Whats the average upload speed most ops run there twgs's on? I'm more curious than anything, I know it varys but moreso im curious as to how much bandwidth the average player takes up. And the ability to keep pings down.

Kaus, not sure how you get the exact number, or I'd tell ya!

well whats your upload bandwidth on your server? howmany players do you have average? And how does it affect surfing the web or playing your favorite game.

IMHO what matters most is what you have running on the server at the same time. If you're playing your favorite game on the same machine that thing is going to crawl to a halt.

The bandwidth depends on the max commands per user per node but is fairly limited, heck the game can be played on a 1200baud modem. The thing that kills you fastest is system resources and how they are prioritized. In addition to setting priorities on you system you can set bandwidth throttling by port on your router (if it is supported) to reserve bandwidth for TWGS at the expense of other network activity.

in other words if you run a twgs on a machine, don't be running programs that take up a lot of resources on it so it will not make the twgs lag. I am redo'ing my home network to make a stand alone machine that will be running the twgs only for a private game server for me and my corp and to others that are invited to play. and for those who want to have a place to test scripts without people crying on things the scripts do.

ok lets do some math here. i'll take one of my game logs and find a section of high game usage: 22 minutes of sdt = 18037 characters recieved (without ansi). i'll hazzard a guess that ansi adds about 25% more characters, so:

18,000 * 1.25 = 22,500 characters in 22 minutes, or 1 kb/min

modems are rated in kilo-bits per second, so doing a little conversion:

1000 bytes/min * 8bits/byte * 1 min / 60 seconds = 133 bps

to give you a general ballpark, a 56kbps modem on average connects at about 32kpbs (56k connections in real life are extremely rare). now, say that half of your dialup connection speed is upload, so 16kpbs up. at 16kbps upload, you could still host a twgs for 120 people doing SDT full time and not use up all your bandwidth.

now - take my cable connection, which has below average uploads of 344kbps.



my internet connection can handle 2500 players running SDT full time. now, there may in fact be other activities in TW that consume more bandwidth than SDT, but SDT doesn't involve ship movement delays, so it's pretty high up on the list of bandwidth usage. ZTM actually takes up a lot of bandwidth as well, but ZTM really hurts you on the CPU usage because calculating all those warp paths ain't easy, especially when 5-10 players are doing it all at once.

which brings me to the real lag source in most TW games. singularity hits it right on the head. lag hits the worst when the server's CPU is pegged. that happens when the server is doing other things besides TW. the real killer on mine is norton antivirus - when it grabs liveupdates or does a virus scan, the cpu tanks and up goes the lag on the TWGS. playing graphical video games like EVE, WOW, or CS:S also nails the CPU.

finally, there is the matter of ping. bad ping times can feel a lot like lag, but there is really nothing that can be done about bad ping. bad ping results when the client is far away from the server. the only way for a sysop to improve your ping is for him to move his server to a commercial server farm that is belly up to fat fiber. bad ping happens when the internet routes your connection through tons of other servers - or worse yet - overloaded servers.

here is the bottom line: for most servers, bandwidth is not the issue (unless the sysop has other bandwidth hogging activities going on like p2p file sharing or hosting other types of games). bad ping can only be fixed with money. if you want to improve your server's performance, manage your CPU usage wisely.

hmm. i think i was haggling in that SDT log. also, sing pointed out that i left out packet overhead. even if my numbers are off by a factor of 2 or even 10, i think my conclusions are still correct. mumble mumble.

Laff. ZTM and CPU lag... course plots have a 500ms delay now, so that helps a lot there. Still all ends up being about CPU lag and far less about actual bandwidth. Your average cable modem or DSL line could easily handle a server in terms of bandwidth. The homing and routing of your connection being a far more important, but essentially uncontrollable, factor. Too bad Comcast doesn't sit on a dozen backbones .

Some guy in kansas cuts a line doing crop work, sending all of your traffic thru a 386 with a 15 year old copy of linux... ever really wondered what those "* * *" things were during a traceroute? =)

Thxs rev/sing that answer my question.. I was just curious I know games vary, when i used to play rainbow six a 128up connection could host 3 players.