CPU Spikes

[KingJ]

I've got a large issue with a number of SRCDS servers. For some reason the SRCDS instances will randomly attempt to use as much CPU power as is available (i.e 100% of each core). During these periods, the servers are doing nothing extra and lag immensely.

The SRCDS instances are running different games (Gmod 10, Synergy, CSS, SourceForts) but they all seem to exhibit this problem.

This is a screenshot showing the CPU usage spiking up to 100%


(Note: Only 1 SRCDS instance was running when this screenshot was taken. If 1 or more where running on top of this, both cores would be showing 100% usage)

Has anyone come across this before? It's a huge problem that is killing my server.

Specs:
AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ (2 Ghz)
1GB Ram

[Spartanfrog]

How many servers are running usually?

[KingJ]

Currently, 5. As mentioned before though, it can happen with just the one. I've only really noticed this since running a Gmod Server for a customer

[Drocona]

GMOD is a huge pain in the "derrière", you can make a server go 100% no matter what server machine it's running on. The only way of getting it to stop is to put limits on all physics, those jam up the servers CPU.

[KingJ]

Drocona Wrote:GMOD is a huge pain in the "derrière", you can make a server go 100% no matter what server machine it's running on. The only way of getting it to stop is to put limits on all physics, those jam up the servers CPU.

The thing that gets me though is that it uses 100% CPU doing nothing extra compared to before. Is there any way to cap CPU usage, say to 30%? Or some form of process isolation?

[Drocona]

No idea, never tried it, never seen it.

Only things that might be having that are the virtual server apps that split the server into like 4.

[KingJ]

A little bit of Googling has turned up this - Battle Encoder Shirase (odd name!). I'm going to try this and see if it helps. It claims to be able to limit CPU usage of an application.

[Drocona]

That looks quite interesting, I'm gonna check it out too on my sandbox

[KingJ]

Interesting yes, however it's not what I need.

What it does it reduce the current CPU usage by X percent. So if the server is happily using 20% as it should, it will make it use 10% instead.

So yeah, it will stop the entire server lagging from having Gmod at 100% CPU, but as a concequence, Gmod is going to be laggy all them time.

Back to the google...

Edit: Also going to have a go at reinstalling Garry's Mod from scratch then adding all the addons

[KingJ]

KingJ Wrote:Edit: Also going to have a go at reinstalling Garry's Mod from scratch then adding all the addons

Okay, done that and was fine for a while. However, the problem has occoured again. Nothing 'extra' is happening and stops randomly. This is starting to drive me insane.

[Drocona]

Try to set prop limits and see if it still happens

[KingJ]

Set a prop limit of 20. Still happened.

It could just be a bad plugin, but I doubt that since the plugins used are the popular ones, pretty much used on every server. I think i'm going to have to stop offering GMod as a hosting option if I can't find a solution, which I don't really want to do, but it if stops the rest of the server from being paralyzed, it's the only option.

[KingJ]

I think I may have found the cause of this. For some reason, on my panel almost everything was set to use Core 1. I've now gone through my server list and given each server either Core 0 or 1 depending on how much they use to balance the load, since I hear Windows dosen't do a good job of managing affinity.

When can we expect to see a multi core version of SRCDS? Would make management a lot easier.

[Drocona]

KingJ Wrote:When can we expect to see a multi core version of SRCDS? Would make management a lot easier.

I have this hunch we won't

[KingJ]

I spoke too soon. While now at least it dosen't affect servers running on other cores (too much, see below), the 100% CPU does happen. On core1, I have two SRCDS servers running, Synergy and Garrys Mod. They seem to randomly just fight for CPU, regardless of what core they are on. Server FPS is reported as 10 (won't go lower), but actual FPS seems to be around 5 based upon the update rate.

I still have absolutely no idea what is causing this. All drivers are up to date, Windows Patches and none of the logs reveal anything helpful.

While I said it dosen't affect the other core now, it does raise the CPU usage of the other core somewhat, as seen below. This shows the end of a CPU spike and return to normal operation.