On Sat, Sep 25, 2010 at 5:17 PM, Matthew Walster <matthew@walster.org> wrote:
Plenty of people sell p2p caches but they all work using magic, smoke and mirrors. Somehow that seems appropriate for gaming networks; maybe add some swords or old Gandalf boxes.
In general distributing gaming software isn't going to have a big impact on your traffic levels - the average user will upload at most about as many megabytes as he downloaded (though obviously some will upload much more and some much less), and if the P2P is implemented well the uploads will mostly go to other customers of the same ISP, reducing the amount that comes through their peering point. And it'll all be a lot less than somebody pirating movies, because the game doesn't get DVD-sized updates multiple times a day or even a month. If you're running a satellite ISP, you probably care a lot more about upstream bandwidth, but it'll be much faster for one satellite user to get bits from Anchorage or even Seattle than to get it from another user two satellite hops away, especially if your uplinks are smaller than your downlinks, so if the P2P is implemented well (no idea if it is), you'll get very little uploading. (Does it save you money to get a WoW subscription for a box that sits in a server rack at your hub site with nobody actually playing it, to further reduce your bandwidth needs? Maybe.) -- ---- Thanks; Bill Note that this isn't my regular email account - It's still experimental so far. And Google probably logs and indexes everything you send it.