Miscellaneous Knowledge

Edit: Yeah, it’s down again and has been for some months. Perhaps some day i’ll get it back up again. However, feel free to put your own one up – it’s an awesome game mode.

After months of neglect, i’ve updated and started the Garry’s Mod Prop Hunt server again. It’s still at 4 players as before, but if it’s popular i’ll raise that limit.

In Prop Hunt, there are two teams, Hunters and Props. The job of the Props is to become a prop (by pressing E while looking at it) then blend in somewhere. Hunters have to find these false imposter props and kill them. However, they loose 5HP for every real prop they shoot, so make sure you know what you’re shooting. The latest update allowed props to say a series of taunts to tease those (sometimes dumb) hunters!

The map is still just cs_office as I think this has the best number of props and is small enough so that you can actually find the props (sometime).

So, if you’ve got Garrys Mod, come join the fun at 193.200.158.235:27028. If you’ve got any suggestions relating to the server, let me know.

Customers of my Game Server Company may have noticed recently that we moved to a new server (if you didn’t notice, you probably didn’t get the several emails I sent out informing you of progress every step of the way!). Anyway, I noticed today that between them, CSRSS.exe and Hardware Interrupts where taking up 25% of the total processing power, which is exactly one core (it’s a quad core server and since CSRSS isn’t multi core aware it can only max out 1 core).

Normally, CSRSS uses less than 1% of total CPU, and Hardware Interrupts only uses a lot of CPU if there is a problem (such as your disk drive being put into PIO mode). I adjusted the affinity of CSRSS so that it only used one core, and all of the hardware interrupts also happened then on that core. CSRSS was defiantly at fault here.

A quick bit of Googling lead me to MS KB 934330. This describes an instance where CSRSS uses more than 50% of CPU resources when connected via remote desktop, which is the problem I was experiencing (i’m assuming they are using just the 1 core). While there is no official patch, they have a hotfix available, and recently Microsoft have started being a bit more generous with Hotfixes, you don’t have to contact support any more – just get it sent straight to your email.

I applied the hotfix, rebooted and the problem had gone away – no more CSRSS using lots of CPU. If you also have this problem i’d reccomend applying the hotfix rather than let CSRSS waste your CPU cycles.

Oh, if you’re wondering how I viewed Hardware Interrupt CPU usage, I use Process Explorer – an excellent replacement for task manager, showing CPU to 2 decimal places, and lots of other handy features. Plus it’s regularly updated and free.