Need Help running a lagg free server

[MBosta]

I have a Laptop with the following spec's

AMD Athlon(tm) 64 processor
3000+
350 MHz, 512 MB of RAM

and i run a server with about 16-18 slots, max

um...i have been trying different sv_maxrate's and sv_minrates and stuff, but nothing works.

I did a bandwith test and these are my results:

Speed:
3.7 megabits per second

Communications 3.7 megabits per second
Storage 453.9 kilobytes per second
1MB file download 2.3 seconds
Subjective rating Awesome

Info
Date & time Sunday, October 1, 10:17PM*
Test type IDT4 Free
Connection type Cable
Region Ontario
Data size 1024KB

Thanks in Advance

[Box Cutter]

Is this latop dedicated to running the server or do you run the server off of it and play the game on it at the same time. If that is the case 16-18 players is alot to expect no lag especially If your running this from your home internet connection. You would be lucky to have 12 players without lag and thats with the laptop being dedicated to only the server. I have tried this before and if you want to run a serious server you need to rent a gameserver or a rig and run it from there.

[diamond-optic]

even tho bandwith tests may show your connection being really good.. its still cable and bandwith tests can be decieving.. plus that info seems to only show download.. not upload, and maybe im wrong but upload speed is just as if not more important when it comes to gameservers.. and most if not almost all cable ISP have upload speed capped (so that you cant really run servers off them)

i cant run a server with that many slots on my connection and bandwith tests usually show me with transfer rates over 5mb/s (but the highest ive ever seen is 1.5mb/s off a newsgroup download & my uploads seem capped at 60kb/s)

but it could also be greatly affected by anything else running on the laptop.. any background apps/services that are using up cpu & ram

but most likely i'd say its because your trying to run it on a cable connection.. lately ive seen a lot of people trying to do this and they all are suffering from lag and such.. its just that cable connections arent meant for running servers.. try decreasing the number of slots and see if it gets any better

[MBosta]

lol well the thing this, i have a really hard time getting it populated, at one point it was holding it at 15 people on marijuana!. um...after about an 1 1/2 hours of it being somewhat full (14-15 out of 16 slots), i got all these run time errors, and the lagg jumped about 200 nothches. But, other than that, we only use it for like 4 on 4 and 5 on 5. Just wondering if there any settings so i can expand the slots. Would getting more RAM work?