Xbox 360 Traffic Graphs as Host for Halo 3(listen server)

[xcrustwadx]

I hope people aren't getting annoyed at my constant posts about Xbox 360 but I thought someone might find this useful, I did.

I have recorded some graphs of the traffic when my Xbox 360 was the host (server) of a Halo 3 Game.

Map: High Ground
Matchmaking Team Slayer
8 Players
1 Player on the Xbox 360(no split screen), all other players from internet
ISP service upstream: 768Kbit/s or 96KByte/s

First Graph:
You can see the part where it is looking for a match and then the rise in upstream is when the game starts.  There is also another Xbox 360 playing Gears of War simultaneosly so that's why there is still some traffic before the Halo 3 match starts.  Notice how the upstream slowly rises to a certain point ~ 50KB/s.  There was a similar gradual rise in all games for which I was the host.

Second Graph:
This is just a continuation.  The point here is the slight drop when I turned off other Xbox 360 which was playing Gears of War.  This graph essentially shows  Halo 3 server traffic only.

Conclusion:
We can conclude that you need roughly 45-50KB/s upstream to host an 8-player match in Halo 3.  That is 1 player locally on the Xbox (no split screen stuff), 7 players from internet.  This is roughly 6.5 - 7 KB/s per player.  (45KB / 7 players)

For Gears of War The upstream for being a client was anywhere from 2.5KB/s to 6KB/s.  I would say averages were ~ 4-5KB/s

NOTE 1 - With only 1 Xbox playing Halo 3, I was able to "get host" (be the game server) 4 or 5 games in a row until I eventually stopped playing.  It is extremely rare for us to get host when there are 4 of us playing in the same party using 4 Xbox 360s/4 different Xbox Live accounts, all on my network.  This may reinforce the idea that you will be considered last for host when it is detected that there are multiple Xbox Live accounts in the same party/game signed on from the same public IP address.

NOTE 2 - These results were NOT gathered from "controlled" environment but it still gives you a pretty good idea of what is going on.