# How to actually find what is crashing your server

> A practical method for FiveM crashes: reading the client crash dialog, finding the server console line that matters, isolating a resource by bisection, the common crash causes, and what a crash dump can and cannot tell you.

Source: https://fam-tools.com/guides/fivem-crash-debugging · FAM Tools · published 2026-04-18 · updated 2026-09-07 · about 11 min

**Short answer.** Establish whether it is the client or the server, whether it is reproducible, whether it started after a change, and which resource is loaded when it happens. Bisection finds the resource in log2(n) restarts.

Crashes feel random and almost never are. There are four questions that identify the cause in nearly every case, and asking them in order is much faster than reinstalling things until it stops.

## Client crash or server crash?

They look the same to players and have nothing in common. If everyone is disconnected at once and the server console stops, the server crashed. If one person gets the FiveM crash dialog while everyone else keeps playing, that is a client crash.

| Evidence | Conclusion |
| --- | --- |
| Everyone disconnects simultaneously | Server process died — check the console tail |
| One player, FiveM error dialog | Client crash — usually a streamed asset |
| Everyone at the same place on the map | A specific MLO or streamed model |
| Everyone doing the same action | A script — find it by what the action triggers |
| Random, one player, always the same player | Their GTA install or their mods, not your server |

## The client crash dialog

FiveM shows a crash reason and a dump id. The reason is often more useful than people assume, even when it looks like noise.

- A crash naming a .ytd or a .ydr is a streamed asset. The name is usually in the message — that is your answer.
- A crash in gta-core or citizen-resources with no asset name is more often a pool exhaustion or a script doing something invalid.
- Repeated crashes at the same coordinates point at map content, not scripts.
- "Failed to load" during connection is a download or cache problem, not a crash at all.

> **Ask for the dump id, not a screenshot of the whole screen** — The dump id lets you find the crash on the Cfx side; the crash reason line tells you the rest. Those two lines are worth more than any description of what the player was doing.

## Bisection: finding the resource

When you cannot tell which resource is responsible, stop guessing and bisect. With 64 resources this takes six restarts, not sixty-four.

1. **Confirm you can reproduce it** — If you cannot make it happen on demand, you cannot test a fix. Find the trigger first.
2. **Halve the resource list** — Comment out half your ensure lines. Restart. Reproduce.
3. **Follow the crash** — Crash still happens: the cause is in the running half. It stops: the cause is in the half you removed.
4. **Repeat on that half** — Six iterations covers 64 resources.
5. **Verify** — Start the suspect on its own with the framework and confirm the crash returns.

> **note** — Keep a copy of your original server.cfg before you start commenting lines out. It is remarkably easy to lose a working configuration during this.

## Server crashes

The server writes the reason to the console immediately before dying. If you run it in a window that closes, you never see it — which is why running under txAdmin, systemd or tmux is not optional on a real server.

- An unhandled Lua error will not usually kill the server; it kills the resource. If the whole process dies, look for native misuse or a memory problem.
- Out of memory on a 32-bit-limited component shows as an abrupt exit with no Lua error at all.
- A stack overflow from infinite recursion in a script does take the process down.
- Repeated crashes at a fixed interval point at a timer — something on a schedule.

```bash
# keep the last 2000 lines when it dies
FXServer.exe +exec server.cfg > server.log 2>&1

# then read the end of it
tail -n 200 server.log
```

## The usual causes, ranked

| Cause | How it presents |
| --- | --- |
| Duplicate streamed file names | Random client crashes near specific content |
| A corrupt or badly converted model | Consistent crash on spawning one vehicle or entering one interior |
| Game build too low for the content | Missing models, then a crash when something references them |
| Pool exhaustion | Crash after the server has been up a while, worse with more players |
| A resource looping without Wait | Client freeze rather than a clean crash |
| Stale client cache after an update | Only affects players who have played before, not new ones |

> **Clear the cache before believing any of this** — A stale client cache produces symptoms identical to a corrupt asset. Delete FiveM Application Data/data/cache on the affected client and reproduce again before you spend an evening on it.

## What crash dumps can and cannot tell you

A minidump contains the call stack at the moment of the crash. That reliably identifies the subsystem — streaming, script runtime, rendering — and it identifies a named asset when one is involved.

It does not tell you which resource shipped that asset, and it cannot tell you which Lua line was responsible, because the Lua runtime is several frames below the native crash. Use the dump to narrow the area, then bisect for the resource.

## Questions

### Only one player crashes. Is it my server?

Probably not. Have them clear their cache, verify their GTA install, and disable any client-side mods. If it follows them across servers, it is their install.

### The server crashes every few hours with no error. What now?

Log to a file so you keep the last lines, then look at what is on a schedule. A crash at a regular interval is almost always a timer, a cron-like task or a scheduled restart script that is not doing what you think.

### Can a minimap resource crash the game?

Only through a name collision with another minimap resource. It ships no scripts that run per frame and no models that can be spawned, so there is nothing to crash. If two minimap resources are running, remove one.

## Related

- https://fam-tools.com/guides/fivem-streaming-assets
- https://fam-tools.com/guides/fivem-server-performance
- https://fam-tools.com/guides/fivem-artifacts-and-updates