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I'm planning to deploy 3 private servers on a web farm. I've got a quote for a hosting package from my ISP, yet it says the server will have 10Mbit bandwidth with a potential 100bitB burst.

What does it mean? I need to serve flash games, each game about ~ 1MB, to 30K unique users a month. Will it suffice?

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  • It's unlikely you need a 100mbps connection. Also remember if you have repeat visitors the content may be cached by the browser, but even without caching It's unlikely and if you have the option to burst then it's fine.
    – ollybee
    Commented May 1, 2011 at 23:17

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GeverGever, the information we have is not sufficient to predict your bandwidth requirements... basically, you have enough bandwidth until you need more. That sounds like a snarky answer, but there is no other answer to give.

If you understand how your application interacts with the network, you can do things to influence how much bandwidth you require... this requires usability studies and / or lab testing...

Ask yourself these questions...

  1. How will users interact with your site? Are you delivering your browser code and applications efficiently? A simple example... Use Google's JQuery CDN to be more bandwidth-efficient; also set META tags in your HEAD to permit object caching, and forbid robots where appropriate. Compress the images on your site when possible... use http 1.1 w/ gzip... etc...

  2. What will load profile be? See https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5669648/tcp-ip-application-keepalive-size-and-bandwidth-overhead/5669835#5669835 for more discussion

Once you have lab tested, you will have a much better idea of what your load will look like. Don't forget to add appropriate client WAN delay with something like wanem... this will affect the maximum transfer rate your users can get.

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Are you talking 10Mbps?

If so, then accounting for peak hours, lets say you serve 3 users a minute. Depending on the users bandwidth, the multimedia content of your site, and how you load the flash games to the user's computer, 10MB should be more than enough.

Assuming the page isn't too large you should estimate that you will be delivering about 5 megabytes of content every minute. With a 10Mbps connection, you will be able to deliver 75 megabytes per minute, which is much more than you plan to deliver from your description.

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  • Yes, I'm talking 10Mbps, thanks for the fix. If it's more then enough, than why other ISP hosting providers offer 100Mbps as a 'basic' package? and I think 3 users a minute is unlikely, it will be around 100 a minute
    – GeverGever
    Commented May 1, 2011 at 19:01
  • Moreover, if the flash is 1MB and the design is around ~300KB, then 10Mbps will suffice for (10 * 1024) / 1324 = 7.73 concurrent users, isn't it?
    – GeverGever
    Commented May 1, 2011 at 19:08
  • Not necessarily concurrent users, but users having the flash app transferred to them at the same time. Once the initial transfer is complete, the data transfer will be minimal. You could also try limiting the bandwidth per IP address to allow for more concurrent downloads.
    – Zach
    Commented May 1, 2011 at 19:27