Anyone saying machina needs to go is asking to be thrown in the pit. You cannot help but be taken back by the brilliance of this map when playing it. The wonderfully crafted architecture, the use of elevation, the weld points worth welding, a pseudo-elevator, and nigh exploit free as far as I know. The map has its quirks, but is the spirit of ns reborn in a post 2.0 world.

On a slightly related note are these specs for the ns server still accurate?
# AMD Athlon MP 2000+ x2
# 2 Gigs Registered, ECC DDR-RAM
# ASUS A7M266-D (Dual)
# Intel Pro Management 100 NIC

yes.

It was so badass back in the day...

Wow.... I guess that means the NS server is a huge resource hog. I'd have figured that box could handle a bit more than it gets put through every now and again.

It is. There is only one server I've ever run into that is more of a resource hog than NS - and in its case, unlike NS, it's mostly due to bugs... Nothing like watching a 6 player MSC server wrack up a P4 3.6Ghz Extreme ed to 100% cpu usage. (Think the NS server on the same machine got to 30% with 12 players - same servers take the Conroe up to 30% and 3% respectively.)

CPU hits are hardest when the maps get flooded with active ents (turrets, oc's, etc). So as the maps go on, they get laggier - and they don't remove themselves proper when they die / recycle (engine limitation). Only thing I found that helped was to strip the hell out of the map ahead of time (remove all superfluous entities) but it has a strong impact on aesthetics.

Further, NS doesn't seem to like Linux for some reason. I suspect the coders do not have the proper optimization libraries for the AMD/Linux setup. (I know I don't.) :/

I see. That inability to remove active entities would explain it then. However are you sure it's a CPU problem or could it be a ram issue?

Ram speed might be an issue, but the HLDS can't even use the full 2 gigs (less, you have a mod with a memory leak, which doesn't happen in NS, sfaik).