The cause of the lag bursts on Continuum has been determined. netrekd sees a memory leak. It was at 28Mb or so today, and restarting it solved the lag burst on login of new players. Karthik and I isolated this by noting that the lag burst happened on multiple connections to either the player list port (2591) or the standard ship port (2592) but not to connections to the metaserver. Watching "top" on continuum when Karthik sent ten connection requests showed netrekd at 99% CPU utilisation. Restarting netrekd removed the problem altogether; it never appeared in "top". Karthik uses the same netrekd on his servers, and it is not leaking. His servers are Intel, and Continuum is Sparc. There are no significant malloc/free heap consumption code within the netrekd code we are using. So the problem is probably related to the Sparc Linux libraries or kernel. Workaround is to restart netrekd periodically. This is relatively harmless, now that the rest of the server processes do not need to be restarted. I have a core dump of netrekd's 28Mb instance, but I don't know how to proceed to determine the ownership of virtual memory. -- James Cameron mailto:quozl at us.netrek.org http://quozl.netrek.org/