Login / Register

Download throttling returning soon

I hate to say it, but the N64 section has proven too popular so I'm going to need to start throttling download speeds again. I had silently removed the caps a few months ago but lately the logs show the server has been consuming 70% of its theoretical bandwidth capacity and rising. How much of that is collectors versus plain old curiousity is hard to say just yet (the popularity of Mario 64 suggests curiosity). As a result I'm getting 2000ms pings in WoW and getting dropped from Mario Kart WFC matches, which is unacceptable. In the meantime I may just slap the old 5K/sec cap back on whenever I'm gaming, but considering how much larger N64 games are I'd like a more elegant solution. (5K speed + 10M ROM = ~30 minute download) Anyway, I'm willing to dedicate 200K/sec (~1.6m or a T1) to downloads but I need to decide how to carve up the pie. I'm thinking of splitting people into two categories, broadband and dial-up. Dialup users would download at the standard 5K/sec while broadband users would be higher, say 20/sec. Users would be prompted to choose their connection type once upon entering The Vault. I would limit it to 10 download slots with dial-up users counting as 1/4 of a slot. That way the system could hold a max of 40 dial-up users or 10 broadband users. Rather than tracking it IP based I'd like to make it session based so you can only use one download slot per session (browser). I had originally tried that long ago but couldn't get it working, and I much later found out it was due to a bug in IIS. Ideally I'd also like to find away around IE's download blocker so the download starts automatically (like in FireFox) instead of having to click the link. Welp, that's enough technobabble for now. Time to make things happen!