So some friends managed to put a nice load on the TF2 server last night. Getting 20-22 people on playing at a time. Unfortunately once the sever had 22 people connected, there was a drastic increase in lag. Looking into the issue, I installed bmon on the server (FreeBSD). This revealed that the server was using ~244KiB per second with 20 people on the server, occasionally spiking to 280KiB.
| Team Fortress 2 | ||
| Bandwidth | ||
| Players | KiB | Mbps |
|---|---|---|
| 20 | 244 | 2.0 |
| 17 | 100 | 0.8 |
The server is on a static business FiOS line that only has a 2Mbps upload, so the server is pegged for bandwidth when more then 20 players are on the server.
Unfortunately I can’t currently speak if this bandwidth requirement is good or bad compared to other FPS. Not that long ago I remember 64 player Tribes that probably weren’t hosted on anything more powerful then a T1 ( roughly 1.5 Mbps ). This would also explain why even hosting a 8v8 on someone’s Xbox 360 is a lagged and hellish experience considering most household cable modems only have 256-768Kbps upsteam. Looking at the table above there is a drastic increase in bandwidth as we go from 17 players to 20, this figure does not appear to be linear but I will need to collect more data points. Considering that the server above can dedicated all of it’s 2Mbps to hosting TF2, where most Xbox 360, sitting in a home environment, may have other household members browsing the web and using P2P.
The basic service for Comcast’s cable modem currently gives 384Kbps for upload speed. I’m willing to bet that the vast majority of home players are a similar service plan, after all, why pay an extra $10 a month for a faster plan with 4Mbps down is great for browsing the web.
Anyways, I’ve set the max clients on the GetSomeSkill server to be 20 as a result of this quick examination into the bandwidth. Hopefully Verizon will boost the available speeds in southern NH in the next year at which time I’ll increase the client count.