The timer in windows that tracks CPU usage is pretty lousy. This means you're seeing false CPU usage from your servers. They're only fooling themselves if they think full 32 TF2 will only use 5% of one of their cores. When windows media player is running, a multimedia timer is started for WMP. Because a multimedia timer is running with a fine grained precision of latency, task manager will start using that that high precision timer for CPU usage tracking. This also seems to help srcds to be able to run at a higher FPS. By enabling it, we see a typically truer representation of CPU usage.
The technical way to think about it is that CPU utilization is done using a low precision timer which checks which process has the CPU at that given moment in time. (for example, every millisecond) srcds has a tendency to not be using the processor at that given moment, probably due to the dynamics of srcds doing most of its work on the tick. This effect is known as aliasing. (See "Aliasing" in wikipedia) The multimedia timer created by WMP or srcdsfpsbooster increases the sample frequency of the system, thus giving a better picture of utilization. Ben B wrote: > I've noticed a few people insisting that a full 32 slot tf2 server will only > use at most 5% of a cpu core. How is this possible???? I use linux servers, > and they always use 60-80% when 32 slots are full? > > Is there something terribly wrong with the linux version, or is something > wrong in the way they're interpreting their usage? > > > > > _______________________________________________ > To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please > visit: > http://list.valvesoftware.com/mailman/listinfo/hlds > > _______________________________________________ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: http://list.valvesoftware.com/mailman/listinfo/hlds
