How to reduce bandwidth on your FiveM server

If your host charges for traffic, or your server slows down whenever a lot of players join, it helps to know where the bandwidth goes. For most roleplay servers the answer is simple. It is not the game traffic. It is resource downloads.

A quick estimate

Game traffic per player is small. Resource downloads are not. Take a server with 5 GB of resources. Every new player downloads all of it once, so 300 new players in a month is already 1.5 TB.

Then come the updates. Say you change an 800 MB vehicle pack and 2,000 regular players join afterwards. Each of them downloads the changed files again, which is another 1.6 TB. A few updates like that in one month and downloads are far ahead of everything else.

These numbers are just an example, but the pattern holds for nearly every server with custom content.

Send less

• Remove resources you no longer use. Deleted is better than stopped and still sitting in the folder.
• Look at your largest streamed assets. A single oversized texture dictionary can be hundreds of megabytes.
• Group your updates. Ten small changes to a big pack on ten different days means players download it ten times.
• Only touch files you need to change. The client skips any file whose hash is the same, so an unchanged file costs nothing.

Send it from somewhere else

The bigger win is to stop serving downloads from your server at all. With fileserver_add you can point resource downloads at a CDN. Your server then sends each file once, the first time someone asks for it, and every download after that comes from the CDN.

Once the cache is warm, most downloads never reach your server. On FiveMCDN your dashboard shows the cache hit rate and how much traffic was served for each server, so you can see the difference for yourself.

What it costs

FiveMCDN has a Free plan with 10 GB of cache storage and 1 TB of bandwidth a month, which is enough for many smaller servers. Paid plans start at €7.50 a month. All the details are on the pricing page.