Counter-Strike: Source - I'm Crashing Online Servers

[adamcunnington]

Hi,

I've been playing an online, multiplayer game called "Counter-Strike: Source", powered by steam & made by valve virtually since it came out in 2004. During this time, I’ve regularly changed my equipment; however, I’ve been using the same internet equipment and computer for over a year now. All was well until maybe 2 months ago. Since then, I’ve been experiencing a problem where essentially, i am crashing the online servers. The server freezes after several minutes of playing (anywhere between instantly on connect and about 20 minutes or so) and, then every player's connection "times out" due to me!

I have a relatively substantial amount of technical / networking / gaming experience and therefore, I was thrown back by the idea that MY CLIENT could be causing this without any illegal scripts. However, this problem persisted and eventually, I setup my own local, dedicated server where I had access to the server console and did some error diagnostics of my own. In summary, I found out that when the server was "crashing", the CPU usage was jumping from its usual, stable 5-10% to 85-95! This was causing the server to not go completely down but "hang" for a time and in this time, everyone's connection to the server would be lost. This of course is not only a huge frustration but also a hindrance to competitive, online play not to mention damaging to other user's gaming experience.

My deductions from this debugging were that my router was abruptly overwhelming the server with a large amount of data and therefore, causing a buffer overflow. Sometimes, the server wouldn't crash but I’d be spontaneously disconnected with various errors such as "Client delta ticks out of order" & "Buffer net overflow". I obviously researched these errors on the steampowered forums and it appears, the issue is rare but ALL answers pointed to out of date router firmware / faulty router. I immediately contacted my router provider - Netgear.

After spending over 2 hours on the phone spread over about 15 phone calls to the technical support team (who were very helpful), i tried a huge number of things including reducing the Maximum Transmit Unit size of data over the WAN and disabling firewall / router protocols such as QoS & UPnP. Following a lot of time / money spent on trying to resolve the issue, they sent me a replacement router on the basis of my current router being faulty. After trying the new router today, I’ve been - as you can imagine - incredibly disappointed and somewhat frustrated to find the problem still persists. I have also tried plugging my computer straight into the modem and hence bypassing the router, the problem also still persists. Therefore, I can only assume it's down to the modem - there's no easy way i can deduce this of course and thus my request for help / advice.

The exasperation of the whole situation is I can't see logically as to why this whole seemingly unsolvable issue arose in the first place. The only possible thing I can think that was changed in my setup was that I got Windows 7, but even then I cannot recall if the problem started at this exact point in time. Even still, there are no recorded compatibility issues, not to mention that thousands of Counter-Strike: Source players in the steam community are running windows 7 without any issues. Steam also studied a copy of my win32 file and concluded that there were no compatibility issues with my hardware / firmware / software on my computer system.

I appreciate that this problem is potentially somewhat unique and specific but I really am desperate to solve the issue, especially seeing the amount of time / money I’ve already invested in trying to fix the issue. Any help or advice would be HUGELY appreciated, thanks for your time so far in reading this plea!

Regards,
Adam