Suitable Client Server setup for Network Game testing - networking

I am sorry if my question is obvious, but i need the expert suggestion/views, i want to test my Client/Server game for which currently, i am using localhost same machine for both Client and Server.
that's why i not getting any fluctuation in data and measure idea of performance, and in other parameters, what i wanted to ask to have a real world scenario:
if i create a little network with two computers or
if check that on LAN on which i am or
ARE THESE THREE CASES (localhost included) ARE EQUIVALENT? or
I really need to test that on different LANs to have reliable testing data and realistic data,
How these different network setups will influence the testing process?
Can somebody please suggest, which could be the ideal way or enough for testing?
which above setup will give me more up and downs in number with LEAST setup/implementing efforts.
Note: The game is suppose to play on the LAN but it is capable of more.
Thanks,
Jibbylala
P.S: i m newbie in network stuff so if u used the wrong terms, vocabulary pardon me
emphasized text

You will want to test your application under different situations. For example, test it using a small LAN where you only have one switch between the two computers. That will ensure that you can, in fact, connect and play over a simple LAN. Then, test different LAN connections such as a slow link (turn a network card down to 10 Mbps), on a wireless LAN, and if possible even a larger or corporate-type LAN. The more testing you can do about different situations, the better. Testing on just your localhost will not be enough.

Related

Connecting Rime network to the Internet

I have been playing with Contiki for some time now and have tried out various examples and wrote my own for both the simulation environment and the real hardware. I have only been experimenting with self contained networks that, for example, measure the temperature difference between two nodes and then communicate that data with other devices (PCs) over plain text RS232 link, blink LEDs, and such simple stuff.
Now I want to make a more complicated system where instead of just forwarding the data in plain text to be read on a console I would forward it to an application that would in turn post it to some sort of web service and, vice versa, receive data from web service to be delivered to nodes on the network. There is quite a lot of examples and tutorials describing this kind of setup but all of them (as far as I am aware) are focusing on the IP(v6) stack and SLIP to achieve this. The problem with this is that I have a really lousy programmer and uploading of a 50 kB image takes about 1.5 mins so the development cycle is pure hell. I am also out of luck with simulation since my platform is not really supported at the moment.
That's why I decided to try out the Rime stack, image size is 1/3 of the IPv6 and the development cycle is somewhat acceptable now (I really should get a decent JTAG programmer...) Meanwhile, I am having a bit of trouble wrapping my head around this new setup with a different network stack on which there is very little information around. Although it is pretty easy to understand by itself, I am not sure how I would go about connecting a Rime network to an IP network and if it was even possible or advised/intended by it's designers.
I have some ideas in my head, ranging from ad hoc communication over a serial link between a server application running on the PC and the collector node, to a real Rime border router that is certainly outside of my league, for now.
How would you go about it? It would certainly work for my simple experimental case to just have a collector node that gathers the data from the Rime network and sends the aggregated data over a serial connection to the custom application that does the rest of the magic, but, I wouldn't want to be the guy that reinvented the wheel and I am quite sure that Rime wasn't designed to be used in a vacuum so there must be at least an advised way of doing this?
Rime is a really simple stack (By simple I mean few functionnality). But it's quite quicker for simple task.
You need to program the Rime stack on your gateway. Thus, your board and the gateway can communicate with the same stack. So now you have the data send on your gateway. The gateway now can send the data with IP to whoever you want.
If you want more technical detail, then edit your question with more specific technical context.
Btw JTAG is a must have. (for industrial application)
Edit : An other solution is to simply send your data from your board to your gateway in broadcast. Then the gateway take the data and interpret it. The cons of this method is you have to somehow be sure that your gateway interpret only the data of your board (not of others board)

for multiplayer is server needed to connect players to each other

I am trying to understand mechanism of how internet work...i understand dns. But this raise a question that if same is true for multiplayer games as well.
There are two type of multiplayer games that i have seen..Local/Lan and Online.
In online either you connect to a server or one of the people you are with becomes the host.
SO my question is basically can lobby be constructed without needing a server to reffer each player to the pool of players.
If not, than isn't it primitive. Shouldn't there be a way to create unique virtual infinite strings that each client could send request to and tell internet that hey direct all data headed to this address to me too.
The two architectures for multiplayer games that are most common are server based and peer-to-peer. Any code you could run on a server, sure - you could run it on a peer to peer basis as well. Simply, put the server code as the peer "server" code.
So in your lobby example, perhaps you could have the client code seek peer-to-peer-based servers versus normal servers. The seeking is the same as in the traditional client-server architecture... just different machines doing the work.
The point is, the client code and server code YOU WRITE has plenty of flexibility to do what you are asking. It just isn't necessarily the easiest way to do these things, so you may not find that people do what you are describing very often. Big games like WoW have plenty of big server machines.
I mean, versus a normal server architecture you could go for something like:
It boils down to what you mean by "server". If you are asking whether it is necessary that some machine run different code than all the others, in order to produce a multi-player game, my answer to that is no. But then each peer will be likely running some code that has traditional "server" functionality.

Building a small 4 node cluster - few quick questions about networking

I'm putting together a small 4 node cluster on which I'm going to be running storm. I have a few questions about the networking side of things. First off all the computers are equipped with gigabit ethernet however the hub that I currently have only goes up to 100 megabits. Should I upgrade my hub? Or will the performance gain be negligible? Second I read on a few sites that a hub is not the best piece of hardware to use that a switch would be better for my purposes. I'm trying to use Storm to have one machine pull data down from the internet and then pass it off to the others for processing. Would a switch or hub be more useful? Thanks for all your help folks.
A Router can allow for serious networking capabilities, it's also oftentimes overkill. With only 4 machines you're probably much more likely to want a Gigabit Switch instead: sold in stores oftentimes under the name Gigabit Router -- which is technically a lie as it's usually a Bridge (Hub or Switch, Networking has a lot of overloaded names). Router are many times more expensive than Switches if you have difficulty identifying between the two from just marketing names. A hub on the other hand is oftentimes a dumb Switch with less capabilities (and sometimes speed penalties in high data flow situations).
The question as to if you need to upgrade is dependent on where you bottleneck is. Is the data you're sending large? Do your cluster computer spend a lot of time computing instead of receiving data? First determine if your networking speed will be your bottleneck, then decide if you should upgrade that bottleneck. If you're worried about network speed but aren't 100% sure it will be a bottleneck, a cheap 1 Gigabit Switch won't cost you much and will almost certainly meet you're needs.
Also note that if you're data needs to first come over the internet (isn't generated on your side of the network) you're bottleneck will almost certainly be your internet connection before your local network.
So essentially, profile your problem before making a choice.

is it possible to limit the network traffic from my PC to my PC?

Hi Guys I'm debugging some CS program and to view the performance of the application in slow internet I tried many different ways. However the best would be the Server and the client be in the same PC ---- my debugging environments for both the server side and the client is setup in one PC.
So I'm wondering is there anyway to limit the speed? I'm using TCP but I don't know too much in-depth knowledge of it.
Thank you
There are two important factors regarding a "slow" internet connection that you need to test out since they have different implications for your application: bandwidth and latency.
If you provide some more details about what os you are running your tests on, it would be easier to recommend a way to limit the network performance.
On a related side note, it's generally a bad idea to performance test any kind of networking using the loopback device on your machine, since many aspects of this will perform very different than the regular network device on your machine.
You mention in the comments this needs to be done on windows, while the Network Emulators I know of (e.g. netem, TCN, other variants) all require Linux. So one thing you could do is create a virtual machine (VirtualBox is fine, I did similar things with it), install linux on it, configure 2 network interfaces, emulate the slow/long/lossy/jittery network between them, and route the test traffic through it from windows.
Finally I found this does what I need.
http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/socket_sniffer.html
Captures Windows Socket traffic, no matter it's local or not.

prove network is truly unavailable

I have an old school foxpro web app that I am trying to help limp along while I rewrite the system. Every day, multiple times, I get this following error message: The specified network name is no longer available.
Does anyone have any suggestions how to troubleshoot this? Perhaps, prove to my IT guys that there really is a network issue. I have theories, but I have no idea how to prove anything, it always comes back to foxpro sucks rewrite it now.
I'll take any help, tools, and will answer any questions that may clarify this for you.
thanks
We have a very large multi-user VFP application on hundreds of sites. Occasionally you get this sort of problem. It is almost always down to environmental issues.
Had one just recently where a client had two machines continually crashing out of the VFP application. Network IT guys swearing up and down that it's not their problem. But what's this in the System Log of both machines? Why, it's the Broadcom NIC reporting a network link loss detected at the same times the application crashed.
Check if the client and server NICs in your situation can report this.
You could consider writing a small program that pings the network resource periodically. You might just look for a file and if the network is failing and the program cannot find the file email the folks in charge of the network and yourself. This would be an independent app, and best if not written in FoxPro so you can independently prove it is not the application or the language/tool it was written in.
I have seen this when networks have bad wiring, a bad port on the switch/hub, a failing NIC in the mix, and sometimes when the network is just flooded with requests from workstations.
You also did not mention if this was a wireless connection. I am hoping not, but I have seen wireless (especially slower wireless) hubs fail with respect to the network overload and slow and unreliable performance. Especially compared to a wired network.
Rick Schummer
In addition to the comments about IP address, is the setting on the network controller to be energy efficient? and thus turn itself off when not actively in use.

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