How much bandwidth is steam gonna need for a decent hl 2 launch

[Wilson502]

I want some honest opinons, not like they need a gzillion gigabits of bandwidth, realistically. Right now they have 1575Mbps total bandwidth, but they do have a few content servers down, one being speakeasy, and im sure they provide quite a bit. Lets get some good opinions here:cheers:

 

[Reiska]

If they start delivering game one week before official release, they dont need SO much. They still could add some servers.

 

[DigitalAssassin]

I don't know much about speeds and networking, but seeing how much press this game is getting, I'd say they need to be prepared for 10 000 downloads at a time (of like 3 gigs each), and maybe more. I'd make the assumption that most 56K users won't download it over steam, download speeds will probably average out at about 200k/s (I honestly don't know, but I'd say it's a fair guess). Anyone know the math?

 

[Wilson502]

at 200 KILOBYTES per second the network would be full load at 1000 users

 

[Joneleth]

Well, no one knows how big the game is... Or how much will be streamed days in advance to people through Steam. It's quite possible that the majority of the game will be downloaded days before the game is offically on store shelves, and the only remaining data left to download on the 30th is minor and it won't really effect the content servers at that much (because I think A LOT of people will be downloading HL2).

Difficult to tell at this point though, honestly.

 

[Wilson502]

they are gonna need to at last double their bandwidth or they are gonna have some serious bandwidth issues

 

[droper]

more then they got.

 

[BloodyL]

There are 10 content servers not on the list at the moment, servers 15 through to 25.

 

[Wilson502]

they are gonna have to throw up at least 10-20 more content servers with 100 meg connections to them which would give them another gigabit or 2 more gigabits of bandwidth

 

[Wilson502]

if those 10 content servers all have 100 meg connections and r in the states that would help but they might need to add a few more.....

 

[XtAkm4p]

5000mbits should be enuff i think.... should be able to handle all the hl2 preloads

 

[Wilson502]

5 gigabits is a lot of bandwidth they will need at least 20 or 30 more content servers to get that much

 

[forn1x]

50 GIGAFLOPS/SECOND!

 

[BloodyL]

Originally posted by forn1x
50 GIGAFLOPS/SECOND!

1.21 Gigawatts!

 

[Dr. Freeman]

Originally posted by Wilson502
I want some honest opinons, not like they need a gzillion gigabits of bandwidth, realistically. Right now they have 1575Mbps total bandwidth, but they do have a few content servers down, one being speakeasy, and im sure they provide quite a bit. Lets get some good opinions here:cheers:

lets put it this way, at current bandwidth, Steam isn't even allowing me to connect to my friends list...

i would hope that connecting to the friends list takes up less bandwidth than downloading HL2? anyway, if Valve can't even get the friends list working.. at current bandwidth, i don't wanna imagine the chaos that will be a HL2 release.


a decent guess would be, they need 10 times the bandwidth they have now for a HL2 release.. especially after Gabe's response where it sounds like HL2 may/will be relelased on Steam before we are able to get retail boxes..

that means Steam is gonna have more users than originally anticipated since most pple thought a Steam release and a retail release would happen the same day..

oh well i hope Valve can muster enough bandwidth for a decent performance on Steam.

 

[Reiska]

Re: Re: How much bandwidth is steam gonna need for a decent hl 2 launch

Originally posted by Dr. Freeman
lets put it this way, at current bandwidth, Steam isn't even allowing me to connect to my friends list...

I think I saw on steam forums that not-working friends-list is a bug, not a bandwidth issue.

Total current system capacity 1575.00Mbps
Total available 1213.14Mbps

Dont you think 1213 Mpbs is enough for a freakin' friends-list?

 

[Wilson502]

i sure hope so!

 

[Dr. Freeman]

Re: Re: Re: How much bandwidth is steam gonna need for a decent hl 2 launch

Originally posted by Reiska
Dont you think 1213 Mpbs is enough for a freakin' friends-list?

well for one person? sure.. for 30,000 pple all trying to connect to the friends list at the same time? hmm.. different story? *shrug* im not an expert.. but the the number of users may have something to do with connecting issues..

as far as that bug goes.. all i have to say is.. its September 21st, Valve have to start getting this pesky bugs worked out.. if they are sticking to their 9/30 release, surely leaving these sorta things til last minute is only gonna make things frustrating..

some mods for me are laggy.. about the only game that works without alot of lag is HLDM.. of course im only speaking for myself.. others have their own problems to deal with.

 

[Reiska]

Re: Re: Re: Re: How much bandwidth is steam gonna need for a decent hl 2 launch

Originally posted by Dr. Freeman

as far as that bug goes.. all i have to say is.. its September 21st, Valve have to start getting this pesky bugs worked out.. if they are sticking to their 9/30 release, surely leaving these sorta things til last minute is only gonna make things frustrating..

All Im saying it cant be bandwidth-issue if theres over 1gig of bandwidth available.

In http://www.steampowered.com/news.htm 18.9 news they say:
"The Friends servers require some networking changes before they're fully functional again. We're working on this now."

and considering 19.9 news, theyre doing bug-fixing all the time.

 

[Dr. Freeman]

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: How much bandwidth is steam gonna need for a decent hl 2 launch

Originally posted by Reiska
and considering 19.9 news, theyre doing bug-fixing all the time.

fair enough. point noted

thanks

 

[wormstrangler]

10gbits at least.

 

[ZeoviZ]

Ehm. It would be possible to let the gamecache be downloadable through fileplanet and other servers...?

When will p2p be implemented anyway; it doesn't seem to be very difficult to do....

It'll take A LOT more bandwith than currently available... I'll personally take up 100 mb/sec. (The first couple of minutes anyway...) Actually the school server have better bandwith than all the Steam-servers together; it's waaaay to little.

Remember too, that you can chose how big the cache-file is, so for those who chose little, the rest have to be dl'ed through Steam very fast...

 

[Reiska]

Originally posted by ZeoviZ
Actually the school server have better bandwith than all the Steam-servers together; it's waaaay to little.

And what kind of server with what connectivity is that?
And about you taking up 100Mbps, it would be wise for them to cap download rates per session.

 

[dscowboy]

Given that Valve will preload the game to people the week in advance of the release, let's see how many people they could theorectially preload it with the current Steam bandwidth.

1500 Mbps * 60 sec/minute * 60 minute/hour * 24 hours/day *7 days/week = 907 TeraBITS/week.

907 TeraBITS / 8 bits/byte = 113 TeraBYTES

113 TB / 2 GB = 56,500

So at max capacity, 56,500 users could download HL2 during the week before release. Of course, not everyone will run Steam all day every day for the week, and a lot of the bandwidth will be taken up with other things, so I'd guess around 10k would actually be more realistic.

 

[dscowboy]

Originally posted by ZeoviZ
It'll take A LOT more bandwith than currently available... I'll personally take up 100 mb/sec. (The first couple of minutes anyway...)

LOL! Trust me when I tell you that at no point will you ever download from Steam at 100 MB/s. That may be the capactiy of your network card and your LAN, but you certainly will not see that kind of bandwidth via Steam. Unless you happen to be sitting at a console inside one of the server rooms that house Steam servers.

Originally posted by ZeoviZ
it's waaaay to little.

Way too little for what? How many people do you think will download during the pre-load week?

 

[rob.derosa]

1) Steam will have more servers exclusively for Half Life

2) Steam may not download Half Life 2 at the maximum speed for your connection (slow enough to allow a lot of poeple to download Half Life 2, but fast enough to ensure it you get it within a week).

 

[Woggy]

I think a 14.4k modem should do quite nicely.

 

[FriScho]

500.000 downloaded Steam.
I guess 250.000 will download HL2
They have 7 days to do that.
I guess HL2 will be a 2 Gbyte Download.
That means they have to deliver 250k*2Gig= 500000 GByte in 7 days.
7 days = 604800 seconds. So 846,6 MBytes every second.

A bandwide of 6773 Mbit (6.6 GBit) is needed to send HL2 to 250k Users in 7 days. They only have 1575Mbps. That's 1/4. So we can only hope only 1/4 users want to download HL2 in the first week prior the release (that would be just 62500 users).

I hope I have not made a big math misscalculation. But I think Valve needs to upgrade their bandwide by about 400% to meet the demand.

 

[rob.derosa]

Note on the Steam status page, you cannot see servers 15-25. Say each one of those has a bandwidth of 100MBps, that increases the total bandwidth to 2.5GBps.

 

[FriScho]

2.5GBps would be enough for about 95000 users... that could work....

 

[rob.derosa]

And TBH, I doubt 500,000 peopole even want to download the game.

 

[ZeoviZ]

Originally posted by Reiska
And what kind of server with what connectivity is that?
And about you taking up 100Mbps, it would be wise for them to cap download rates per session.

Ok, I have no idea how fast the connection is, but I know that it has to be extremely fast.

LOL! Trust me when I tell you that at no point will you ever download from Steam at 100 MB/s. That may be the capactiy of your network card and your LAN, but you certainly will not see that kind of bandwidth via Steam. Unless you happen to be sitting at a console inside one of the server rooms that house Steam servers.

Hmm... I've had 100 mbit over direct connect, so with p2p enabled...

Did 500 000 people d/l Steam? Well, the first seven days is not when the servers will have the heaviest loads... Not everyone will d/l the full game, and millions of people will play online. Does anyone know the bandwith of the battle.net-servers?

Anyway, I have no idea why, but gamecompanies always seem to underestimate the serverload. Blizzard does it for every game they release and even Black & White was highly underestimated. (The hype was way bigger than the actual sales)... and gabe said himself that they had underestimated the load on steam...

 

[Epsi]

Bear in mind that when they're preloading HL2, they don't have to get the whole game to people in the week, because with Steam you don't need the whole of the single player game before you can start at the beginning, so they can serve a few more people by not downloading everything in the preload.

 

[rob.derosa]

Originally posted by Epsi
Bear in mind that when they're preloading HL2, they don't have to get the whole game to people in the week, because with Steam you don't need the whole of the single player game before you can start at the beginning, so they can serve a few more people by not downloading everything in the preload.

Thats right, only the first few levels will be downloaded in the first week, the other levels will be downloaded as you are playing the game.

 

[ZeoviZ]

Originally posted by rob.derosa
Thats right, only the first few levels will be downloaded in the first week, the other levels will be downloaded as you are playing the game.

It takes 1-2 days to complete the game( if you don't cheat). Not everyone will do that, but the ones who try can't because the whole game isn't downloaded?

 

[rob.derosa]

Originally posted by ZeoviZ
It takes 1-2 days to complete the game( if you don't cheat). Not everyone will do that, but the ones who try can't because the whole game isn't downloaded?

And how do you know it will take that long

Well.. whatever... Valve will have it all sorted out.

 

[FriScho]

Originally posted by rob.derosa
And TBH, I doubt 500,000 peopole even want to download the game.

I guess it will be 250k. Half of the number of ppl who downloaded Steam. Don't forget all those ppl who do not care about Counterstrike. HL1 was a multimillionseller and HL2 got tons of pre-hype in the press. I expect a big run on HL2 Sept. 30. It would be very good to pre-deliver the content to all those die hard HL2 fans who start Steam every day to lower the load on those Steam servern in early October.

 

[RoyalEF]

Originally posted by rob.derosa
Note on the Steam status page, you cannot see servers 15-25. Say each one of those has a bandwidth of 100MBps, that increases the total bandwidth to 2.5GBps.

People keep saying this. If you are setting up servers today, especially for loads such as these you would use gigabit nics, which come preinstalled on many servers now.

A 100Mb connection can only support 80Mbps absolute most, and that assumes that the entire path is clean and doesn't have issues. You can never use the entire bandwidth in Ethernet. If these servers have 100Mbit nics, then there are a lot more pervasive problems going on at Steam.

Your server has to be designed properly to even reach that level of performance. For a content server that typically mean enough memory loaded to cache all content files being served in memory. Constructing a disk system that would hold up 100Mb+ performance could get very costly. A single server can outperform multiple servers--it is a design vs. cost issue. Often the technology of getting multiple servers to function as a single entity complicates things to a level that many technical people don't handle well.

The network and servers have to operate in conjunction. So far I would say they have missed the mark. Clearly a lot of stuff wasn't working immediately after leaving beta--was it working in beta? That means they have a bad Q&A/production deployment process.

As far as badwidth, they should have looked at purchasing temporary bandwidth for the launch. 1575Mb (don't know where this number came from) is a lot of bandwidth, but estimating how many people will buy into a Steam-only version of HL2 is questionable. From my Steam experience I won't. I also fear I will be very disappointed when I go online.

I also wonder about the 15,000 CS1.6 players at anytime number. If this is happening around the clock, then I would suspect there is a bottleneck. My company's website was running 23-24 Mbps each day whether it was a slow or promo day. Previous promotions ran us up to 32Mbps. Something was wrong. Eventually (after weeks) they figured it out and an ordinary promotion that they release every month shot through the roof and we hit 35 Mbps. Marketing couldn't believe the sales $'s to this ordinary promo. It had nothing to do with the promo--the site was finally working.

Getting proper performance has many components and the number of MBPS coming into the building is often the least complicated part.

 

[jonlu69]

How do we know Valve has not purchased temp bandwidth. I think we will just have to wait and see what happens.

 

[Inflatable]

I don't think they need as much bandwidth as they needed for the Steam intrduction & CS 1.6.. By far most people won't buy & download HL2 on Steam, most will buy it in retail.. My guess is that even less then 10% of all people will use the option of buying it on Steam.. And most likely you won't be able to preload any of HL2 if you didn't pay for it on Steam..