Help a fellow gamer out!

[Ryuho]

Hey all! Ok, here's the deal. I'm deployed over in iraq, and i'm sharing internet with about 20 dudes (we all payed for a satellite and service and what not). So, basically the guy in charge is this emo dbag, and he knows nothing about computers or networking or anything. Basically the problem is with 20 people sharing a connection that runs about as well as a good cable service back in the states, you can imagine it gets congested up the arse. But here's where it gets annoying, the guy in charge gets frustrated with it being so slow that he's started to blame the slowdown on every little stupid thing, even though he doesn't know what he's talking about.

Basically this is where i need your help... I need some solid stats or somethin on how much bandwidth the following activity use.

- Being on yahoo messenger
- Playing FFXI / WoW
- Browsing myspace/facebook... or whatever other photo-heavy websites
- Watching movies on Youtube
- Receiving & Sending (and both) on a Webcam

The only data i've been able to collect myself is while idling an empty ventrilo is keeping an eye on the ping when doing said activities. But people don't really make a connection when i say "when you fukbags are on your webcams, the ping goes up to like 15,000ms." If i could actually tell this stupid dude, "stop whining about people idling on yahoo cause it's only like 10kpbs down/5 kpbs up. It's the webcammers doin 500kbps down/80kpbs up that's killin the network dumbfuk"... that would be lovely.

Anyway, i ask you... fellow gamers... to assist if you can. You people are all much smarter than I. Thanks in advance to anyone that helps.

[Kiro]

Just mutiny the nigger and proclaim yourself new interwebz king of Iraq.

[Heian]

Just mutiny the nigger and proclaim yourself new interwebz king of Iraq.

[Charla]

A packet parser should be able to tell you how much traffic is being generated by each application. The one we used in networks class had all kinds of feature, but no idea what it's called or where to get it.

[Remyo]

anyone not a dumbass would know the webcam is the biggest draw. so would youtube ,on the initial downloading, watching tho has little effect.

[Kaylia]

- Being on yahoo messenger
- Playing FFXI / WoW
- Browsing myspace/facebook... or whatever other photo-heavy websites
- Watching movies on Youtube
- Receiving & Sending (and both) on a Webcam

-Messenger: next to nothing.. dont have any number, but I can't imagine what would take more than 1k/sec
-FFXI/WoW: WoW and FFXI are around 5k/s as far as I can rememer. Doubt any online game uses over 10-15k/sec
-Browsing: It's as fast as the site allow you to download. Average is probably around 100k/sec for the duration of the download (picture and the like is what take time to download, and it varies from page to page. )
-Youtube: A lot more than anything else above. I've no idea what size youtube files tho, but video/sound files are generally big, even compressed
-Webcam: No idea again, but it's a lot more than gaming/browsing/messagenger



One page of text (notepad) is about 2kb big, one minute of music (mp3) is 1000kbp/s and video is generally bigger. It's easy to tell how much bandwitdh you used by looking at your download

[Remyo]

- Being on yahoo messenger
- Playing FFXI / WoW
- Browsing myspace/facebook... or whatever other photo-heavy websites
- Watching movies on Youtube
- Receiving & Sending (and both) on a Webcam

-Messenger: next to nothing.. dont have any number, but I can't imagine what would take more than 1k/sec
-FFXI/WoW: WoW and FFXI are around 5k/s as far as I can rememer. Doubt any online game uses over 10-15k/sec
-Browsing: It's as fast as the site allow you to download. Average is probably around 100k/sec for the duration of the download (picture and the like is what take time to download, and it varies from page to page. )
-Youtube: A lot more than anything else above. I've no idea what size youtube files tho, but video/sound files are generally big, even compressed
-Webcam: No idea again, but it's a lot more than gaming/browsing/messagenger



One page of text (notepad) is about 2kb big, one minute of music (mp3) is 1000kbp/s and video is generally bigger. It's easy to tell how much bandwitdh you used by looking at your download

youtube videos are about 2mbs per 15-20 seconds iirc.

[MisterBob]

The webcam is by far the biggest draw, and is most likely what is generally behind your congestion. Youtube is probably the second biggest.

Remember that most MMOs are designed to function on 56k modems (And FFXI is no exception, not 100% sure about WoW though), so they won't be much of a bandwith hog.

[Charla]

youtube videos are about 2mbs per 15-20 seconds iirc.

A bit less than that according to my calculations. A 17 meg flv file I took from youtube runs for 421 seconds, so that's almost exactly 40 kB/second. Of course, it'll download as fast as the browser and connection is allowed to until it's finished buffering, so the actual bandwidth used depends on how long it takes to buffer.

[Remyo]

youtube videos are about 2mbs per 15-20 seconds iirc.

A bit less than that according to my calculations. A 17 meg flv file I took from youtube runs for 421 seconds, so that's almost exactly 40 kB/second. Of course, it'll download as fast as the browser and connection is allowed to until it's finished buffering, so the actual bandwidth used depends on how long it takes to buffer.

wasn't talking about download rate, I'm confused about the first half of your post and the second.

[Yangsing]

You have to pay for your internet service? I would think it would be provided for free.

[Remyo]

You have to pay for your internet service? I would think it would be provided for free.

they probably did this because the free one was so shitty, and overwhelmed by the amount of people trying to use it.

[Charla]

So you were talking about the encoding quality, then. That's what I calculated in the first half of the post: bytes per second of video length. In the second half I was just describing how the ratio between that and bandwidth usage is determined by the download/buffering speed.

[Bartylby]

i don't think any program could explain it better than the people in this thread... just to slam it home further, the webcam rapes a connection far worst than anything else you listed.

maybe you could have him have the people using the webcams adjust the quality of the video (on their[your] end) as to lower the amount they need to upload easing the connection for everyone as a whole.