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Warframe Bandwidth Usage. How Much Hosting Really Need?


Tazmanyak
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I dont know what is the the best place to post this, so i'll go for Gameplay Feedback, as there is no "Network Feedback" forum :)

 

I play warframe for ~5 months now.

And since my beginings, i appear as a "not that bad" host.

On standard missions, ppl dont complain, but on survival/defense/mobile defense, teammates report some lag.

 

I dont have a top-notch internet connection ... no fiber here :/ But good dsl ... 11mbps dl / 0.90mbps ul

2997537375.png

http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/2997537375

 

Good for up to 110-120KB/s upload speed.

 

So why do players lag in my games?

 

After a lot of testings, i found this usefull software called "netBalancer" (http://seriousbit.com/netbalancer/)

The free version is good enough to monitor bandwidth usage of each active process.

 

Here is the result after 1 hour session:

NtDyhsK.jpg

 

60 to 40 min i'm host in a few missions, with only one teammate. upload max is 20KB/s

40 to 29 min i'm client in a survival mission. Low up 5KB/s and ~25-30KB/s dl

25 to 12 min, i'm the host on a survival mission, with 4 players. Max upload is 122KB/s!

 

Yes, a 4-man survival eats all my bandwidth. I suppose it could even need more ...

Some othere p2p games dont even need half what warframe requires, and those are the really bad coded ones!

 

 

So, now, please DE ...

I'm here to help.

So tell me, how can i (we, all beta testers) help you improve your netcode?

What logs are needed?

 

Would be interested in other players performances reports too ...

What are you b/w, can you host without lag?

Maybe some could post netbalancer (or any other program) logs to compare?

 

Thx for reading ;)

Edited by Tazmanyak
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One of my friends can only play with one other player. Anymore, and the party all get disconnected.

Another one of my friends can play with one other without problem. Three and things start getting somewhat laggy.. and four is god damn unplayable.

 

Yeah, players increase demand on your internet. 

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Me and my 3 mates are all from france.

Next session, i will try to isolate bandwidth usage per connection, to see if there are inconsistencies between users.

 

This post is also to try to focus attention on the subject.

I'm a dedicated beta tester, ready to use dedicated software/benchmarks to monitor everything needed, and efficiently help DE to optimize their code.

 

But, yep, they first have to call for help too ... :/

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I'm not really sure all this consumes bandwidth (speaking of those detailed movements).

Fact is: i think nobody but DE know what has to be transmited to host. Could do some packet monitoring, but it's certainly encrypted, and somewhat against EULA to try to decode them ...

And my goal is not to be banned ^^'

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I think that the high upload bandwith is maybe related to the fact that if the hosts disconnects, any client is able to take over as host. In order to do that, each client needs to have a pseudo-replica of the server state and thus information about mobs/drops/etc that aren't near any player must be transmitted as well.

 

100 KB/s to host a 4 player game is insane and unfortunately DE seems not to care. This issue has been around since U7 at least and the new difficult content released in each update forces us even more to play co-op. I decided to simply not play unless my buddy with good bandwith is on.

Edited by AkhAnubis
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There are apparently trivial things that get transmitted over network that could be removed from the synchronizing code, i'm not sure. Obviously there might be a reason to this, but maybe these can be improved.

 

For example, early in our warframe days me and my friend noticed that drop positions are synchronized. So if you destroy a container and a health orb flyes far away, it lands in the exact same position for you than for the other players. I believe they are sharing the initial vector and speed across clients, and that's a cool way to have things fly around and be consistent for each player, but wouldn't it be less costly bandwidth-wise to have a hardcoded arc (calculated client-side) that throws each item in front of the container ? 

 

I'm sure there are more details like this one that might have been overlooked. Maybe these fixes are less significant if removed instead of changing other core aspects of the netcode :)

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  I hate hosting in this game. It's the only game where I recieve complaints from my team mates even though I have a cable connection(30-40 mb download 4-8 mb upload). Can't really figure out what's wrong. It must be on DE's side... idk. I swear very early in closed beta they've must have been using dedicated servers because the game felt really smooth.

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  • 3 months later...

Yeah, we had that discussion a few months ago. At the moment, I should be able to host at least one other player(35kb/s up), but 9 out of 10 times noone can connect to me. The ones that do bring down my fps to 25 while nothings going on. Back when I started playing around U7 I used to be able to host games all the time. Problems started happened after the void was introduced.

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snip

I believe they are sharing the initial vector and speed across clients

snip

It's a lot worse than that; in laggy games you can't pick up mods that are wobbling a bit on the ground until they stop completely. Seems like every movement is synchronized.

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leave it to the french to not only point out issues, but bring freaking graphs to the party to prove it. +1 for you op, good food for thought in your post. my connection is fine unless im hosting as well.

 

connection is 7mbps down, .6mbps up.

Thanks for the kind words :)

Sadly, my discussions with support didnt go anywhere. So i just gave up :/

Recent DE's annoucments about network optimizations disnt improve anything at all.

A bit lazy to post new graphs, but the upload bandwidth need when hosting a 4 players survival is still the same: it caps my 1200kbps adsl upload speed.

In my clan, we have to rely on the rare of us that have fiber/vdsl to host games. This shouldnt have to happen!

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3238525371.png

 

That is at best average net and im having 0 problems hosting for 4 man squad unless they are far away.

 

edit: faster than 82% is mainly due to fact that only cities have acces to such internet.

 

If you call that average... *cries in a corner with crappy third world internet in the PH*

 

My 5mbps down / 2mbps up connection speed on wifi seems to be sufficient for hosting but when I need to use my mobile 3G internet either from a USB stick or tethered via my Nexus 4, it's a lagfest even though my speedtest results show the same speeds if not higher.

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If you call that average... *cries in a corner with crappy third world internet in the PH*

 

My 5mbps down / 2mbps up connection speed on wifi seems to be sufficient for hosting but when I need to use my mobile 3G internet either from a USB stick or tethered via my Nexus 4, it's a lagfest even though my speedtest results show the same speeds if not higher.

i pay 15 euro/month for that, i could have 190mbps DL speed for maybe twice that price but i really doubt that i will need such for at least 5 years from now on.

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Internet speed is a problem which tends to solve itself over time... but it's a long time. 

 

In most places home internet is set up in a 10:1 fashion, so if you have 10Mbps download, you should have 1Mbps upload. 

 

1Mbps (~100KBps) upload is, as the game currently stands, the target available bandwidth for trouble-free playing. So, people should have QoS set up, and the more bandwidth the better, for lower congestion. 

 

Download-only or download-mostly uses, such as Netflix, shouldn't interfere with Warframe, but torrents probably will. Capping torrents at the application level, plus setting up QoS on the modem/router will help. 

 

It's a high cost of bandwidth for sure, But the mode to ADSL2 and fiber is inevitable, so the problems is shrinking. 

If players can upgrade to 10Mbps or fasterconnections, it benefits all traffic, so it could be a good excuse for a faster pipe :)

 

It does NOT mean they shouldn't be always trying to improve the network code though. But without knowing what's under the hood, I wouldn't judge the devs too harshly on this one. The server migration logic is a pretty advanced thing to do, instead of plainly dropping some players. 

 

I would prefer to have the faster host preselected before the game starts though. There may be room for improvement in the host selection/migration logic. Mybe in the actual information 'packetization' too. 

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  • 2 months later...

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