Understanding network resources
We’ve already mentioned the importance of bandwidth and throughput; in Chapter 1, Setting up a Server, we even had a brief introduction to and a visual representation of the topic in Figure 1.3 and Figure 1.4. Now it’s time to wrap our heads around these concepts, which are fundamental to network usage optimization and will be our major resources to measure the improvements we made toward our optimization goals.
As a general rule, the less bandwidth and the lower the throughput of our network code, the better. Of course, we need to keep in mind that all optimizations should maintain the game experience, so we are in a very delicate position. Different from other processing, memory, and graphics optimizations, our work can’t create “beautiful accidents,” such as a processing optimization that can lead to a cool mechanic. No, our job as network engineers is to replicate the already established mechanics and effects...
