RE: Timeout During Map Changes

[Ryan McCullough]

This has been covered many times but I will give you some pointers.   It looks like you have fast drives. That was going to be my first question. Next, it looks like you have plenty of ram so you shouldn't be using the pagefile too much. The next thing I would suggest is to unpak the files in your pak0.pak file. This can save alot of loading time.   Basically the thing that slows down map changes are your hard disks, the pak file, and the map. Some maps take longer to load than others. Have you noticed problems on particular maps? I am told there are a couple maps that are particularly easy to load(de_dust). You didn't mention if you are running any kind of raid?? It might help to run some type of striping, or if you don't have too many maps you might be able to fit your hlserver directory on a ramdrive. This would make it alot faster.   -Ryan -----Original Message----- From: Ronnie Enriquez [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Tuesday, October 09, 2001 1:55 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Timeout During Map Changes Hi Everyone!  I'm not sure if this was previously addressed or not....  but...   In a nutshell, my CS server takes way too long to change maps.  It is NOT because no one is pressing fire.  I'll be in the server myself and will press fire to initiate the map change.  I know the map is changing because i get a "flatline" on my netgraph.  It is NOT due to the custom.hpk size.  It is 7k.  In addition, I have disabled uploads.   Sometimes, it can take up to 1 minute to change maps.  When this happens, people have reported seeing the dreaded message:  "Warning:  Connection Problem..."  They will see this for a few seconds and will go away.  When it goes away, they'll see the LOADING... message on the screen.  Then they will enter the new map.  Some people won't even get this far.  They'll just be dropped altogether.   When I do a manual changelevel, it takes even longer!  The server does not crash during map change.  Since the server is co-lo'd at a data center, I cannot physically see or hear if the HD is crunching away during the delay period.  So I really don't know if there's anything happening on the server end.   Bandwidth is not an issue.  There's plenty of it.  Also, some people say that this is a known issue.  On the other hand, I've seen plenty of other win32-based CS servers out that don't have this issue.  Anyone want to sell me a clue?   BTW:  Everything listed above has been done with a fresh new install of the OS, HL, and CS.   My CS server is running on a fairly decent system:   ---Hardware--- Pentium3 / 1GHz Asus CUSL2 Motherboard 768MB SDRAM Adaptec 2940UW SCSI Controller 2 x Seagate Barracudda 9.1GB UW-SCSI Drives 2 x IBM Deskstar 18GB UW-SCSI Drives   ---Software--- Win2K Server SP2 HLDS 4.1.0.8a Counter-Strike 1.3 Full 20 players       -ronnie