Post when you host

[Hyfrydle]

Updated and restarted!

Thanks for that I'll give it a go.

[zebramatt]

Thanks Toll!

[Toll]

Glad to! Not an MP player myself, but always fun to be able to contribute in some fashion.

[Toll]

Server's going down for the night; it'll be back tomorrow!

[Toll]

And it's back! 213.114.75.98 this time.

[keith.lamothe]

Just checking: has anyone seen evidence of the game using too much bandwidth (sending/receiving too many bytes at once)?  Some of the messages are way bigger than they have to be and would be fairly straightforward to trim but it'd be a couple day's work so I've been deferring it.

[Toll]

Hmm. Didn't check when there were lots of people around, but when I did check it didn't even make a dent on the network monitor (it used 0.01% of my network, which is 1Gbit). I can throw up a packetsniffer to check what, exactly, is transferred if you want me to?

[keith.lamothe]

Hmm. Didn't check when there were lots of people around, but when I did check it didn't even make a dent on the network monitor (it used 0.01% of my network, which is 1Gbit). I can throw up a packetsniffer to check what, exactly, is transferred if you want me to?

I would definitely be interested to see a bytes/sec over time chart or something like that if it's feasible

[Toll]

I'll see what I can coax it into doing!

[Toll]

First glance of the transfer rate (with one player playing on the server):



Packet-wise, the statistics of the session was 91458 packets sent in 979.844 seconds, averaging 93.339 packets per second. Average packet size was 105.118 bytes, with a total transfer of 9613928 bytes or averaging at 9811.691 bytes per second.

EDIT: Oh, and the colors above... Black is total (both to and from server), red is to server and green is from server (I think).

[Toll]

I've also got a copy of all the packets complete with timestamps, in case you're interested at looking closer at them. Using Wireshark to capture (which I believe in turn uses Winpcap), so I'm assuming you need that to look at them.

[keith.lamothe]

Packet-wise, the statistics of the session was 91458 packets sent in 979.844 seconds, averaging 93.339 packets per second. Average packet size was 105.118 bytes, with a total transfer of 9613928 bytes or averaging at 9811.691 bytes per second.

Very interesting.  The spikes are probably chunk transitions since it has to send the whole chunk (compressed quite well, but still bigger than most).  9811.691 B/sec doesn't seem like it would be much challenge to a modest residential upload speed of 1Mbps (125KBps).  Indeed it would seem to only consume about 8 percent of it.  But my knowledge of networking is very laymanish, any mistakes in that?

Of course, it's not all neatly averaged out, there are spikes, but the spikes are probably 100% either world-transmission (on initial connection) or chunk-transmission (on transitions) and those can afford to take a little longer with the fade-out and all.  Though presumably while the network interface is occupied sending a 22KB compressed chunk it's probably not able to respond with the usual alacrity to "my fireball hit the overlord for 2000 damage").


And I do have wireshark but I don't think I need to actually inspect the traffic at this point.  Later when there's more time for optimization (and the game's less in a frequent-big-changes state, avoiding premature optimization and all) I will be interested

Many thanks!

[Toll]

Yeah, it averages out to about 80kbits/s. That's both to and from the server though, not just upload, meaning it's even less of an impact (not that it was much of an impact to start with). Of course, it'd be multiplied for every player on the server, but even so, you'd probably be able to have 15-20 players on a 1Mbit-connection.

[keith.lamothe]

That's both to and from the server though, not just upload, meaning it's even less of an impact (not that it was much of an impact to start with).

Right, I was just being pessimistic.  Most of it would be upload from the server anyhow, the client doesn't send all that much in (fairly frequent messages, but small).

Of course, it'd be multiplied for every player on the server, but even so, you'd probably be able to have 15-20 players on a 1Mbit-connection.

Right, and that sounds like a good supported number for someone with that kind of connection.  If someone wants to run 100 players on a server (if that's even possible from a RAM standpoint if they're in different places, or other things that could creep up at that kind of scale) they're probably going to want a beefier-than-normal connection anyway (and preferably unmetered, otherwise they're burning 4GB of their bandwidth cap per hour).  We'll probably be able to improve those numbers significantly in the future, but it's good to see they're pretty reasonable even now

[mrhanman]

is there a way to start minimized or in windowed mode from the command line?