School LAN Party


This is awesome. Without mentioning names, someone hid TrackMania Nations on the share drive and we had an über LAN party during programming class. At the height of it’s popularity, there were about 10 people connected, which was cool for a while until the server started crapping out. And here’s why:

Doing some simple math, the game is about 300MB. So each time it is launched, it has to be loaded from S:\. Lets estimate that only 100MB of that 300MB got loaded. By the time we loaded a few levels, we’ll add on another 20MB. When all 10 players needed to load the same level, the server kind of blew up and lagged badly, so everyone’s game froze and we stopped playing. I’ll bet we sucked up a few gigs of bandwidth for this. And also, we kind of lagged up the entire school for 20 minutes. Oops. And the share drive kind of sucks because it consists of old hardware. So now we have to limit connections in the game (or play a less intensive game)

Last semester, the admins emailed our teacher and told him that we were using way too much bandwidth in class. Let’s see how long it takes them to notice now.