🎉 Celebrating 25 Years of GameDev.net! 🎉

Not many can claim 25 years on the Internet! Join us in celebrating this milestone. Learn more about our history, and thank you for being a part of our community!

Back to Networking and Multiplayer

Limiting bandwidth usage of a download from client side

Ian Reed · 2018-04-04T20:14:39

I'd like my game client to download some extra assets in the background, but I want it to rate limit itself so it has less effect on any other network traffic. I imagine I could rate limit on the server side through a web server setting, but I'd rather the client gets to choose its own rate limit so it can also have times when it downloads at a faster rate. What is the right way to do this? I'll be using HTTPS for the downloads. Is there some way to inform the TCP or HTTP stack that you only want to receive data at a certain speed for a particular connection? Or do I have to just slow down the rate at which I am reading it from the HTTP stream? Slowing down my rate of reading seems like I am relying on TCP fallback logic to handle my slow processing speed, rather than informing it up front that I want to be a good citizen and use less bandwidth.

Networking and Multiplayer Programming

Started by Ian Reed March 31, 2018 06:26 PM

10 comments, last by Ian Reed 6 years, 3 months ago

Ian Reed

183

Author

April 04, 2018 08:14 PM

I see what you mean. There are definitely a lot of network factors outside of my control.
I just wanted to make sure the asset downloader that is within my control would not be the cause of a poor gameplay experience, but perhaps I am over thinking it.
Thanks for the advice.