Best Arma Reforger Server Settings for Performance and Gameplay

Which knobs actually move the needle

Most Arma Reforger "best settings" guides throw a spreadsheet of numbers at you and call it tuned. Having run a fair few of these on LOW.MS, I've found the truth is messier. The right values depend on your scenario, your mod list, your player count, and honestly how chaotic your community is. What I can tell you is which settings matter, which direction to push them when things go sideways, and where the sensible defaults sit.

Arma Reforger caps out at 128 players, and the server config lives in config.json inside your server files. You can edit it through the Configuration Files entry in your LOW.MS Control Panel at https://control.low.ms, or via File Manager if you prefer poking at the raw JSON.

The settings worth caring about

If a server is struggling, these are the first three I look at. Everything else is a rounding error by comparison.

networkViewDistance is usually the first knob we reach for when a server is chugging. It controls how far out the server replicates networked entities – other players, vehicles, AI – to each client. Default is 1500. Drop it for dense, heavily modded or high-player servers; push it up for small milsim ops where spotting a silhouette at range is half the fun.

serverMaxViewDistance is the terrain/world view distance the server simulates. Default is 1600. This is more about visual fidelity than raw performance, but it still costs CPU. Nudge it up for low-population servers where you want postcard views, nudge it down when frametimes start climbing.

maxPlayers is obvious but worth saying: every extra player adds CPU, memory, and bandwidth cost that scales non-linearly once AI and vehicles enter the picture. Don't set it higher than your scenario actually supports.

After those three, impact drops off quickly. serverMinGrassDistance (default 0) is mostly a visual call. battlEye is cheap and should stay on. Mods are unpredictable – some do nothing, some script themselves into your frametime.

A reasonable starting config

Rather than handing you four tiered blocks pretending to be lab-tested, here's one sensible baseline. Start here, then nudge individual values based on what your server is telling you.

{
  "game": {
    "maxPlayers": 64,
    "crossPlatform": true,
    "gameProperties": {
      "serverMaxViewDistance": 1600,
      "serverMinGrassDistance": 0,
      "networkViewDistance": 1500,
      "disableThirdPerson": false,
      "fastValidation": true,
      "battlEye": true,
      "VONDisableUI": false,
      "VONDisableDirectSpeechUI": false,
      "VONCanTransmitCrossFaction": false
    }
  }
}

From that baseline:

• Heavy mod list or approaching your player cap? Pull networkViewDistance down first. A server that feels laggy at 1500 often feels fine at 1200, and nobody notices except you.
• Small private milsim group? You can push serverMaxViewDistance up considerably without breaking a sweat. Long sightlines are the point.
• Frametimes creeping up? Trim serverMaxViewDistance before you touch anything else visual.
• Want grass to actually render server-side for prone stealth? Raise serverMinGrassDistance in small steps and watch CPU.

I'd rather you adjust one thing, run a populated session, and see what happened, than copy-paste a four-tier table from a blog post.

Mode-specific notes

Conflict is the mode most LOW.MS customers end up running, and it's also the one that degrades most over a long session. Players build FOBs, spawn vehicles, leave crates lying around, and the entity count creeps up. A daily restart is a good baseline; busier or heavily modded Conflict servers benefit from more frequent restarts. Don't feel precious about it – entity cleanup happens at restart, and your players will thank you.

Game Master is the wild card. A calm GM running a small ambush scenario will sip server resources. A GM who spawns hundreds of AI on Everon is a different story. AI counts hit CPU harder than player counts, so brief your Game Masters to keep spawns modest, especially once the lobby fills up. If your crew runs GM seriously, take a look at the Game Master Enhanced (GME) mod – it adds genuine quality-of-life on top of the vanilla tools.

Combat Ops is the lightest of the three server-side. Smaller squads, constrained AI, predictable load. You don't really need to tune it – the defaults work.

BattlEye, VON, and crossplay

Leave battlEye on. The overhead is negligible and the alternative is the occasional headache no one wants. The only time I turn it off is for quick local testing, and even then I flip it back before anyone joins.

The VON keys (VONDisableUI, VONDisableDirectSpeechUI, VONCanTransmitCrossFaction) are a preference call, not a performance call. If your milsim unit runs everything on Discord or TeamSpeak, hiding the VON UI tidies things up. For PvP Conflict, leave VONCanTransmitCrossFaction at false unless you want opfor and blufor talking mid-firefight.

On crossplay: enable it. Since Update 1.4 (May 2025), PC, Xbox, and PS5 players all join the same lobbies and can load mods, with the caveat that individual mod authors flag which platforms their mod supports – mods using script code are PC-only on Sony's end, data-only mods work everywhere. The wider player pool is worth more than whatever purist argument you might hear against it.

Keep an eye on the server

Settings are only half the job. Watch RAM and CPU in the LOW.MS Control Panel, and if players start mentioning rubber-banding or desync, check before they escalate. The Log Viewer in your panel catches most problems before they snowball. Scheduled restarts via Scheduled Tasks are set-and-forget – configure them once and stop thinking about it.

Qualitative cheat sheet

If you want a one-glance mental model instead of numbers:

No specific numbers on purpose – the right value is whichever one makes your particular server stop hiccupping.

For the full list of config keys and what they do, have a look at the Arma Reforger Server Configuration Guide. If you're standing a new server up from scratch, start with the Getting Started Guide, and if something's already broken, the Troubleshooting Guide is where I'd head first.