. Console-tab Shutdown always uses a fixed ten-second countdown, so use the in-game /Shutdown if you want a longer warning.

After the server stops, start it again with the Start button in the bar at the top of any of its pages. Or just use Restart, which stops and starts in one action.

Scheduled Restarts on GameGrid

The control is on the Admin tab, in the card headed "Automatic Daily Restart" - not in Settings.

It offers three intervals and nothing else: Every 6 hours, Every 12 hours and Every 24 hours. Pick one and it saves immediately; there is no Save button and no way to schedule a specific clock time.

The important part: a scheduled restart only happens when the player count is ZERO. The host agent checks every five minutes, and if anyone is connected it waits. Nobody is ever kicked by this, and there is no warning broadcast because there is nobody to warn.

The flip side is that a permanently busy server may never hit its window. If yours is one, restart it by hand at a quiet hour instead.

The card also shows when the last automatic restart happened.

Auto-Save Before Restart

Autosave Interval defaults to 30 SECONDS (AutoSaveSpan=30), not 30 minutes. Player progress is therefore rarely lost during a restart - at most about half a minute of play.

For extra safety before a restart, force a save: /Save in game, or Save in the Console tab.

A graceful stop from the panel also saves before exiting, and Palworld servers get a 90-second shutdown budget here so a large world finishes writing rather than being killed mid-save.

You can raise Autosave Interval to save less often (less disk churn, more progress at risk) or lower it for more frequent saves. The panel accepts 1 to 3600 seconds, and very low values cause visible stuttering and disk spikes. Most servers leave it at 30.