Bandwidth Budget Analysis

Understanding and tuning your game’s bandwidth consumption is critical for scaling to more concurrent users and supporting mobile clients.

Running the benchmark suite

cargo bench -p naia_bench

The benchmark suite (benches/) includes bench_protocol.rs with realistic position, velocity, and rotation component types using naia’s quantized numeric types. Run it before and after tuning to verify improvements.

Reading connection stats in production

#![allow(unused)]
fn main() {
// Server: sample every N ticks
if tick % 60 == 0 {
    for user_key in server.user_keys() {
        if let Some(stats) = server.connection_stats(&user_key) {
            println!(
                "user={:?} rtt_p50={:.0}ms p99={:.0}ms loss={:.1}% out={:.1}kbps in={:.1}kbps",
                user_key,
                stats.rtt_p50_ms, stats.rtt_p99_ms,
                stats.packet_loss_pct * 100.0,
                stats.kbps_sent, stats.kbps_recv
            );
        }
    }
}
}

For interpreting the kbps_sent values and RTT percentiles in production, see Connection Diagnostics.

Tuning checklist

1. Use quantized numeric types — replace Property<f32> with Property<SignedVariableFloat<BITS, FRAC>> for position/velocity. See Delta Compression.

2. Use static entities for map geometry — zero per-tick cost after initial scope entry. See Entity Replication.

3. Set entity priority gain — entities the player can’t see get 0.0 gain (never sent); player-owned entity gets 3.0 (replicated 3× more often). See Priority-Weighted Bandwidth.

4. Enable zstd compression — CompressionMode::Default(3) reduces wire size ~30% with minimal CPU overhead. See zstd Compression.

5. Train a dictionary — reduces wire size a further 40–60% vs default zstd on typical game-state delta packets.

6. Reduce tick rate for non-interactive entities — use priority gain to effectively reduce the rate without a separate “slow replication” pathway.