Why Your Conan Server Uses More RAM After Enhanced
You updated to Conan Exiles Enhanced and now your server won't behave. It's chewing through memory, and on a full night it might just drop out entirely. Nothing's wrong with your setup. Enhanced simply needs more RAM than the old game did.
Here's what changed, and how to keep it stable.
Enhanced is a new engine, not just a patch
When Funcom shipped Enhanced on the 5th of May 2026, it wasn't a normal update. They rebuilt the whole game on Unreal Engine 5. New engine, new way of loading and holding the world in memory. That's what brought the nicer lighting and visuals, but under the hood it also made the dedicated server a lot hungrier than the old Unreal Engine 4 build ever was.
Short version: same players, same bases, more memory used. That's the trade that came with the new engine.
How much more we're talking about
Rough numbers from launch: even a plain server uses somewhere around 15 to 25 percent more RAM than it did before. Fill it with a full population and a stack of mods and reports put it at two to four times the old footprint for the same world. Funcom themselves now point at 16 GB as the figure to plan around for a 40 player server.
So if your old plan was 8 GB and it felt fine, it might not be fine anymore. Fine on the old build and fine on Enhanced are two different bars.
The part that catches people out: memory creep
There's a second thing going on, and it's the one that turns into 2am crashes. Enhanced servers don't just start higher on RAM, they climb while they run. The longer the server stays up, the more memory it holds onto, until it hits the ceiling and the process gets killed. Out of memory. Server offline. Usually right when it's busiest, because that's when it's using the most.
The fix is boring but it works. Restart the server on a schedule, every day, so the memory clears before it ever reaches the ceiling. Any decent Conan hosting setup gives you a scheduler in the panel so this takes half a minute to set up. If yours doesn't, that's worth asking about.
Why your old plan might not cut it
Put those two together, the higher starting point and the creep, and you can see why a plan that felt roomy last year feels tight now. Nothing broke. The game got heavier, and the sizing that made sense on the old build is just under-spec on the new one. It's the most common reason people's servers started lagging or crashing after they switched to Enhanced.
What to do about it
Two things, really.
Give it enough RAM. A small PvE world with a few friends can run on less, but for a 40 player server plan for 16 GB, and go higher if you're running a heavy modlist. More memory is the direct fix for the higher baseline and it buys you room before the creep bites.
Then make sure something restarts the server daily. That keeps the memory leak from ever becoming your problem in the first place.
This is the stuff we built Server Heron around. With us you pick your RAM and you can see exactly how much you're getting, sized for how Enhanced actually behaves now instead of what the old guides say. The panel has a task scheduler, so you can set a daily automatic restart in about thirty seconds and stop the creep turning into a wrecked weekend. And when your world grows and you want more headroom, you move up a plan, no drama. Our game hosting is built around one game we know inside out, not a hundred handled the same way.
Enhanced is a better version of Conan. It just asks more of the box underneath it. Give it the memory, keep it restarting, and your server stays up while everyone else is wondering why theirs keeps falling over.