Well, we have never discussed it with Owen. Although it's a tricky issue: if we start donating to the forums, should we start donating to #openttdcoop too? After all they host the OpenGFX/OpenSFX projects, a number of NewGRF projects and IS2. Should TTDPatch start donating to OpenTTD because we build and host their nightlies, which are arguably the thing that TTDPatch users should be using.Dave Worley wrote:I don't wanna kick it off here but does OTTD's development team contribute anything from their donations for your hosting of pretty much their entire fanbase's work on the forum? I'm sure I'm about to get flamed by every OTTD dev under the sun but surely it'd be fair for them to chuck you a small slice at least?
On the other hand, OpenTTD's content server has served almost 6 million NewGRFs, heightmaps, AIs, scenarios, etc. which did not have to come from the forum's bandwidth; it's using roughly 10 GB nowadays (2.7 TB since it began, which is 13 months in trunk and 10 months in stable). That's almost twice of the bandwidth needed for the forums. Although one can argue that lots of these downloads wouldn't have existed if we didn't have content downloading in-game.
It's not specifically the paying that's the problem, but looking at download statistics of previous releases (e.g. 0.7.0) I estimated that the needed bandwidth would exceed the bandwidth our ISP provides; we were pushing 20+ mbit/s after 1.0.0-beta1, given that the content downloads increased by a factor 10 since the first beta we would be pushing 200+ mbit/s just after 1.0.0. I'm not using the binary download counts because there the betas do not really show up in the statistics I aggregrated. With 0.7.0-beta1 the content downloads shot up by a factor 2-3 (previously it was only available in trunk). With 1.0.0-beta1 the content downloads also shot up by a factor 2-3 (but now content downloads are also available in stable; the content download counts already were 10-15 times higher with 0.7.4 than before 0.7.0-beta1). So it's because we expect the download count to enormously peak; the money thing is something secondary, i.e. to sufficiently handle these 'stresses' we would need at a few mirrors, which means paying for more hardware. So instead of letting companies donate money, we just let them donate some 'spare' HDD space and bandwidth. An added benefit of mirrors is that downloads generally happen from a closer server, which means it should generally be faster and it keeps bandwidth free for the other traffic to our server, which means our server reacts faster.JamieLei wrote:But they have massive amounts of traffic which they barely can pay for.
