When multiple people are in vicinity of each other, the network usage sky-rockets.
When playing alone, I get between 100-300 Kbps (kilobit) in received data. When im joined by a friend, that spikes to 600-800 Kbps in received data. With 4 people, its up to 1.3 to 1.6 Mbps.
Join an empty server, open up a network monitor.
Have your friends, 1 by 1, log in next to you. watch the revived data increase every time.
We all have a decent amount of loot, so it could potentially be related to an item we are all carrying.
EDIT* Turns out, its caused by items that have an inventory themselves (medkits/protector cases/ammo boxes)
while there's an increase in network activity per client in the vicinity. its drastically reduced as long as nobody is carrying items with an inventory
We don't have more than 4 people to test with, but I assume this linear progression keeps ramping up.
My friend only has 1.4 megabits on a good day. which means that when we are playing in a group of 4, he cant play with us.
1.6 mbits is roughly 700mb for a 1 hour session of dayz, if you have bandwidth caps, this is a big issue.
We only noticed this bug, recently but we dont know when it was introduced since we dont always play 4 of us together.
In addition, when somebody enters your network bubble, you get a big spike in download. Like my 4mbps connection maxed out big spike. before it settles on the higher base-level.
In essence, this means you can keep the network monitor up on a second monitor, and know when, and how many people just came within whatever the network bubble distance is.
My friend on a 1mbps connection gets disconnected when there are a few players around. Hope this gets fixed.
Me and my friend just tested it by dropping all of our protector cases, medkits and ammo-cans. we went from 700-900kbps with just the 2 of us. to 200-400 kbps with just the 2 of us. so yeah, the wast amount of download usage is in part caused by items with inventories.
nice find, didnt notice my network usage, cause i have direct desync with the items leading to NO network usage. But this is potentially related to the game breaking desync bug.
http://feedback.dayzgame.com/view.php?id=8977
Dev may want to consider not sending the whole inventory and keep everything server side? like instead of storing acopy of inventory locally, updating it then sending it back, you can do something like item slot #X moves to slot #Y and send that simple message over the network, minimizing network usage massively.
its definitly caused by storage boxes, i emptied al my various condensed store stuff into me and my friends inventory, exact same number of items, just no protector cases/medkits/ammo boxes. all the bandwidth issues gone
Same here, just cannot play with my 256 kbps connection. When my 2 friends with decent amount of loot get near me, my internet connections start to struggle and i don't recieve any updates of the environment. But when i bumped into several empty newbies like me on the coast - all been fine.
It's game breaking, i've not lagging while playing some massively MMO like EVE, but when i get 2 people around me in DayZ i've get constant desync.
My friend with a 1 mb connection continues to have this issue after the latest update/hotfix. :( he really likes this game but can't play near geared players with a 1mb connection.