I'd like to introduce myself. Skuzzy, I am the chief cook and bottle washer at AppLink Corp. The guys that are responsible for hosting the HTC server.
I just started flying in the training arena and am getting my wings wet.
I will be monitoring the BB for posts about network related information and also invite you to use my email address for sending in queries, or at least copying me on queries about the network performance.
Like HTC, we want feedback. The Internet is not a stable beast, but a vary dynamic beast. At AppLink we qualify aspects of network performance as follows:
hiccups: These occur when a route may change or a new block of IP addresses are brought up on the Internet and are being used for the first time. They ususally last a few seconds and are unavoidable.
burps: When a router needs maintenance, anywhere on the Internet, and routes have to be re-routed to bypass the inflicted router, a loss of connections occurs and can last anywhere from 3 seconds to 20 seconds.
belches: This occurs, most likely, when a router loses its connection due to something done at the telco office. These can last from 20 seconds to hours, but once past 1 minute, it becomes a fart.
farts: The most serious of temporary outages. A combination of all the above, parts of all the above, or some other human/technical error has occurred, without warning, and usually not intended.
Anything past the above is just serious breakage and causes me to lose a lot of sleep.
Maybe you don't care, but I thought I woul let you know how we rate things.
I will also be testing various video cards and drivers with the sim and will post info about this.
Just wanting to help out. We do care about the quality of service and, like the HTC guys do about their sim, we make our best effort to let people know about Internet problems which could effect connections.
As a side note; HiTech and I had a good laugh this morning when we looke at the download stats from last night. I can't tell you what it means to design a network to withstand a high load and then have the oppertunity to see it actually work, without a single hiccup, burp, fart or anything remotely related.
One thing to note. We use 2 different servers to deliver the updated sims. One goes over the same connection the gaming server uses, and the other uses another Internet connection. This server delivers the new sims and updates through the WEB site (correct me if I wrong here HiTech). I would suggest getting new versions from this server, simply because it will help to offload the gaming server and its connection, which will make for better performance of the sim for those wanting to play that new download. Just a suggestion. Whatever is the best for you, by all means, use it.
Thank you for your attention and I hope to see you all online soon, as soon as I can figure out how to consistently land without crashing.
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Roy "Skuzzy" Neese
President, AppLink Corp.
http://www.applink.netskuzzy@applink.net
