Windrose Server Performance Optimization
Tips and settings to optimize your Windrose dedicated server performance, reduce lag, and handle more players smoothly.
Understanding Windrose Performance
Windrose is an Unreal Engine game with large procedural worlds, naval combat, and base building. Server performance depends on world size, player count, number of built structures, and active creatures.
The dedicated server handles physics simulation, AI, and world state. Client performance (FPS) is separate and depends on the player's hardware.
Common performance issues include high CPU usage from AI calculations, memory growth from world exploration, and network latency from large world data transfers.
Optimizing Server Settings
If you have Windrose Plus enabled, you can adjust settings that affect server performance:
Live Map update intervals: Increasing the player position interval (default 5000ms) and entity position interval (default 30000ms) reduces CPU load from map updates. If you do not need real-time positions, increase these values.
POI Scanner: The POI scanner runs a background scan every 4 hours by default. If you do not use the POI overlay, you can disable it to save CPU cycles.
Server Query: this is the module that refreshes the dashboard’s live status. Raising its poll intervals, or turning it off if you never look at the dashboard, saves a little work each cycle. It has nothing to do with server browsers.
Multipliers: High loot and harvest multipliers cause more items to exist in the world, which increases memory usage and save times. Use moderate values if performance is a concern.
Player Count and Performance
The "Max Player Count" setting accepts 1 to 64 and ships at 8; the platform adds no cap of its own. Our sizing guidance for Windrose is roughly 8 GB of RAM for 2 players, 12 GB for 4 and 16 GB for 10, with an SSD strongly recommended — which is the honest shape of what each extra player costs.
Each additional player increases CPU load (AI calculations, physics), memory usage (loaded chunks), and network bandwidth.
Windrose’s own co-op scaling settings — Co-op Stats Correction and Co-op Ship Stats Correction on the Settings tab — change how much enemy health and posture scale with player count, and Windrose Plus adds two more of its own. Turning scaling down makes a large group cheaper as well as easier.
If players experience rubber-banding or delayed interactions, the server CPU may be saturated. Reducing the player count or adjusting settings can help.
Memory Management
Windrose servers can experience memory growth over time as players explore more of the world. This is normal for Unreal Engine games with large procedural worlds.
The Resource Usage card on the Overview tab is the instrument to use: it shows the game process’s own CPU, memory, network in and out, uptime, thread count and connections, refreshed every 10 seconds, and it is there whether or not Windrose Plus is installed. wp.memory in the Windrose Plus console gives the same figure from inside the game.
If memory grows without stabilising, lean on the automatic restart. It is already on, and the Admin tab lets you choose 6, 12 or 24 hours; the restart is skipped entirely while any player is online, so it never interrupts a session and a busy server may go a long time without one.
There is no time-of-day option and no off switch — only the interval, counted from when the game process last started. Restarting the server yourself resets that clock.
World Size and Exploration
Windrose generates procedural islands and biomes. As players explore, more of the world is generated and loaded into memory.
The Settings tab offers nothing that limits world size — the world is whatever the game generates from its world ID. What you can control is difficulty and multipliers, and the world preset.
If your server has been running for a long time and performance is degrading, a world reset (generating a new world) can help. See our guide on resetting your Windrose world.
When to Contact Support
If your server is consistently performing poorly despite optimizing settings, contact support.
Include your Service ID from the bottom of the Connection Info panel, the approximate player count, what the Resource Usage card was showing at the time, and a description of the problem — lag, rubber-banding, crashes, high CPU.
Our support team can check if the host is experiencing resource contention or if there is a configuration issue specific to your server.