Some of you wanted an idea as to how much bandwidth AATrade uses in a month so here is a rough estimate.
The main game is set for 15 players. From 10am to 10pm our time the server usually has 10-15 players online all of the time. We do not slack off in players until we get close to midnight and then the early morning hours are very light like 2-4 players all of the time.
Last month we used almost 20 gig of bandwidth. We had gZip compression enabled at the maximum compression rate of 9. The vast majority (like 80-85% of the bandwidth used) was not graphics but HTML code. The graphics used a very small part of that.
After doing some testing it looks like we would have used 4-5 times that amount if we had turned off gZip compression. So you would be looking at 80-100 gig on a 15 player game that was FULL for 12 hours a day, every day for the month without gZip enabled. The main game server is unique in that it is always busy and usually close to being full if not full. Most servers will probably be set at 10 players and maybe have 5 people online at the same time.
So if you use the standard setting of 10 players max and you are an average server you can probably expect to use 6-7 gig a month with gZip enabled at maximum compression and 30-35 gig a month max with gZip turned off.
Or use a very rough figure of...
Worst Case
1.3 gig per player, per month gZip
6.5 gig per player, per month non gZip
Average
0.5 gig per player, per month gZip
2.5 gig per player, per month non gZip
Now that would be if there was a single player online virtually 24 hours a day playing the game. So the figures above would be the worst case scenerio. That should give everyone a grough idea as to how much bandwidth you may need per month with 0.21.
One thing I am hoping we can do with 0.30 is reduce the bandwidth usage by a decent amount. The big bandwidth hog is the main screen.
And contrary to popular belief using the GD graphics library to build an image can use alot less processor than building an HTML page to send. This is especially true if the image you are building is only 7-8k in size compared to an 80k html page.
One of the things I have been testing is building a graphic display that has all of the planets, ships, fighters, probes, debris and ect that is around 7-8k in size. Alot smaller than sending the current planet images and the HTML needed to place them. Speed and load testing shows that this method is just as fast and less of a load. Hopefully it will be one of the test templates in 0.30 during beta. BTW, it looks cool too.
