Bandwidth usage with BOTS

[provocating]

I am just curious on something. I have put some thought into putting my server up for public usage, something I have never done before. To date my server has only been used for family and friends. Currently my server has a ton of ram, 8 drive hardware raid, 24gb memory, i-7 so I know as far as the hardware, it is pretty damn tight. I have large battery backups on the switches, modem, and the server. My pipe coming in to my house is 10/50 cable so I know the 10mb upload would handle more clients than my server would ever attract. I am a realist and know unless I put a ton of time into the admin portion and made an attractive website I probably would not attract more than 10 people at a time. So my question is for the people that are allowing Bots on their servers. Do the Bots use up a lot of bandwidth ? Allowing maybe 5 Bots at a time per client does each Bot pull bandwidth on the server ? I am trying to figure out if the Bots cause traffic like clients do when they are in the same zone. I seem to remember reading that Bots use bandwidth just like a client does. So 10 Bots would use the same bandwidth as 10 players. I could be wrong, seems like I read that.

[bad_captain]

Without testing it, I would say they would take less bandwidth than the client, but more than say another NPC in a zone. Looking at the packets collected, you have all of the initial zone in stuff for the zone itself, player profile, AAs, inventory, mob zone entry, etc that takes up say ~1/3 of the total packets used in a typical hour long xp run. Bots would updating the client as to HPs, location, etc., but wouldn't require all of the other client specific updates that are sent for all of the other mobs in a zone. I'll try to do a test this week, since I sometimes run full Bot raids, and it would be interesting to see how that compares to what I got running with just a Merc or solo.

A made up estimate off the top of my head would be that bots use 1/4 or less of the bandwidth after the initial zone-in stuff, with almost none of the zone-in traffic that clients get. I would say they hit the CPU much harder than bandwidth.

[provocating]

About 6 months ago I had a player trying to bring out 5-6 groups of Bots. He would go link dead after a few seconds. I was kind of against this anyway, but he was complaining of going link dead. I mean it could had been his computer, his bandwidth, etc.

My server is running in a vSphere virtual machine on a large host. I can monitor the bandwidth through the utility, I may check that out tonight.