[ENet-discuss] Questioning a server without connecting to it

[Emmanuel Rivoire]

Hello,

At 22:48 25/05/2012, you wrote:
>Perhaps I am wrong, but I believed the overhead for a few bytes 
>within a packet was almost zero.
>Here's my logic:
>If the packet is smaller than the 1500 byte maximum packet size then 
>the packet will be enlarged and no additional packets will be sent.
>10 bytes / 10 megabit per second = 1 microsecond of overhead to 
>serialize the bytes.
>A very good network latency is 2 milliseconds.
>1 microsecond / 2 milliseconds =  0.05% additional overhead in 
>transmission time
>
>The only additional overhead I see in the game program is the time 
>to serialize/deserialize the additional bytes.
>I can't estimate those since I don't know how your code does this.
>
>If this is wrong, or overly simplistic, I'd be happy to learn where 
>it's wrong.

My game is mainly played over Internet, and some people still have 
only 128kbps of upload, and in real it usually can handle less than 
that. But even with that the transfer time for 10 bytes isn't too 
big, the issue isn't really here.
But Internet is a big place with congestion, stalling & packet loss, 
and to avoid all of that, my guess is it's better to have the 
smallest packets possible, so I see no reason to send unneeded bytes, 
especially when it's not so hard to remove them.

Another issue is that some people have capped download/upload amount 
per month. So any saved bandwidth is good for them.