I am developing a relatively fast paced game (Flash/Apache Mina Server back end) and I am having some difficulty getting an accurate benchmark of the type of bandwidth my current setup would use.
My question is: How do I get an accurate benchmark of the bandwidth required for my tests? What I am doing now wouldn't take into account any overhead?
On the message sent/received methods I am doing
[out/in]Bandwidth+= message.toString().getBytes().length;
I then print out the current values every 250 milliseconds (since that is how frequently "world" updates are done currently) .
With 10 "monsters" all randomly moving around and 1 player randomly moving around I am getting this output.. (1 second window here)
In bandwidth: 1647, Outgoing: 35378
In bandwidth: 1658, Outgoing: 35585
In bandwidth: 1669, Outgoing: 35792
In bandwidth: 1680, Outgoing: 35999
So acting strictly on the size of the messages (outgoing) being passed that works out to about 621 bytes/second or (621/10) 62.1 bytes per second per constantly moving item on screen per person. This seems a little low, a good high speed connection could handle 1000+ object updates per second at this "rate" no problem.
Something definitely smells fishy here. According to the performance testing provided by them: here mina is capable of 20K+ 405 byte requests per second on ~10 connections - way more than what you're seeing.
My guess is that there is some kind of theading\timing issue going on here that is causing the delay. I would enlist the help of a packet tracing application such as wireshark and see if your observations in code mesh with the raw network data. I would also try "flooding" the server side with more data if possible - this might provide some insight to where the issue lies.
I hope this helps, good luck.