1. If I have a 50 Mbit/s download, and a 7.75-10.0 Mbit/s upload - that's about 6.25 MB/s down, and 1.0-1.25 MB/s up - internet connection, about how many people do you think I can have in my own room? I would think that 25 Mbit/s down and 4-5 Mbit/s up (my previous internet speed) would be good enough for at-least 5-7 players without the slightest issue from my point of view. So do you think I'd be able to "perfectly" handle 10-15 people with the new connection speeds? When I say "perfectly" I mean no issues/hiccups/slowdowns from my connection's point of view to host the session for all players. 2. How does ping factor into everything? Can the player's and/or the host's connection speed (upload and/or download speeds) help improve the experience for someone with high ping? What about the opposite - can a very low ping make-up for slow connection speeds? I'm really tired of looking for my own server (desired car, track, etc.) as the amount of locked servers out there is ridiculous (even more-so in SCE), I therefore would like to try to get a hang of opening my own room in both games as-well as Formula Truck, and would love some opinions about all this. P.S. Does anyone know how things are progressing with RF2's alternate mode of hosting? The one that's supposed to be much easier and not rely on a pre-determined track list that anyone joining must have every single track of installed? There seemed to be quite a bit of attention and work on it before but it seems to have faded. In the middle of the session (practice, end of the race, whenever) I'd love to just hit "change circuit" and choose any track I have installed that I and/or others feel like racing on just like is possible with RF1, SCE, etc. If this mode could be combined with the autodownload system ("GetMod") then that would be absolutely fantastic. I thought I read a while ago that it's actually already possible to get both working simultaneously but that it doesn't always work. Is this true?
What I did some time ago with build 930 was to use the new dedicated hosting tool to create the vmod and then quit and start the old dedicated hosting tool and select that newly created vmod, that way I saw that getmod worked perfectly and I could select every hosting option, etc.. I didn't manage to make getmod work with the MAS utility :-(. I hope they can manage to get some time to finish the new dedicated hosting tool since it is far easier and much less error prone. Didn't test with the current build 946 yet. Hope this helps...
Run a traceroute to ISI , mine is shocking, you can see if your IP can improve it, mine can't. Depends on player locale Spin and lesser extent connection speed of drivers. I only have 20/1 atm I can host 8 if they are all aussie, if they all overseas ping will be issue sometimes, anything under 200 is okay for me. But from our perspective hosting dedicated menu I think other drivers get double the ping to what you and I see ? I get 25/5 activated next week, I do not expect anything to change. If I had all aussie drivers I could do 12 so you should do 15. I dunno I have lapped hard, fast and very close ( inches ) with drivers from US UK etc and it is as smooth as it can be for me, not sure they see it that way. lool
Oh wow, only 20/1? I've been in your room many times and the experience is always great, and I'm quite far from Aussie land . I didn't think 50/10 (but probably more like 50/7.5) was that good. But you're saying that ping is much more important than than player and server down/up speeds?
Don't quote me mate, someone will have a better idea. Yeah that is what I meant I was always able to lap very close to you too. I get 18/0.75 in down/upload tests ( 75% of advertised speed is considered okay out here ) I asked how many KB/s a car takes ..........I don't think I ever got a answer. Like F1 challenge was around 50KB+ a car, 512kb upload you could do 8-10 rF2 is a bit more demanding then that
At VEC we have our server set to 17Mb/17Mb and we host 45 teams with a hand full of spectators, lots of driver swaps for 24 hours without a problem. rF2 is very clever about how it conserves bandwidth. The thing you have to look out for when hosting is although you get 50/10 domestically, you may only really get 7/2 internationally. Our older server for VEC had a 600/600Mb connection but only got those rates domestically. When testing I saw we could get about 50/50 to most countries but some only 24/24 so to play it safe we throttled the server to 17/17. I would sugest using a tool like speedtest.net and browse around the map to pick servers all over the world to see what sort of rates you get. If you're only really planning on a domestic audience then you are probably fine setting your server to 45/7 or something like that. I think a lot of times the dedi will act strange if you set the rate too high and the server doesn't throttle to stay within the limits. It seems a little counter intuitive that lowering the limits on the dedi would actually produce better results but it does in some cases. The proto dedi interface is still on the backburner and not that useful. If you're looking for a user friendly way to build a vmod then check out my new tool here: http://isiforums.net/f/showthread.php/24948-rFactor2-Series-Creator-(UI-for-creating-vmods) And to GetMod enable all your components check out this tool: http://isiforums.net/f/showthread.php/19702-GetMod-Manager
Calculating a rate per car is tricky because the rate goes up exponentially. Let's say each car transmits 2000bytes/sec (I'm just throwing out a random number here) to the server and you have three cars on the server. The server now has to send that 2kb*3 to each car (excluding sending a player's own data to himself). So it isn't just <telemsize>*<drivercount> = <totalupstream> So in that case it would only be 2000*3=6000kb/sec But is's really more like <telemsize> * <drivercount> ^ 2 - <telemsize> * <drivercount> = <totalupstream> So in reality it's 2000*3^2-2000*3=12,000kb/sec But look when you add more drivers: 2000*20^2-2000*20=760,000kb/sec So it grows fast. The unknown is the exact size of the telemetry packets. Also, the server is very smart about how often it updates players. For example. Player A and B are on one side of the track and Player C is on the other. The server reduces the rate at which is reports the status of Player A and B to player C because it knows they are very far apart. You can see this in client side replays when selecting a car that is far away from your own. You will notice unessential stuff like gear changes is almost completely missing sometimes. The server also knows that A and B are close to each other so it will send the data for those two players rapidly. Sorry, I am probably not wording this very well. hahaha. Long story short, it's hard to take a calculator and determine how many cars you can get on a server with X amount of bandwidth. You could calculate a worst case scenario where you know how much bandwidth it would take for the server to not have to throttle at all. But that is about it.
Another thing to note is that the dedi will show the percentage of allocated bandwidth being used. You will notice the downstream is hardly used at all because it's only getting one copy of the telem from each car. It's the ustream that gets hammered because of the way it has to send copies of the telem from each driver to everyone on the server.
Like I said my traceroute to ISI is long, high ping and has 2 timeouts, really seems to bounce around the place. So I on the back foot to start with, you should romp in 15. My IP Exetel uses the Telstra network. I got IP to look at it but they say it can't be improved ( ie: Telstra can route them whichever way they like ). Running from your own PC which I assumed you are doing, the better you ping ISI will help. I forget IP to trace sorry Spin, doh. P.S. even with low speed and bad traceroute I still had years of close smooth lapping with 90% of people 90% of time. I can't complain ISI.
The following is for my current 25/5 speed from Speedtest.net (change to 50/10 will be done in 2 days): Local (west coast, north America) = 11 ms, 27 down, 3.31 up Perth, Australia - 227 ms, 21 down, 2.92 up Brisbane, Australia - 199 ms, 24 down, 3.12 up Rome, Italy - 177 ms, 23.25 down, 3.11 up Tampere, Finland - 187 ms, 18.7 down, 3.11 up For some reason I kept getting very bad download speeds when trying servers in England (4 or 5 different ones), China and Japan. Like 5 - 10 download. Uploads seemed fine though. It was actually consistently the worst with the English servers. Weird. Russian ones weren't bad at around 15 down and 2.75-3 up. Was going to try African countries as well as the "middle eastern" part of Asia but I got tired of staring at that speedtest screen. P.S. I have no idea what timeouts, trace routs, etc. are. I suck at internet stuff, lol.
For sure ping is really critical. It seems the pings from Oz fluctuate wildly. When I used to run SRRS we had a bunch of drivers from Oz and there would be nights where they just had to abandon the race because their pings would be so bad. But other nights it would be fine. But this was many years ago. Things have probably improved since then.
1. So for the guy running the room (not an actual server, just my regular PC that I'll be playing on at the same time) the upload speed is more important, but for the players joining, their download speed is more important? Is that correct? 2. Can a good ping make up for bad down/up speeds, and Vice-versa?
Sounds a lot like what I was seeing. China is the worst but I found Argentina was bad too and we have a bunch of Argentiniens in VEC so I didn't want to cause problems for them. The thing is, say your total upsteam needed is 5Mb. That doesn't really mean you need to be able to send at 5Mb to Argentina unless every single one of your drivers is in Argentina. It's really damn hard to come up with exact requirements. The 17/17 we settled for at VEC was probably on the extreme conservative side. Who is your provider BTW? I have ComCast here in Florida and if you really should be able to get exactly what you pay for. You say you have 25/5 right now. When ComCast advertises 25/5 you really get more like 27/7. I have 50/10 at the house and get 60/12. My point is, if you aren't getting what you're paying for you should complain a little and they will sort it out for you. If your rate is reduced I can almost guarantee your ping is also not as good as it could be either. I get 9ms a few hops out with ComCast but when things get bad it will run up to 50ms (again, just a few hops out). Google PingPlotter. It's a very handy tool for fighting ISPs. Edit: nevermind, I see you have Telus.
Can someone put up the ISI server AD, I can't find it. That is pinging the forum, I suppose much the same. 300+ and 2 timeouts see edit: Oppsa forum is hosted in the UK ? Anyways I know trace to ISI server is similar for me.
Well those timeouts on the hops in between don't mean much at all. A lot of routers don't respond to ICMP at all. It's the final destination that you don't want to see timeouts on.
I am hoping my new connection on the 15th gets a better path, not holding my breath. lol All things being good I should get 200's .......about the same as what Spin gets to here ( not the 300+ I had since I moved 1 mile up the road and swapped IPs from Primus to Exetel.) 200+ Ping to ISI server ( not forum ) , hosting my room at my present speed would be better experience for all no doubt. PS You would barely be 100 ping to ISI server Noel ?
Something else to consider is that if other bandwidth-heavy activities are happening in the house then you may have problems. I have 120/5 and when torrents kicked in or my wife was watching Netflix I would have issues hosting from home. While my download is plenty, the upstream was getting choked with the acknowledge packets and other traffic. You can host from home... you just need to think about limiting traffic and/or using scheduling for things that run unattended like Dropbox, cloud backups (esp. iCloud if you have iOS devices), other services that sync data, etc. As an example, I have my Carbonite online backups scheduled to run at 3AM and not continuously. That parallels what I see in iRacing. Chinese and South American drivers, lots of problems. As an aside, rF1 is a lot more tolerant though... we race NA servers with Aussies, Brazilians, Argentinians, South Africans and never a problem. Pings in the high 100s and low 200s are manageable.
