I have a standalone WinXP machine running TWGS/Gold 3.13. It's a fairly modest machine: PIII 450, with 256 MB ram, and a 36 gig drive. However I have noticed that since upgrading to the latest code rev my players have complained that the server comes to a crawl. In investigating the services running on the machine I've noticed that there can be only one or two players on and the tw2002 session for the players with hit 100% CPU constantly. This also seems to happen with aliens. Well, aliens are easy enough to fix, I can remove them, but I can't believe 1 or 2 user sessions can constantly peg my system running normal scripts. This same server used to be able to run multiple games with several loaded aliens and 1-15 players with no problems. Any ideas?

There could be a virus on your system that is slowing it down.
It could be a program running in the background that you don't know about. Well it could be alot of things! well good luck and Happy Winter solstice.

get ad-aware and spybot search and destroy, both are free, and both will get read of crap on your system (to be technical). heh.
with that system, even with a moderate amount of aliens, there should be little to no lag.

Slim

It can partly depend on what those few players are doing, also. I would try disabling aliens and see if it gets better.

It's the actual TW processes eating the processor according to performance monitor.

Norton, Ad-Aware, and Spybot S&D are all running and find nothing Of course, this machine is a standalone behind a firewall that never gets used for anything but TW, so that was expected.

Turning off aliens does fix the problem for alien process that are eating cpu, but what is the point of having aliens if you can't use them?

This same game config/server worked fine before the latest patch, and is much slower now.

I have noticed the same thing on my own server - it looks like Gold Aliens use a surprising amount of CPU and system resources, even on my Athlon 1900. If more than 3 players are executing scripts at the same time, the server slows to a crawl. In player surveys that I have seen, most people express the opinion that Aliens are simply an annoyance that adds little or nothing to game play, and most would prefer the game to have aliens turned off. I may disable aliens completely on the next game I set up, and see if that helps speed up the server significantly

Depending on how many races, how many individual aliens, and how often they move, the aliens can be a real drain on system resources. In addition, considering your running windows xp with those hardware specs, your system isn't going to be able to handle a lot of load anyway.

In general, XP should have 512Mb RAM. And they recommend 1Ghz processors. You are gonna feel a drain with aliens for sure.

Jhereg

Well I haven't had any drain on my system yet. I have a server with a 2.0 Celeron processor, 40 Gig Hard Drive, 256 Mb memory, and Windows Server 2003, but the only difference is that my server is online, it has 500Gig+ bandwidth on a T1 connection with multiple backup connections, but as far as TWGS overloading my processor, I haven't had that to happen yet, with or without the aliens. I am not sure why your system is bogging down unless there are too many calls to the system from the TWGS, try to look at the amount of calls to the system and try to cut some of them and see what happens, sometimes too many calls to the system overloads the processor, I have had this to happen with another program and cut some of its calls to the processor and the problem straightened itself out.

But since I have installed TWGS I haven't had any of these problems. of courst it may be the operating system I am now using too that helps out. The only problem I had with TWGS was it didn't want to allow connections to it but found out it was the over amount of filters that MS put into Server 2003 ( whole different story and headache too! ), once (with JP's help) I figured that out the TWGS worked fine since.

Vulcan

I don't think the processor/memory is the problem. The system was running fine before the Sept update, with heavier scripting, and the same aliens already maxed out. Memory usage isn't a problem, as this system rarely uses more than 130MB of ram. I have done hours of performance monitoring on this latest patch and have noticed that the only processes that use any amount of prcoessor time are the TW processes. Now, I also have an Athlon 64 3000 with 1 Gig of ram. I plan on porting the game over to the faster machine just to see if I can peg the processor. Also, the fact that lcharlot posted similar results on a much beefier system seems to indicate that TW is interacting with the system improperly.

I would uninstall the EIS software, remove the directory, reboot, then do a clean install of the latest code.

+EP+

I agree EP, this is why I think there are too many calls, the two versions haven't meshed right or something like that. That is exactly what I did when I first installed the mewer versioin. I always do this with newer versions of things when they don't have to rely on the older version for any info to run.

Vulcan

I will definately try the re-install. It's not a big deal to wipe it, and move the archived game back over from my other machine Unless bringing back the archived game will cause problems? Of course to give it a true test I'll have to bring the aliens back online.

I'm not sure of any way to manually reduce system calls. All I am able to do from the server is change the priority of each running service(is this the same thing?), and I'm not sure how to make such changes permanent, since the game session will close and spawn a new process each time a player logs on/off.

I have been able to monitor bandwidth, and even at 128K up, hardly any of it is getting used. Memory usage sits around 130MB out of 256MB.

Once I reinstall I'll have to do another capture of performance to see if things have improved.

For anyone who was following this, the complete removal and re-install of TW did the trick. Had to manually remove the registry entires, and had some issues with re-importing the game, but was able to get it all up and running again. CPU usage is minimal now, with high user load, almost no spikes. Thanks to everyone who had suggestions!

Glad to hear the problem is straightened out, you should hopefully have little to no usage problems now. Keep us posted on the progress.

Vulcan