i was looking at some of the fixes to combat this problem are there any updated fixes? for STEAM NS? any and all help will be much appreciated

What OS are you using?

What are the server specifications?

What Kernel are you using?

Pebbs

Processors: Dual AMD MP 2800+ (4.26Ghz)
Ram: 2 Gb DDR
Motherboard: Tyan S2468 Dual Processor
Power: 460 ATX-GES
Case: 2U Rackmount,6 Fans
System: Linux RedHat

linux 2.4.23 SMP

First off SMP won't help you for half-life servers since the HLDS is not multi-threaded. It will help you if you run two servers since you can specify an affinity to a CPU for each server.

Second, on the valve HLDS admin mailing list, complaints about astronomical CPU usage seem to fall on deaf ears. Admins have been complaining about the extreme CPU and memory usage of HLDS 3.1.1.1 and STEAM vs 3.1.1.0 and older. Valve doesn't seem to want to invest large amounts of time in optimizing it.

So your options are limited, at this point though for best PCU usage you should use the 3.1.1.0 server files. When NS 3.0 goes STEAM we will all have increased CPU usage problem, so this might be a short lived solution.

QUOTE (Vadakill @ Jan 8 2004, 04:14 PM)

It will help you if you run two servers since you can specify an affinity to a CPU for each server.

How would I do this?

Or could you point me in the direction of what I am looking for?

Pebbs

I was kinda wrong, 2.4 kernel of Linux isn't really ready for binding (pinning) a process to a specific CPU, though it does seem to load balance well currently. You can do it though if you feel like a little kernel hacking and recompiling here is a source that talks about what needs to be done in order to accomplish this.

Windows Servers can set an affinity to a cpu using the Imagecfg (I think) command, but this is a Linux forum so I don't think anyone here would be interested in that.

Supposedly 2.6 kernel will be able to set affinities, but that is a few months down the road yet. Here's some talk about the 2.5 kernel (which is basically 2.6) going over process affinity. The article mentions that some distributions have back ported some of these capabilities into the 2.4 kernel. Maybe yours is one of those distros?

Yeh I have noticed a jump of about 25% since going to steam engine with NS 3.0 beta 1. Unfortunately that means I have had to drop the server back from 16 to 14 players to keep pings reasonable.

I'm running a celeron 1.8, 512 MB RAM, Redhat Linux 9 with 2.4.20-28.9 kernel.

Is the engine the original hlds_l or is it some newfangled steam engine?

There is a general concensus that the more cache memory the processor has the better ot seems to perform. A celeron has much less cache then most main stream processors xeons seem to much better.

Something of an interesting note, AMD processors seem to be performing better then their P4 counterparts. The Valve devs are investigating that.