Hiya guys!
I gotten alot of great info here, so I thought Id post a few things I do to speed up my UT server.
1. Back up all maps, textures, and sound files you arent going to use to a folder outside UT and delete them from your game folders. If you plan on running only CTF, then deleting the other map types and thier associated files will remove 100's of megs and make UT run alot faster.
2. If you are going to use your unrealtournament.ini file to run a server, back it up, and then remove all lines not needed to run a server. You dont need the sound, video, game lobby interface refrences in the ini, cuz the server its self doesnt use them. Remeber to change it back before you get on to play, or start your sever from the command line and ref a renamed version of your edited unrealtournament.ini so you can still play on the same machine.
3. If you are running XP, change UT and your network cards priority to HIGH if you have at least 256megs of RAM. This will give your network card a 2 - 10 Kb boost, and add a few more KB of ram to UT.
4. Read the tute on running UT as a service
5. Use a redirect server.
6. Scandisk and defrag after a heavy UT editing session.
7. Split yer hard drive up into multiple partitions. Us one for your OS and its updates only, and the other(s) for everything else. This will keep yer OS nice and clean, and in tip top running condition. There is a reason it takes along time to Defrag a single drive, it blends the data. Having very large amounts of data on your OS drive will slow it down to a crawl.
Hope this helps someone