Why players get stuck downloading resources
The usual reasons joins hang on the resource download screen, and what you can do about each of them.
Few things lose players faster than a join screen that sits on downloading resources for five minutes. Most people will not wait, and a lot of them do not come back. The cause is usually one of a handful of things, and most of them come down to your server doing too much at once.
Everyone joins at the same time
After a restart, a large part of your player base tries to connect in the same few minutes. With 60 players in the queue and a few hundred megabytes of updated files each, your server has to push many gigabytes while it is still starting up. A 1 Gbit port sounds like plenty until you divide it by 60.
This is also when joins fail outright. The client only retries a file a few times, and the connection has a time limit before the player is actually in. If the downloads do not finish in time, the player is sent back to the menu and has to start again, which adds even more load.
Players are far from your server
A download over a long distance is slower than the same download nearby, even when both sides have plenty of bandwidth. A server in Frankfurt feels fast to players in the Netherlands and much slower to players in Australia or South America. You cannot move your server closer to everyone, but you can move the files closer.
Your packs are bigger than they need to be
Vehicle and clothing packs grow over time. Huge textures that nobody sees up close, duplicate models and old resources that still start but are no longer used all add to the download. It is worth going through your resources every few months.
- Remove resources you no longer use instead of leaving them in the folder.
- Downscale textures that do not need to be that large.
- Avoid updating big packs for small changes. Every changed file is downloaded again by every player.
Your host limits your bandwidth
Some game server hosts cap upload speed or have a monthly traffic limit. If downloads are slow even when one player joins on an empty server, check what your plan actually includes.
Taking downloads off your server
Most of these problems have the same fix. When the files are served from somewhere else, your server only has to run the game. That is what fileserver_add is for, and it is what FiveMCDN does. Your server sends each file once. After that, players get it from a Cloudflare location near them, no matter how many join at the same moment.
You can read how the setup works in our fileserver_add guide, or go straight to the quickstart.