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Cade
August 11th, 2010, 20:43
Has anyone played around with using common modules enough to know what file sizes start to get too cumbersome to share with players? For the games that I host, I'd like to create a separate common module with useful things in it like some basic reference data from the PHB, and only the races, feats, classes, powers, etc. that players will actually be using during the session. That way, I don't have to pre-distribute client modules to everyone in the game, and I don't have to worry about giving out a full PHB client module to someone who doesn't actually own a PHB or an Insider subscription.

I'm on a fast 50mb fiber connection, but I know that the server starts slowing down considerably if you attempt to share a 5mb module with your players. Transferring 5mb of data within FG seems to go a whole lot slower than if I were to set up an FTP server and allow people to download files that way. Has anyone played with this and found a "sweet spot" for size limits so that they don't completely bog down everyone's connection?

Moon Wizard
August 11th, 2010, 21:01
The textual data in the modules is typically relatively small. The majority of module size is typically images and tokens, if they are included. Streamlining the number of images/tokens in a module will reduce its size, and speed up sharing.

Cheers,
JPG

Griogre
August 12th, 2010, 20:48
All the Savage World modules I made were common ones. As Moon mentioned you don't generally have to worry about text but graphics should be *absolutely* minimal, i.e. none is best.

The thing to bear in mind is that most peoples up is 1/3 to 1/4 of their total so your 5 mb is likely around a 1.25 mb up speed. The up data rate is the speed the FG server can transfer to you players but it is split between each client. If you have 5 players then they are each getting at best a .25 mb stream and you are pushing the full size of that common modules over it to each client.

My example also assumed no network overhead and the FG server was doing nothing else but transferring the common module, not a very realist scenario so the actual transfer speed would probably be worse. If fact it's almost guaranteed to be worse because common modules are transfered on connection right when the player is trying to log in and grab his character - which by itself tends to stop the FG server cold if five or six guys do it all at once.

It's really important you keep common module size down. You have a good connection - there are many on DSL or Cable would only have like a .25 mb up which split five or six ways makes it hard to transfer anything large.

Common modules can be very useful but you just need to think like a web designer and keep the file transfer size down. Common module data is also cached so if you don't change the module you should not have to transfer it more than once to each client.

Cade
August 12th, 2010, 21:08
My up speed is about 7.5Mb on average. I'm a sysadmin during my day job, and I work mostly from home, so I spend a lot on my internet service for the extra bandwidth. And my PC is more than capable of serving as a FG server.

I had simply noticed that even for mostly text, some players would take up to 3-5 minutes to initially download the modules and connect to my server. Of course there could be other problems, but the same users seem to maintain a pretty clean connection to Skype, being able to handle voip traffic just fine. I haven't done any extensive testing, but it just seemed to me that FG is particularly slow at transferring files, as if there is some sort of bug or efficiency problem. I don't know if FG makes use of open source data transfer technologies like rsync or if everything is home-grown, but it just seems more sluggish than I would have expected.

I noticed the changelog for 2.7 says that transfer speeds have been improved though. I'll just have to experiment and see what works for my players when the time comes.

Thanks for the advice everyone!


All the Savage World modules I made were common ones. As Moon mentioned you don't generally have to worry about text but graphics should be *absolutely* minimal, i.e. none is best.

The thing to bear in mind is that most peoples up is 1/3 to 1/4 of their total so your 5 mb is likely around a 1.25 mb up speed. The up data rate is the speed the FG server can transfer to you players but it is split between each client. If you have 5 players then they are each getting at best a .25 mb stream and you are pushing the full size of that common modules over it to each client.

My example also assumed no network overhead and the FG server was doing nothing else but transferring the common module, not a very realist scenario so the actual transfer speed would probably be worse.

It's really important you keep common module size down. You have a good connection - there are many on DSL or Cable would only have like a .25 mb up which split five or six ways makes it hard to transfer anything large.

Common modules can be very useful but you just need to think like a web designer and keep the file transfer size down.

Griogre
August 12th, 2010, 21:42
Man, I wish I could justify that type of up bandwidth! :)

I'm looking forward to seeing what JPG and Doug can do for transfer rates. I'm guessing the real problem is that FG was originally coded prior to the end of the dial-up era.

My guess is the developers of the time simply didn't believe that much data would be pushed around because you couldn't realistically run a game with large data transfers so FG was not optimized for large data transfers.