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General Questions - "Patch" for subbill CPU usage problem

numpf - Tue Feb 17, 2004 5:46 pm
Post subject: "Patch" for subbill CPU usage problem

When you run subbill you can see that it updates a ticker every iteration. This is expensive and likely what causes your CPU usage to max out at 100%, divided between subbill.exe and CSRSS.EXE (MGB you can eat a dick for the all-caps warning I just got from this stupid board when i typed that).

The solution I've seen listed on this board is to manually lower the subbill.exe process priority. I remember having problems with this, aside from the inconvenience of manually setting the priority. I loaded subbill into IDA and discovered that the lone sleep call was given a param of 0. From what I understand from ek about thread scheduling, this would normally be fine except the interation is a hog with the console update. So I changed the parameter to sleep to 1. CPU usage gone.

I make no claims as to whether this is a good idea... I used this hack long ago, and I _think_ I remember it working well for me, but I could be wrong. If someone cares enough they can do a thorough disassembly to see if this hack harms anything. If it provably does _not_ harm anything, someone might consider using this modified subbill in the standard server.zip download on this site.

You'll need a hex editor for this. The byte is at 0B53h in subbill.exe:

Code: Show/Hide

00000b50h: 00 00 6A 00 FF 15 CC 01 42 00 8B 74 24 10 83
^^ change to 01, like so:

00000b50h: 00 00 6A 01 FF 15 CC 01 42 00 8B 74 24 10 83

-numpf

Cyan~Fire - Tue Feb 17, 2004 7:30 pm
Post subject:

numpf wrote:

(MGB you can eat a dick for the all-caps warning I just got from this stupid board when i typed that)

Right.

In Subbill.ini:
Misc:LowPriority=1

Mr Ekted - Tue Feb 17, 2004 7:45 pm
Post subject:

I think Sleep(1) is prefereble to low-priority...given that subbill is a complete design abortion.

numpf - Tue Feb 17, 2004 8:19 pm
Post subject:

Cyan~Fire wrote:

Misc:LowPriority=1

I addressed this option in my post. Read?

To test, I just ran subbill with that. 100% CPU usage. While it doesn't seem to affect other apps when running like this, there's the possibility/likelyhood that it will be starved for CPU time. As I say, it's at least worth testing.

-numpf

Cyan~Fire - Tue Feb 17, 2004 9:30 pm
Post subject:

Yeah, it's possible it could run out of CPU time, but then I'd say use SSB2

And in your post, you talked about manually lowering the priority (I'm assuming you mean changing through task manager, since you say it was inconvenient). In my post, I talked about changing an INI setting, which isn't all that inconvenient.

CypherJF - Thu Feb 19, 2004 12:57 am
Post subject:

So, has the jury come up with a verdict::

Yes it does help/more efficient, or no ?