Bandwidth Q

Mr. Dobolina · **Bandwidth Q -** 02-07-2003, 10:37 AM

I was monitoring the connection on my gateway PC the other day using Netstats Live while I was playing Mohaa online. It showed an average useage of abaout 7KB. Granted I set my connection in mohaa to ISDN even though I have cable. Can anyone confirm this useage?? If it holds true, even with a measly 128KB upload speed, you could still host a server for a fair amount of people. 7KB X 10 players = 70KB. What do you think?

Mr. D

rudedog · 02-07-2003, 10:46 AM

You also have to look at what the server's maxrate is set at.

By setting maxrate at the server, you limit each connection's bandwidth. Setting max rate is dependant on the upload limit for the server.

For more information on setting maxrate check out:
http://www.mohadmin.com/nuke/modules.ph ... age&pid=18

Mr. Dobolina · 02-07-2003, 12:53 PM

Understood, So the server I was playing on may have had maxrate set to 7KB?? Like I said that seems very low but the server was ultra smooth. that being said, has anyone else sucessfully ran a ded server on cable?

Mr.D

Aslan[TLD] · 02-07-2003, 03:06 PM

That 7 KB per second should be kiloBYTES per second. That 128 kbps on your ISDN is kiloBITS per second. There is a factor of 8 at work there. ISDN/Cable/DSL connections are only able to support a few players (<6) reliably.

I just took a look at my server and right this moment it has 16 players on it and is consuming 50 kiloBYTES per second incoming and about another 50 kiloBYTES per second outgoing for a total bandwidth consumption of 100 KiloBYTES = 800 KiloBITS per second.

Typically it is going to be your outgoing bandwith that is the limitation. For instance, at home I have cable and it has 1.5 Megabits per second incoming but only 256 kilobits per second outgoing. This means that if I use my entire outgoing bandwidth, I could theoretically host 10 players. However in practice you don't get that much outgoing bandwidth steadily and quality of play starts to break down around 6 players. That is with an outgoing pipe that is twice as big as what your ISDN has. So figure 3-4 tops for your connection.

Aslan[TLD] · 02-07-2003, 03:10 PM

Oops, I didn't pick up at first that you said you have cable. That means you prob. also have a 256 kilobit per second outgoing pipe - figure you can host a game of 5 or less if you cap the player rate at 8000 (which is in bytes per second). You could squeeze a couple more in if you dropped the rate cap even lower, but less than 5000 and people are going to complain about the quality of the connection.

Mr. Dobolina · 02-07-2003, 03:31 PM

Duh, Good point. I got my KB's and kb's all mixed around. Thanks for the clarifacation :)

Mr. D