I checked Zwift network load a few years ago as I was curious. Found it’s not (at that time) a very big drinker. It was ‘bursty’, but nothing significant. Not like streaming a video, and even that is surprisingly not a massive use. Zoom/Webex, etc drink heavy from the network, but Zwift, TrainerRoad, Peloton, aren’t large consumers. Again, at that point in time. I can check my local network and firewall traffic and see what they show during a ride today. I’m not expecting it to be much different.
Most of Zwift is heavily compressed and just code that is interpreted on the client system. It surprised some Peloton users that it’s not a huge draw, but for the indoors rides, the majority of it is easily compressed, and the ‘live’ video rides are loaded with compression artifacts.
But we’ll see… It’ll be interesting.
Doing a Pacer Group as a ‘ride’, I didn’t see any massive traffic. I watched the firewall, and the traffic wasn’t too bad. The processor activity never went above around 5%, and the traffic wasn’t changed all that badly. Watching the iMac I am on, and the memory usage jumps a little, but stayed rather low from where it started out. I think it consumed maybe a meg or 2 more then when Zwift was idle. The packets and amount of data did rise, understandably, but for 5 minutes neither one were the top users.
It seems that, from what I saw, it’s not such a ‘pig’, and handles things fairly well for what it is. I can do this for a longer time here in the next little bit. An hour and a half ride should work things out pretty well.
I’ll try to grab packets to/from the Mini too. That might be interesting, or nothing.
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