Strange Server Performance

[GOsVariable]

First of let me give you the server specs.

Pentium 4 2.4GHz running Windows Server 2003
500MB memory
100Mbps network connection to way more than enough bandwidth for this game.
The COD server instance is a 30 person server.

Here's the issue, or possible issue, hopefully someone can tell me if I'm looking in the wrong place:

- Our server has begun to lag even with only 3-5 players connected. Even when we are only running 1 COD server.
- I've noticed in the console log that we are getting tons of SV packets... and I mean constantly 1 after another.. from multiple IPs and on a variety of ports... is this normal?
- I've read that some SV packets are from players on Gamespy or the in-game listing refreshing their server info, but should these requests be coming directly from these machines?
- Oddly enough I tried switching IP ports and for a while there were very few of these packets, just from the activision server and the gamespy server on a semi-regular basis (like every 20-30 seconds). Then after a while the SV packets picked up on this IP too, to the point where they are coming in constantly.
- Could a flood of these packets affect gameplay on this server? The actual bandwidth being used is little, but each of these packets must be processed by something... I really have no clue if these packets are even an issue, it's just something I noticed. :?

My question is, is this something I should look into? Or could it be memory related? The processor is only running between 7-27 percent even when the server is fully loaded. Memory usage is at 600MB so some is being paged, but with such low processor use I doubt memory is the issue.

Please help/advise! Thansk in advance!

[jdwright]

What else do you have running on that machine? FTP/website(php/mysql) and the email server all slowed down my games until I set them to the lowest priority. Also, anything thats real HD intensive will lag the holy hell out of my server (copying large files/stats/etc).

[GOsVariable]

Thanks for the quick reply :) The only other thing running is Serverwatch. The processor is showing very little use though, is it possible for drive access to be a problem even with such little processor use? Is there a way to tell if drive access is the problem? The lag was still there even with serverwatch totally turned off.

Thanks again.

-V

[GOsVariable]

OK, well, the extra SV packet logging was a result of an extra tag I put in the shortcut, so that probably wasn't the issue, the server probably has been getting those all along, unless someone knows that it's not supposed to be like that. After my last post I went back and looked into the performance monitoring tool some more and found how to log disk access and things like that. All of these are still very very low as far as usage.