Author Topic: How much bandwidth to server?  (Read 3296 times)

darklurker

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How much bandwidth to server?
« on: August 06, 2006, 07:46:26 am »
Hi, all.  Does anyone know how much bandwidth is normally needed between a trem client and trem server?   1Kbps, 10 Kbps, 50Kbps?  I'm currently allowing 16 clients on the Lair, but school's out for summer right now, so the Trem traffic isn't really affecting the other (light) traffic on our T1s.  I may have to decrease the client count once school starts in a few weeks, and wondered if any of you l33t server operators knew for certain what the per-client bandwidth is.

(On the other hand, why do college students need so much Internet pr0n? ;)  )

Thanks for any help.

DarkLurker (Dave)

Caveman

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How much bandwidth to server?
« Reply #1 on: August 06, 2006, 12:01:28 pm »
Don't know about the first part but the second part might be related to cripled social skills and the fact that P0rn does not talk back or complain when you get another .)

Terran

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How much bandwidth to server?
« Reply #2 on: August 10, 2006, 05:37:20 pm »
I believe sv_maxrate sets the maximum transfer rate from server to client in bytes per second (other direction is smaller and can be ignored).  The default is 15,000.

The default client rate, on the other hand, is 5,000 (I think), but it can be increased up to the server maximum if the player changes it.

Caveman

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How much bandwidth to server?
« Reply #3 on: August 10, 2006, 07:10:45 pm »
Yesss Terran we are aware of that.
It has nothing to do with the question asked though.

Shaydee

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How much bandwidth to server?
« Reply #4 on: August 11, 2006, 02:10:22 am »
Actually it does, but its a bit more complicated to predict how much network traffic one single player is consuming in reality.
First of all, the used bandwidth is not just a static value, but it depends on several factors, and is a value somewhere between the hard limits of your server's configuration.
One of these factors is the number of players that are currently connected to the server. In a nutshell: if there are many players, each individual player needs to receive a lot of data, which describes the movements of all the other players. On first glance, this sounds as if the required bandwidth were exponential to the number of connected clients. But luckily this is (by far) not the case, because the netcode is ultra-optimized.
Another factor might, for example, be the rate by which players shoot their weapons. If there's a lot of shooting going on, then more bandwidth is required. And still it is really hard to predict how much the gun fire really affects your line, because.... ah, i could go on and on, but to make it short, I'll just skip to the conclusion.
If you want to know a reliable value of the bandwidth that your server is eating, then just measure it yourself for a couple of days, and make  your own conclusions.
If you only want to be on the safe side, then you can use the server's maxrate for clients to estimate the max. bandwidth your server would require in the worst case scenario (even though this value would most likely be far higher than the actual traffic).

P.S.: Gunfire has a significant impact on your server's desire to eat CPU cycles. But thats kind of off-topic.
y hoovercraft is full of eels.