Preserved Topic: I'm giving up. how much traffic does a chat produce?

After spending 20 minutes trying to find this on google, I'm giving up and asking you guys.
Does anybody know how much traffic a chatter produces per hour on average?
Is any of you operating a chat site large enough to offer a resonable sample?

Thank you,

Tyberius Prime

It really depends.

Whether it is:

1) Web Chat (where the page totally reloads)
2) IRC chat (where he's receiving lots of messages in channels he's in)
3) Other type of chats...
Basically, you can measure and experiment that...just get http://www.dumeter.com and create a new StopWatch and measure the bandwidth consumed.

Hope that helps.

Well, it would probably be a basic webchat. html/php based, so no additionall overhead from java or flash.
Of course I could set one up, get it popular, measure it's traffic and divide that by (chatters*hours_online), but it would be very handy if I could estimate the amount before hand, because than I could choose a hosting packet that offers enough...

yours,

Tyberius Prime

I've head that IRC is less traffic than web-based. Can't give numbers, though.

i dont know concrete numbers either, but wouldnt it exactly be the amount of text transferred from and to the user? (in bytes of course)
so the #1 criteria is how many users are chatting and how much do they type.

that's just what I want to know. How much does an average user type per hour? But you'll need a lot of chat hours to average this correctly...
Any ideas? (except breaking into a major chat site and stealing their statistics :-)

thx,

Tyberius Prime

That gets into topics. Some sex chats would probably generate a totally different amount of bandwidth than some warez chats, etc.....

IRC stuff isn't too bad, but I don't have numbers.

ok, I'll go and visit a webchat similar to the one I'm planing and see how much traffic it produces in 30 minutes on my end. That muliplied with the expected number of users should give me a good guess.
Any fault in my logic?

I don't see any problem with that logic.

so here's what I found:
I chatted 40 minutes, and transfered 429.9kb of date. That's up and down combinden. I spent about 15 of those 40 minutes in a private conversation, and the remaning 25 in a busy chatroom. I'm a fairly quick chatter, myself. (about a 80wpm)

that would be about 650k/hour of chat.
I will now assume that a chatter consumes at least a meg per hour of chat. sigh. I'll take the offer with the 60 gigs of traffic then. (compared to the one priced the same, but with only 6 gigs of traffic. but a hell of other extras (180 subdomains... that kind of stuff). Still, 60 gigs a month for $25 (but $35 for every gig beyond that) seems kind of to cheap to be true.

so long,

Tyberius Prime