First TF2 Update in 11 months and server's FPS is dropping out

[DaRabman]

Yo,
I've updated TF2 for the first time since August 2010 in preperation for a LAN party. The update seemed to execute fine, but on firing up the map rotation problems start to appear.

The ping will remain steady around 2-7ms but clients lag in erratic bursts a couple of times every minute. Running net_graph 4 on the client's side shows that the server's fps is bottoming out (from ~460 to <20), but as I say, ping seems unaffected.

srcds_l's priority is highest, I've disabled replays and Source TV, disabled addons and a number of extra daemons, I've even updated the Kernel to 2.6.31-23 on Ubuntu 9.10.

fps_max: 600
tickrate: 100
maxrate: 20000
minrate: 5000
maxupdaterate: 100

Although it has improved very slightly, it seems hard to believe that TF2 could have bloated so much in a year that a server which could once run TF2, two instances of CSS, Soldat, Apache and Mumble simultaneously, can't even run one instance of srcds_l comfortably.

Can anybody think of something I haven't tried, or suffered a similar problem?

Cheers,
DaRab.

[Mike]

I'd advise you to drop the fps to 66.67 (try with different values to get close to it, under is always better, not over), then it should use a bit less resources. And drop the tickrate to 66 too, no effort in running things no body can notice.

[DaRabman]

Changing the FPS and rates had some effect, but only really lengthened the interval between the lag spikes.

I got to the bottom of the problem eventually; I had manually set the environment variable $RDTSC_FREQUENCY to the value recommended by the server initialisation messages, so I instead set it to "disabled" and the spikes completely disappeared.

Thanks for the help,

DaRab.

[Mike]

Hm... Maybe I'll try it too, i've got some spikes too.

[DaRabman]

Yeah, it'd be interesting to see if that works for you too, although my server specs are pretty low.

[Mike]

Very weird. It stopped for me too when i set it to disabled..