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Games Entertainment

Download 600MB From The EU -- For A Demo? 116

Posted by timothy from the use-the-new-transpacific-tunnel dept.
Baddas writes: "Anarchy Online, a MMORPG from Funcom scheduled to come out on the 27th of July, is currently in it's 4th series of beta testing. This beta has about 100,000 people involved by mailed keys. However, the more interesting thing is that each of these people has to download a CD worth of information from servers mostly located in the EU. This may well be one of the largest tests of trans-continental bandwidth ever, as I've never heard of 100,000 people trying to download a single game in the space of 3 days or so (the length of time the emails went out over). This isn't some 150Mb D2 test or something, this is a full 600Mb of data. I think this could be an ideal location to use Swarmcast from OpenCola, since they could enable all of us waiting on this side of the pond to get the files."
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Download 600MB From The EU -- For A Demo? More

Download 600MB From The EU -- For A Demo?

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  • And that's currently 4 CDs (650MBx4) worth of data that people all over the world download.

  • Allow me to point out (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    That I think this was a rather intelligent plan, saving the FanCom team TONS of money, and, testing their bandwidth, waaaay before the commercial release of their game. One can only look to the abortion that is the commercial launch of WWII online, and remember the train wreak that was the first week of EQ's launch, to see how important a company stress testing their bandwidth, and their servers, is. WWII online has AT BEST, had 600 out of 20,000 people, able to get online at a time. Also, as a person that got EQ, day of release over 2 years ago, the first 3 days were un-playable, due to the constant crashing of their login server. Also, allow me to point out, the cost of several tens of thousands of dollers FanCom made by not mailing CDs to people. Keep in mind, there are 100,000 people in the new beta, it would be atleast a dollar per person to mail the CDs to each. Oh, and finally, over a week ago, FunCom put up the list of locations of FTP sites where one could download the beta file. If you were intellagent, like myself, you got it late at night, a week ago, burned it to your own CD, and then spent all yesterday, laughing at the fools that did not plan ahead.

  • Anarchy Online (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Nobody seems to have bothered to look some of this stuff up.

    They're ASKING and allowing anyone who wants to to download the file, print up a thousand cds and pass 'em around to friends. AND share their beta cd-key. I think you're able to have 2 people online using the same key at the same time during beta.

    Linux "is still planned" but won't be out for a while.

    The file is zipped.

    For me, a bandwidth challenged netizen (56k) this download will take 35 hours total. (according to reget) I'm now around the 22 hours left mark. It's hard to connect to the ftp sites if you're sitting there waiting, but with a good program that autoretries 9000 times.. you get in eventually.

    As for it killing the bandwidth of the 'net... somehow I doubt it. Most people will only bother downloading with cable or something similar. While I don't know what kind of speed they get with those, I'm sure it probably would reduce the time down under 10 hours.

    Also, should everyone download at the same time, sure that's a lot but, all the ftp sites are limited to 30 - 50 people. (Which is why it's so hard to dl at the moment)

  • Hard enough time already... (Score:5)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 10, 2001 @05:54AM (#162703)
    I've been having a hard enough time getting the CD image and now you /. it? ARE YOU MAD?

    Gee /., thanks a lot.

    (jerks)

  • It is zipped, but those windows installers are already compressed (data1.cab, etc.), it only took about 10 or 20 meg off.
  • I downloaded the file (aobeta4.zip) yesterday, with 400k/s and it went just fine. And it was from one of the official download places. So I don't see why this should really be a problem? I higly doubt all 100k persons actually will download it.
  • Cha!

    I saw statistics on this a couple of years ago. The traffic balance is around 50:50 but us Europeans pay soemthing like 80:20 of the cost of the link to connect to the "american" internet ;)
  • Just FYI for those of us having a hard time getting this file. Fileplanet has it here [fileplanet.com].

    Disclaimer - I don't work for AO / File Planet or any other company related to it. I'm just a geek that signed up for the beta and thought I'd share with the rest of the class :).

    Secret windows code
  • Oh, and don't we wish we could. We've bought certs from Verisign and from Thawte, but Sun's WebStart's signature handling is completely hosed. The VeriSigned ones sort of work on Windows, but completely don't work on Linux. The java keytool doesn't handle either of them well.

    For the Swarmcast 1.0 we'll either have invested enough time/money or dumped WebStart, but for or 0.9 you just have to trust that the file you're running came from us :(. Remember, all the signature proves is origin -- not that the code won't do mean things to your machine.

    As for the 'Full Control' that WebStart says you're giving it, we Linux users know that full control only goes to root. If you run Swarmcast as a non-root user it, of course, won't have any more privilages than you give it.

    If anyone has had more luck than we have getting WebStart to recognize a certificate on both Linux and Windows, please drop us a line through http://sf.net/projects/swarmcast .
    --

  • At least for me, the cd key came in email. Not snail mail. Which would be a fairly crucial difference here. I'm sure you wouldn't want a cd image coming through your mail server. ;-)

  • Linux Version Status (Score:4)

    by Mark Bainter ( 2222 ) on Sunday June 10, 2001 @09:50PM (#162710)
    I submitted a similar story, though with a slightly different point. Anarchy Online was mentioned here on slashdot some time back. Mainly because they had a planned linux version as well. This is why I signed up to beta-test. I was one of those who received their key this last week and I was rather thrilled by the chance to check it out and assist them.

    Unfortunately, I went to their site to download it and there was no real indication of a split between platforms and the file was in zip format. I poked around the FAQ's some and discovered that the linux platform was now tenatively planned, would not be out until at least after the windows release, and would be dependant on the results from the windows release. (I'm not sure in what way, the FAQ doesn't say.)

    I dropped a line through their contact form informing them that I was disappointed by this turn of events, and that I was sorry but I would be unable to beta-test their software as none of my boxes run windows. That in fact the whole reason I was interested was their linux support, and indicated my willingness to assist with beta-testing when they needed it for their linux version.

    If you are one who is actually interested in playing this game on linux, I would recommend you express your interest. I can only assume they do not believe there is sufficient interest. And they may be right about that. For this reason, please write them only if you are actually interested in the game. Over-inflated market estimates will not help the situation at all. It will only sour them and other gaming companies when it comes to market and they don't come anywhere near their projections.

  • Just a question: exactly what does your mail server tell you when you receive a 600MB attachment?
  • I can download from european servers without using transcontinental bandwidth. Welcome to the rest of the world.

    And the headline is wrong too - it's a beta (according to the rest of the blurb), not a demo.
    --
    the telephone rings / problem between screen and chair / thoughts of homocide

  • mirror (Score:1)

    by dieman ( 4814 )
    ftp://209.98.65.241/pub/mirrors/ao/
  • That shouldn't be a big problem, as most of the traffic over the trans-Atlantic links usually goes in the other direction. In general users in Europe download a lot more data from the US than vice versa, which means that there should be a lot of unused capacity. :-)

    You might be wrong. A few years ago I heard it the other way around: the traffic from porn downloads on European servers to US customers was a lot bigger. This may have changed though.

  • According to the latest statistics, the European Union's 320 million people now has more *Internet users* than the USA's 250 million.

  • Makes me wonder if they will break the old record of ftp.cdrom.com, 996Gb on one day!

    If I've understood correctly, the download is available for 3 days, for 100.000 people. That means: 100.000 * 600Mb / 3 = 20.000.000 Mb

    That surely beats the old record :)

  • This isn't on one single site though, if you combined all the records from every site you'd get a rough number. But, not all people are downloading it, some are getting copies burned for them. Others, not even in the beta are downloading it, for some strange reason.

    ---
  • Yeah, I mean it only took em 4 days to crack everquest.. no wait.. they didn't

    ---

  • Mirrors.. (Score:4)

    by RAruler ( 11862 ) on Sunday June 10, 2001 @06:31AM (#162719) Homepage
    Bah, first of all its not a demo. Second mirrors are popping up all over the place, including Fileplanet which is no slouch for downloads.

    Fileplanet - AOBeta4.zip [217.199.34.244]
    Barrysworld (UK) - AOBeta4.zip [barryworlds.com]

    Some yahoo said that they'd post to alt.binaries.images when they get it, so if your a trusting person, and are willing to wait until your newserver to get it, that'd probably be the fastest.

    ---
  • I agree that the /. effect can be extremely hard on a network (it's quite like DoS attack now), but there are things you can do on the server side to compensate (somewhat) for it.

    How about a script that (after the 2nd or 3rd try in under a minute) blocks that IP address? After some length of time (12, 24 hours?) that IP address could be removed from the "blocked" list.

    Or disabling the slashdot "link", blocking requests to that direct link, and putting a .txt file in the directory advising users of an updated location. That way /.'ers will assume that the site has already been slashdotted and most won't go further into it, but others who are actually meant to get the software will probably go the extra step to grab it. et cetera, et cetera
  • The Stage 2 beta of Neocron [neocron.com] will be starting in a couple weeks or so, and two hundred people will be shipped CDs of the beta software. Neocron had originally intended to let everyone download its client software for free, but had to nix that option after its publisher objected, and after the size of the client file grew to about 550 megabytes, which they thought was too much to ask anyone to download. There's been a good bit of argument on the Neocron fora about whether the CDs will be shipped from Europe or North America when they are ready.

    This does raise a bit of a question about what will happen when Neocron expands its beta to several thousand people, though. Hmmmm.
    --

  • usenet (Score:5)

    by NMerriam ( 15122 ) <NMerriam@artboy.org> on Sunday June 10, 2001 @06:35AM (#162722) Homepage
    Or you could just wait for it to show up on Usenet warez groups (approximately 12 seconds after release)...

    ---------------------------------------------
  • That's why it's an Asinchronous line :)
    The difference between quality and quantity. (Oops...)
  • You are so right and I was too quick....

  • Re:If they're mailing the keys, why... (Score:4)

    by verbatim ( 18390 ) on Sunday June 10, 2001 @05:58AM (#162725) Homepage
    100,000.00 CD's
    x $0.50 each
    ==========
    $50,000.00
    + 10% shipping costs roughly 10%
    ==========
    $55,000.00

    Your "no-brainer" just got a tad expensive.

    OTOH, shove the image on a bunch of servers and clamp the bandwidth at a max 28.8bps and laugh as us westerners try to download ;).

    ---
    Computer Science: solving today's problems tomorrow.
  • I eventually managed to download it from a mirror somebody had put up at Linköping University (thanks if you're reading!) which meant a steady 60k/s on my ADSL from SUNET to Telia. This still took hours (and it was several hours until I found this mirror). I eventually finished downloading at around 5:30am after receiving the key at about 9:00pm the previous evening. So I eventually got it installed and ...

    It was bloody awful.

    I had heard so much about this "EverQuest-killer" that I had go really exciting during the eight and a half hours or so attempting to download it. I don't think I have ever had so much disappointment from a computer game. The MMORPG idea of attacking an NPC just does not work with guns. Pressing "q" and then waiting to shoot at a squirrel just seems wrong. We are so-used to the concept of guns, we have all used them in FPS style games that any way which doesn't involve pointing at an NPC and pressing the mousebutton to shoot just feels totally wrong.

    I tried it. Thanks but not thanks, back to EverQuest for me.
  • you may underestimate the amount of bandwidth available.

    I live in Gibraltar, have links directly to the UK, (so I'm only a couple hops away from the eastern seaboard). I get good high speeds from most sites in the US, and have no problems with any online gaming.

  • Swarmcast (Score:1)

    by vs ( 21446 )
    Nice :/ First the good news: Java Webstart & Swarmcast runs under Linux emulation in FreeBSD, too.

    Bad news: First thing Swarmcast wants to do is take over your machine, erm, I mean, its requesting "unrestricted access" from the runtime. And guess what: Webstart complains that the packages signature is invalid. I think Ill comply with Webstarts advise: Dont start Swarmcast.
  • It`s a shame how much money gets wasted on those certs.

    I just bought a S/MIME cert from German Telekom/T-Online just to find out that half of the Netscapes I tried it out on have botched root certs for this CA.

    On the other hand, I don't think anyone will notice this when he receives mail from us :/
  • Yeah, it's alot to grab, but surfing through the various mirrors gave me a server in Belgium that was able to saturate my 768K sDSL link with no slowdowns ... took about 2 hours to download.
  • I know slashdot's located in the States and all but still, it's in the worldwide domain, it's certainly reported when european politics have affected IT and the times get displayed in your selected timezone. It's used to recognising that there is a world outside of the US.

    So, why is this being remarked on, given that the EU has a higher population than the USA? It might have been a good idea to stick a server or two elsewhere - but it's not exactly unknown to see the reverse.
  • If you mean me then I meant sheer volume of people. Internet users I don't know but I'd suspect we're looking at a comparable figure at the minimum.

    Sidetrack: I'm a little curious who modded my comment as a troll :-) Oh well, can't please them all...
  • I don't understand it either. But while I live in the Netherlands, I still prefer US download sites over EU sites most of the time. I don't know why it is, but apparently there's more bandwidth between Amsterdam and the US than there is between Amsterdam and Munich.

    ----------------------------------------------
  • Only half of the 8 listed servers [216.74.158.92] are located in the EU. And one of them is listed as "Finland only". So unless you're sitting in Finland, four of the seven servers available to you are outside the EU.

    Yes, that's right. EU != Europe.

  • Just thought i would let everyone know, that it isnt 'snail' mailled keys, but 'emailed' keys. I just got mine through.
  • well.. duh! compare the fileplanet download link with the main funcom one...

    On a side note.. It's pretty damn nice to be on the right side of the atlantic for once! :)
    (Still has taken a whole day to get it tho..)

    /Emil
  • Duh. I miscalculated. 20,000 Gbyte/day is about 2 Gbit/sec, not 20. So it isn't that much after all. Still, with only 8 download sites over the world each site must be able to deliver 250 Mbit/sec sustained, probably 1 Gbit/sec peak. That still is a lot per site.

  • Simple math (Score:3)

    by miquels ( 37972 ) on Sunday June 10, 2001 @06:34AM (#162738) Homepage
    The download page only lists 8 locations over the world to download from. Even if all of those servers are connected with 1 Gbit/sec ethernet cards to "the backbone" (I know, there's no such thing), and they are able to max out that bandwidth, you cannot ever let 100.000 people download 600 MB worth of data.

    100,000 people downloading 600 MB over the coarse of 3 days, that's 20,000 Gbyte/day. That would be 20 Gbit/sec non-stop bandwidth. Assuming that a normal FTP server has trouble enough filling a 100 Mbit link, and that most sites don't have an OC48 link to the internet, they would need at least 200 download sites spread over the globe. Or 20 sites that have at least a 1 Gbit uplink and a small FTP server farm at each site.

    So they probably hope that only a few thousand people end up downloading the CD, otherwise they probably need to go talk to a company like Akamai.
  • The 5 cents mailing cost are just a *tad* optimistic.
    International mailing of a CD from Europe is probably in the range of $1-$2. The actual shipping container is probably about another 50 cents to $1. This doesn't include handling on their end (anyone care to stick 100,00 customs stickers?). So your probably looking at about $350,000.

    You can do better than this by transshipping to the US and then mailing, but overall, the cost of the goods is an insignificant part of the cost of the mailing.
  • The warez distribution network would be perfect for this. There's already supposed be a release of Unreal 2 (could be BS, I don't know).

    As of this post the layout of FTPs is:
    • 2 servers in Oslo - Norway
    • 1 server in Belgium
    • 1 server in Germany
    • 1 server in Finland
    • 1 server in the UK
    • 1 server in the USA
    • 1 server in Australia.

    Sure I live in AU with The Worst Cable Ever, but as of this posting, the Australian and American FTPs are down, I can get about 1KB/s out of both servers in Norway. And the Finnish FTP is for Fins only.

    Suffice to say I'm practicing my follicle removal, trying to login to non-existant servers.


    ===
    Hacker - "Let me make one thing clear, Humphrey is not God."
  • yes thats probably wiser to do.. although it would cost more if a big number of beta testers is located outside US... like me. :)

  • It's not bandwidth-limited, it's stupidity limited (Score:4)

    by Barnes ( 48925 ) on Sunday June 10, 2001 @09:03PM (#162742)
    (yet another /. effect story)
    I'm a sysadmin with one of the download sites - the one in Australia, Pacific Internet [pacific.net.au]. I wasn't the one who put up the mirror site in the first place, but I was the one who cleaned up the mess. When the mirror was originally put up, it was using a sizeable chunk of our bandwidth - big enough that our Networks team noticed it and wondered what was up. So we limited the number of downloads to ~40, and all was good for a number of days. Sure, it would be hard to get on, but if you were in Australia (or the US, most likely) it'd be faster than not getting it.
    Then what happened? Slashdot happened.
    Suddenly, the server was getting hammered by thousands of people who thought "Ooh, 600M of prerelease game. Better give my Cable/DSL/work T3 a work-out", and completely failed to read the section reading "If you know you did not sign up for beta, you don't need to download the client".
    So if you're one of those people, (especially that one guy on @home cable in washington who tried every 5-10 seconds for 3 hours) congratulations, you spoilt it for everyone (well, for the 40 users allowed to connect, anyway).
    I'll probably put it back up again in a couple of days, once the greed effect wears off.

    Barnes
  • > I'm a sysadmin with one of the download sites

    Likewise, of Peliportti.net.

    My story is pretty much same as your's except that we didn't get much of additional Slashdot effect. I guess Slashdoters can understand "Finland only", unlike the one guy at stonebrook.edu who sent around 200000 request for the file during Sunday. *sigh*

    Traffic is pretty much normal right now ...

    --Flam
  • Come on now.. do you think this is seriously going to affect the internet in any palpitable way whatsoever? Any ISP worth it's weight in fiber has large (OC3, 12, 48, 192) international interconnects, and LOTS of them. The point of the internet is that things are generally supposed to be location-independant. It doesn't matter if you're sending packets across domestic, terrestrial circuits from SanFran->NY, at 80ms or so, or from EU->NY at 100ms or so. Your downloads are going to look roughly the same, as does the capacity on those links. _Maybe_ you'll flood some smaller ISP's tunnel which is underprovisioned and oversubscribed but come on.. have a little more faith in the infrastructure. An undersea link is sometimes even cheaper to run than domestic bandwidth, since you're just sinking wires to a few hundred (or thousand) ft, and not burying cable across developed land. So don't expect this to be noticed by anyone.

    //Phizzy

  • Re:If they're mailing the keys, why... (Score:5)

    by rommi ( 61644 ) on Sunday June 10, 2001 @06:06AM (#162745)
    Actually, they are not mailing the keys, they are e-mailing the keys.

    I know that, because I received one.

  • Easy. You don't. (Score:3)

    by Convergence ( 64135 ) on Sunday June 10, 2001 @07:25AM (#162746) Homepage Journal
    If you're in eurpoe and you want to ship 50,000 CD's to the US, you don't ship them.

    You contact a friendly CD duplicator in the US and pay them to manufacture and ship the CD's domestically.

  • Another reason? Try this... do a traceroute and see if Amsterdam to Munich isn't really Amsterdam to US to Munich as happens frequently ;)
  • Um, first, that would be "asynchronous [m-w.com]", and second, the word you're looking for is probably asymmetric(al) [m-w.com]". Mmkay? ;^)

  • It stands for "asymmetrical", because the bandwidth is not symmetrical, i.e. it is not the same in both directions on the wire. To be specific, the bandwidth available downstream (into the home) is typically larger than the one available upstream (out of the home). This is because ADSL is designed in a consumer-centric way, assuming and/or implying that most users do not want to run servers.

    Also, if you read my comment again, you'll hopefully come to the conclusion that I was indeed right. The original comment (#17) [slashdot.org] by Teun was both misspelled and incorrect, and I tried to correct it on both accounts. Just trying to help, you know. ;^)

  • and post the keyname here.
  • Well, someone's bound to crack it pretty soon...


    ---
  • This is slightly tragic. There -was- a US serv listed, but it sure as heck isn't hosting the file anymore. I'm getting it off 4Players, but Germany-To-US over a 56K dialup is going to take several days. This had damn well better be worth my time, considering the only reason I was signed up at all was cuz I got AO mixed up with Planetside...
  • They are sending the CDKeys by EMAIL not regular mail. I got mine by email and every one that I know of has gotten theirs the same way.

  • That would be 20 Gbit/sec non-stop bandwidth

    There are 86400 seconds in a day. Assume 10 bits per byte (stop bits, etc) and you get 2.3Gigabit/sec. Assuming that the 20,000 Gigabyte/day figure is accurate.

  • Pearl Harbour

    Uh, that's "Pearl Harbor", silly Englishman... ;-)

    Let's make a deal -- we'll use your anachronistic English spellings when refering to British place names, if you'll use our creative American spellings when refering to American place names, ok?

    The Patriot

    Everybody knows this was just a remake of "Braveheart" with "American colonies" substituted for "Scotland" and "sons" substituted for "wife". I assure you that, although it was quite an emotional stirring movie, even the most gullible Americans (and that's pretty darn gullible!) don't accept it as historical fact.

  • Well, you must have gotten in ahead of the game, because most of the download sites are now down, and even continuously retrying for 24 hours I've only logged on to 2 sites, downloading a whopping 21k.

  • What's the difference? (Score:4)

    by qts ( 100793 ) on Sunday June 10, 2001 @12:45PM (#162757)
    I fail to see the difference between Europeans downloading something from America and Americans downloading something from Europe.

    We do have the internet over here, you know.

  • well.. (Score:4)

    by pheber ( 107615 ) on Sunday June 10, 2001 @06:27AM (#162758) Homepage
    from their download page:

    Download from Funcom, East Coast, USA [anarchyonline.com] (This may be unavailable from time to time)

    Download [pacific.net.au] from Pacific Internet (Australia) Pty. Ltd [pacific.net.au]

  • They had thought of using freenet. Split the file into chunks and post the keys to the beta testers. That way the file goes across the atlantic once. Probably.

    D'oh - that's what happens when you turn cookies off

  • it is zipped
  • Here's a hint: DO NOT download it if you don't have a cd key in your email inbox.
  • I think you mean 12 seconds before release. Warez fiends are extremely efficient distributors.

    For example, the game Alone in the Dark was released in the US by warez fiends several months before it was officially released. The warez fiends had grabbed a French version of the game, hacked it, and translated it themselves, long before the official translation was complete.

    Negative six month warez!

    -- Agthorr

  • The connection to australia is a lot worse than to Europe
  • I've been trying to download the bloody thing for about two days now with no success. I live on the east coast in the US and haven't had any luck with the EU servers. Hopefully things'll pick up, I'm looking forward to giving AO a whirl.
  • More to the point, there were 100,000 keys mailed out. But only seven distribution points(4players doesn't appear to be hosting the DL anymore). Assuming that even half of the recipients want to download the game. Even if we all got in a line and waited our turn politely, is it even possible for such a small number of servers to handle the load over the next 2-3 weeks? Since I've recieved my key(early saturday) my DL manager has been cycleing through them since and only had success once. The connection promptly gave up around the 73 meg mark(512k dsl). Oh, and that particualr server doesn't support resume. :) Not that they're alone, this kind of short sightedness seems rampant in the MMOG development community.
  • The download page only lists 8 locations over the world to download from. Even if all of those servers are connected with 1 Gbit/sec ethernet cards to "the backbone" (I know, there's no such thing), and they are able to max out that bandwidth, you cannot ever let 100.000 people download 600 MB worth of data.
    But the ISPs have http and ftp caches, right? So it's not like every copy of the image is going to come from one of those eight servers.
  • And it it does not come with MD5 keys... you could easily be downloading a virus or trojan...

    I suggest that Slashdot Whitehat hackers take down this company to protect the world.
  • I might not, but I would have the Freedom to waste my time doing so.

  • Just a question: exactly what does your mail server tell you when you receive a 600MB attachment?

    It very politely tells the sending MTA that the message is too large. That MTA had better generate a bounce message back to the sender saying the same thing.

    What's in your mail server?

  • Yeah, I know, no one cares about this anymore. Hell, its the driving force behind broadband. But still, you think that if this company were mailing out the CD-Keys anyways, they could mail the CDs. It just seems like an irresponsible use of bandwidth.

    Granted, people download ISOs of RH, Debian, Slack, etc all of the time, and I don't complain... But in this instance, they were mailing something anyways, and it couldn't have cost them THAT much more to mail a lightweight compact disk, and to maybe have the online downloading available as a backup plan.

  • Yeah, too bad paying per minute is a more capitalist concept than paying by the month, or you'd have a point now, wouldn't you?
  • Wow, talk about second rate. How much did Dreamworks pay for that, anyways?
  • Nope. You be wrong. Just because you can spell doesn't mean you're smart. What does the A in ADSL stand for again? And WHY does it stand for that? HMM?
  • For years and years the warez people with their releases couriers and sites has generated this kind of bandwidth load, so in comparison, talking about a burnout test is kinda a joke.

    humm, I wonder if the warez scene over the years have helped the buildout of the physical infrastructure.

  • EU as a continent will have more population than the USA as a country becuase of that© And we have a higher percentage of people online© So that's why more things are based in the USA©
  • I signed up for the beta awhile ago, and said I was running linux for my OS since they said they'd eventually have a linux client. Well, I just got accepted, but I see only Windows stuff and I'm not too keen on downloading 600MB over a 56k just to see if it has the linux client. Is there currently a linux client? If so, where can I get it? I want to play the game, but I'd like to see it now before I become a paying customer after the linux client actually comes out.
  • Would be 656MBytes, not Mbits.

    (Not trying to be pedantis, it's just that some people don't know.)

  • Umm... they aren't sending the keys out via snail-mail... they're emailing the keys. Oh and just imagine if they tried emailing 100,000 600MB files... ouch
  • I fail to see the difference between Europeans downloading something from America and Americans downloading something from Europe. We do have the internet over here, you know.

    not quite... i received the cd key via emal on the 8th.. since then i've been continously trying to get the game.. and so far this is what i have..

    168616504 Jun 9 14:52 AOBeta4.zip

    and that was after over 10 hours of dl at 1.something k/s.. notice that i havent been able write to the file for over 24 hours.. why is that?.. becuase the all of the servers are either full or down.. most of them only allow 50 simutanious logins.. compare that to say one of microsofts servers that allows for 10,000 simutanious logins.. the difference becomes obvious: most eurpean servers just doesnt have the bandwidth to serve as many people as the american ones..
  • Assuming some of you guys or gals give up on the DL, I'd take a tester key. =) gthomas@(no.spam)grioghar.org (remove the no.spam) if you even consider ditching your key.

    Grioghar

  • There's at least another big game, around 600MB.

    It's called " Steel Panthers: World at War [matrixgames.com]", from Matrix Games [matrixgames.com]. It's an übercool tactical, World War 2, combat game. You have different countries, scenarios, long campaigns, 1 tank is 1 tank... a virtual Saving Private Ryan.

    It's just wonderful.

    Even though it does not run neither with Linux nor WINE nor Win4Lin nor vmWare... believe me, I've tried :( I can install it OK under any of those, but it works in none, sofar. Not yet :) If you make it work, under Linux, please contact me.

  • Lineage: The Blood Pledge = 650 MB download

    And that's only for the Beta/demo software.. (can be fully registered online though ) The game lists OVER 970,000 registered players, so I figure many of them started out with the downloaded software.

    Actually, Steel Panthers: World at War is the third huge release in 12 months. Yes, last year there were 2 versions: v.4.0 and v.4.5. Now, they have released the v.5.01. And all of them have been of around 650MB.

    Last year I had a 250Kbps connection. Today, I surf at 2500 Kpbs make it easier :)

    BTW, did I mentioned that this a fully-functional FreeWare game? You can buy it, also, on CD with an extra set of scenarios (Called "DesertFox Megacampaign") for a cheap price. Check their web.

    Anyway, those guys at Matrix rock. If they only would port it to Linux... or make it work under WINE..... Then, I would not have to bring home my work laptop, loaded with Windows...company requirements, but with a nifty vmware + Linux install :)

  • Well, the file is 599 MBytes... so its pretty damn close to a full cd...
  • He said percentage wise..... Not sheer volume...
  • never 100,000 from 8 servers tho, and a lot of the warez traffic is mirrors inside the US.
  • Mod up, he's right. Earlier, FP just put up the AO site (lame) and called it good. They must have had as much trouble getting it as the rest of us.
  • Hmm, smells like troll to me. True, it's not a FPS, but it's worlds better than EQ, and I'd say the graphics alone put it ahead of the others ( haven't played, so I don't have a for sure opinion)

    But I insist, if you're testing, wait at least for your first sunset/sunrise combo. About an hour. I was just swept away by the beauty. Plus, no more camping, no more waiting for quest items to respawn. It's all handled by their quest generation routines. Neato.

    Also, if you're not going to play with the other children, send your key to someone who will. I've got one, but several people on here offered cash to get one. I'd go for that, but it's too much fun.

  • Bandwidth? There is a lot in that direction. (Score:3)

    by eram ( 245251 ) on Sunday June 10, 2001 @05:56AM (#162788)

    However, the more interesting thing is that each of these people has to download a CD worth of information from servers mostly located in the EU. This may well be one of the largest tests of trans-continental bandwidth ever, as I've never heard of 100,000 people trying to download a single game in the space of 3 days or so

    That shouldn't be a big problem, as most of the traffic over the trans-Atlantic links usually goes in the other direction. In general users in Europe download a lot more data from the US than vice versa, which means that there should be a lot of unused capacity. :-)

  • Any ISP worth it's weight in fiber has large (OC3, 12, 48, 192) international interconnects, and LOTS of them.

    No ISP on the planet has "lots" of OC-192 international links, particularly not intercontinental.

    UUnet, the biggest player out there, has two OC-48s between Europe and North America.

    P.S. Look up "palpable" and "palpitate" in the dictionary sometime.

  • Slashdot is turning into such a hype machine it's ridiculous.

    100,000 users downloading 600 MB is 60 TB. To do that in 3 days you need about an average bandwidth utilization of about 1,862 mbps.

    I don't know how much bandwidth is running in between the US and EU, but I'm sure there is a boatload. A single OC-48 can handle this (2,488 mbps max)

    These guys [streamload.com] deliver much more than that every day. Do some research Slashdot.
  • One reason for this (there may be others) is that Europe and the US are in different time zones and Amsterdam and Munich aren't.

    When you download during normal working hours in Europe it's still very early in the US thus bandwith and server capacity is less stressed in the US than in Europe at that time of the day.

  • HA (Score:1)

    by Shazow ( 263582 )
    first off, its 599 megs second, they released the files well prior before the keys were released third, as a beta tester, I must say that is was well worth the download. and fourth, sending out CDs, that would require addresses which not all beta testers provided and blah blah blah i gotta go :) - Shadow
  • They're not mailing keys, they're e-mailing them.
    But I wouldn't have complained if they had mailed me a CD.
  • Hehe, I got into the 4th Beta, but I just moved and my internet connection is down, with only ISDN awaiting me at the new place!

    Methinks an FTP client with resume capability is of the order...

  • > And in my country...internet access is
    > time-metered (stupid telcoms monopoly)

    Live by the socialist sword, die by the socialist sword...

  • I can imagine all the int'l. ISP's looking at their cables on the ocean floor and saying, "WTF!"

  • Charging by the minute is very undesirable to the consumer. In a capitalist (i.e. free, specifically, free from government-guaranteed monopolies) country, no one can stop other greedy capitalists from competing for flat-rate access.

    Normal modem access is virtually free now, high-speed access is almost free (ca. $50/mo worst case, where available), cell phones are a dime a minute for any calls whatsoever, long distance or otherwise; meanwhile a socialist monopoly telco will whine to the government about costs, impracticality, costs, blah blah blah and politicians bend their ear and pass more idiotic laws to protect this fragile, obese flower of an organization/pseudo corporation that sits like a lardass bon-bon eater on a sofa whining "I should have been born a queen!"

  • Not all that bad? 600MB at 28.8 will take around 2.5 to 3 days. That's assuming you don't get disconnected on a dial-up, or if you're not using dial-up, its assuming that you don't actually want to use that connection for anything else for those 3 days. And in my country (admittedly I'm not a "westerner") internet access is time-metered (stupid telcoms monopoly :( ..), we'd pay roughly the equivalent of 25 US$ for 3 days. Thats just for the time spent online, that doesn't include the monthly ISP fee.

  • ...aren't they mailing the CDs? It seems logical, and cds only cost what, fifty cents these day? It seems like a no-brainer. Of course, this might be a form of stress test for the servers and client machines...

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