Re: Bandwidth

They surprised us as well, and the costs involved made us basically 
leave the 'game server hosting' business - the only way it was 
financially feasible (as far as we could see based on the bandwidth we 
saw going out of our servers) was to have a LOT of game servers (thus 
being able to get better/cheaper bandwidth rates).

I think the bandwidth per player was more around the range of 32 kb/s 
per player for half-life until they added voice support, which added an 
extra 10-20 kb/s per player.

BF-based games were definitely much higher.

Btw, considering that people on modems are barely able to play modern 
games online, i wouldn't expect them to be able to host any kind of 
server, let alone anything close to what our servers on 100 Meg pipes 
could do.

I mentioned cable/dsl usage based on what we found here in Vancouver 
Canada - we initially ran a single CS server based on a Shaw-cable 
modem, and found that it would barf out at between 12-16 players, we 
moved to a T1 line and found that it would support a single server up to 
about 20 players or so before it would barf out and then we moved to a 
100 Meg coloc (which allowed us to finally use the machines to what they 
were able to, got 4-5 CS servers on a machine, 1 Natural Selection 
server per machine (extremely server-processor intensive).

The bandwidth usage seemed fairly consistent across the various pipes we 
plugged the servers into.

The LAN game server options for HL/BF were completely seperate types of 
servers (as far as the game-launching goes), these were entirely 
'internet' servers as far as the game in concerned, but i'm not sure if 
the game itself handles the network bandwidth differently, or just 
handles the server browsing and game launching differently (ie only 
looking on the local network for servers, NOT calling home over the net 
to authenticate, etc).

Again, this is just my experience based on the servers that we ran.

Cheers
Mike W
www.gekidodesigns.com

Javier Arevalo wrote:
> mike wuetherick wrote:
> 
>> after monitoring and calculations, we found that a default half-life
>> (version 1) server is about 50 kb/s per player pretty much straight up
>> to the max players, you can run about 12 players on a standard
>> cable/dsl before you max out and start seeing lag.
>>
>> as another example, battlefield 1942 used almost twice the bandwidth
>> per player, upwards of 100 kb/s per player...
> 
> 
> Wow, those numbers sound awfully high. Your "Standard DSL" outbound 
> speed is *6* times what I have at home. :) At 50kb/s (6.25Kbytes/s), a 
> 56K modem would barely be enough to let someone connect to a server.
> 
> Maybe those numbers were measured using a heavier "LAN performance" 
> option? (Not sure if those games support that, just wondering).
> 


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