How many cores does a minecraft server use
Emily Carr
Published Mar 30, 2026

A CPU with good single-core performance. The server (as of 1.14) does use additional cores for other operations, but typically three cores are used at most. Hyperthreading (HT) or simultaneous multithreading (SMT), i.e. a CPU providing 2 “threads” or “logical cores” for each physical core, does not seem to benefit Minecraft much.
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Show activity on this post. I am working on setting up a Minecraft server on a machine I have at home. This particular machine has two quad-core CPUs running at 2.0Ghz so I would like to take advantage of the number of cores and run a server with 4 or 6 of the cores. My server of choice is CraftBukkit, the latest version of which is craftbukkit-1.4.
Addition: Some people say optifine makes Minecraft use all available cores, some people say it makes Minecraft use 3 cores and some say Minecraft is hard limited to 1 core. I’m specifically talking about 1.8.9.
OverviewPlans DescriptionConclusionSo you’ve decided to set up a Minecraft server, but how much ram does a Minecraft server need? When you are trying to determine which Minecraft server hosting package to purchase, you may not know which package is right for you. The only difference between the packages is the amount of RAM available. Ram is required by the server to run all of the software and support all of the c…
minecraft doesn’t use only one core. there are many things that get executed in other thread like chat or the connections. the problem is that the main server loop runs in only one thread and that you can’t easily change that without breaking shit left and right.
I set my server to use 12 gigs of RAM for now, considering that I will be adding more servers soon. My iMac has these configurations: 3.5GHz Quad-core Intel Core i7, Turbo Boost up to 3.9GHz. 32GB 1600MHz DDR3 SDRAM – 4X8GB. 1TB of PCIe-Based Flash Storage. NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780M 4GB GDDR5. It uses mavericks.
1. Posted March 15, 2020. I’m hosting a server atm on a lowly Celeron G3900, because afaik, Java edition of Minecraft can’t use more than 1 core, but i’ve seen more crashes with the Celeron than back when i had it on a Xeon E5-2670 and i also see it does use both of the cores. My question is, did they change Java minecraft to have multicore support …
In the screenshot above, Javaw is using 52 threads. So minecraft is not using 1 thread, but 52, spread over the number of cores present in your computer. Now to what matters, Minecraft uses lwjgl (Light Weight Java Game Library). I used lwjgl before and it cannot use more than one core.
For this reason it’s never recommended to run a server on only 1-2 cores, as this will significantly harm performance. There are many performance gains that can still be covered without making it more multithreaded. Multithreading is extremely complex & can break plugins, so it’s not highest priority.
I get roughly equal usage across all my cores no matter the render distance. I normally keep it at 32-48 chunks and get around ~40-50% across all 6 of my cores / 12 of my threads. BTW I used MSI Afterburner/Rivia Tuner Stats to get this info. And afaik Minecraft Java edition, now has limited multithreaded support.
Related Questions
What kind of CPU do I need to run Minecraft?
A CPU with good single-core performance. The server (as of 1.14) does use additional cores for other operations, but typically three cores are used at most. Hyperthreading (HT) or simultaneous multithreading (SMT), i.e. a CPU providing 2 “threads” or “logical cores” for each physical core, does not seem to benefit Minecraft much.
Can Minecraft servers use more than one core?
The Minecraft Wiki says: Minecraft servers, as of 1.1.0, can use multiple cores, so now they will not sit idle. but does not really expand on this.
How many threads does Minecraft use?
So minecraft is not using 1 thread, but 52, spread over the number of cores present in your computer Now to what matters, Minecraft uses lwjgl (Light Weight Java Game Library). I used lwjgl before and it cannot use more than one core. This only applies to the rendering, The AIs and all of that can run on their own cores.
Why does Minecraft run on multiple processors?
Any individual process can be assigned to any processor that is available. Even if Minecraft uses a single thread it benefits from this as all of the other system processes can be run on alternate processors. Keep in mind that your computer, mostly the operating system, is continually running many different programs at the same time.