P2P Closed Beta Test Results

Thanks to all who came to either session of the VastPark and Badumna beta test. We had 12 of you running around concurrently with users from around the globe (Australia, Canada, Japan, UK and USA). While things didn't go too smoothly in the first session the guys over at NICTA quickly identified the responsible component in Badumna resulting in a much smoother experience in the second session.

Some findings from our friend David Churchill over at NICTA...

"From what we observed within the park and through our diagnostic tools, all users had a very smooth experience and there were no crashes throughout the test. We also confirmed that everyone was able to see everyone else(except for two users who were unable to see each other, although they could see everyone else). We also monitored the bandwidth used by our peers at NICTA. The results were within our expectations, although they highlighted a number of optimisations we can make. In particular, Craig refereed three teddy bear races which allowed us to identify a bug in our dead-reckoning code. Updates are being sent much more frequently than necessary, and fixing this bug should significantly reduce our bandwidth requirements."

"The two graphs show the bandwidth used on my peer as we ran back to get ready for the third race (graph 1), and as the race was run (graph 2). Time in seconds is on the horizontal axis, and bytes sent/received during the second on the vertical (so the graphs roughly show bytes/second over time). Outbound from my peer is in black, and inbound in red. In the first graph you can clearly see the outbound peak as I ran back, while the inbound hovers at a lower rate as everyone else moves back at their own pace. In contrast, you can see both inbound and outbound peak at the same time in the second graph as everyone started running at once (looks like a pretty fair start!). Both inbound and outbound settle down again as people arrived at the finish."

We also monitored the bandwidth inbound and outbound of the vastverse server during the tests. The graph below represents the data transferred to aquire the p2p-test-room document and any items that weren't already cached by the 12 clients that were connecting.

The P2P Test Room is still open for anybody in the closed beta group. You can access it by following the links in the VastPark Imp, if you missed the instructions you can find them here.
We have made available the chat transcipt for both test 1 and test 2. If you would like a read follow the links.

I'll leave you with some screenshots for your viewing pleasure, for larger versions click on the thumbnails.