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Engine Resource Consumtion Assessment.

by Anders Jacobsen · in Torque Game Engine · 11/19/2004 (6:19 am) · 6 replies

Hi.

Planning technical requirements for running a Torque based game doesn't seem easy. I'm wonder what kind of bandwidth the engine will need in a typical multiplayer mode game. Is there a math formula I can use to calculate the usage with different numbers of players in game?

Also, what would be a normal player memory usage footprint? Need ball park figures, not rocket science precision ;)

Thanks for any answers :)
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Torque 3D Owner Stephen Zepp
#1
11/19/2004 (6:26 am)
Most MMOG's shoot for a max throughput of anywhere between 3 and 10k bytes per second. I have a very faint memory that TGE by default sets the max throughput at 4k bytes per second as a "tuning" constant, but it is of course adjustable if you have the SDK. (of course, this faint memory may be wrong!)

If you do the math, bandwidth really jumps on up there. You'll have some surges during client startup obviously (ghosting objects/datablocks) as well.

Torque Owner Anders Jacobsen
#2
11/20/2004 (11:41 am)
Wouldn't the server side bandwidth requirement grow somewhat exponentially?

Associate Mark Frohnmayer
#3
11/20/2004 (12:19 pm)
The server side bandwidth grows linearly with the number of clients connected -- basically packetsPerSecond * bytesPerPacket * numClients = server bandwidth.

Torque 3D Owner Stephen Zepp
#4
11/20/2004 (12:25 pm)
You do need to factor in local "sideband" bandwidth that may be a factor with your load balancing setup--for example, if you have your server applications manage performance on each server instance, and dynamically transfer connections to existing (or new) servers, and that will probably include some bandwidth for the movement (or at least the database access to bring the new objects over to the newly designated server), but this becomes both totally project specific, and incredibly complex! It also isn't what most people consider "bandwidth throughput", since it won't be leaving your internal infrastructure.

Torque Owner Anders Jacobsen
#5
11/24/2004 (6:27 am)
Yeah Stephen, we're talking more than one server here, and they do have their own local side network. What I'm wondering about is internet backbone load.

Ideally it would grow linearly as you say Mark, but once you have a bunch of players in the same space, they need more data on the other players position etc... So there will be an exponential factor too?.. Guess I'll just have to stress test and find out ;D

Torque Owner Anders Jacobsen
#6
06/17/2005 (2:06 am)
I've done some tinkering and measurements with iptraf and found about 50kbit is consumed using one client connected, this will no doubt grow a bit when more players enter the scope, but I use pretty high packet rates right now. Adjusting those should get the number down. In any case I think it's quite good for the intended use, near the golden 2-3kbyte/sec rate. Looks like the Torque network system is good enough to be used for MMO purposes. (We're aiming at 15k (or more)players spread across numerous processes on 56 processors)