Our network now have about 30 irc-servers and 300-500 users.
Is it normal for server to have about 8 Mb traffic per day? (its incoming+outgoing).
All servers are connected via ssl + zip (level 6 compression), server versions 3.2.2.
To my mind, its very large traffic for irc, our users don't speak so much
Although I don't know anything about the amount of data that an IRCd sends between clients and servers, or between servers and servers, 8MB for a network that size sounds realistic to me.
This is all relative. I can make 5GB traffic/day with a single user. All it takes is a massive amount of flooding. I can also have 1Mb/day with 10000 users, they just all idle. 8Mb to me, sounds very small though. Think about it, an IRC message can be up to 512bytes. so 2 msgs = 1KB. 2048 msgs = 1MB, 16384 msgs = 8MB. Now, you say you have about 300-500 users, so dividing that by 400 (the middle), we get approx 41msgs per user per day.
Granted, most msgs are less than 512 bytes, but even so, maybe it makes it ~100msgs per user per day. That's not all that much. And lets not forget that SSL increases bandwidth by a lot. In all, I'd say it's normal. If you think it is too high, disabling SSL would probably cut it significantly.
I second that, 8mb/day (~240mb/month) doesn't sound much at all for me... But of course, 30 servers is a lot, so that helps spread the load :)
Also, I agree SSL can be quite costly, think of percentages of 20-25% overhead (for 100-200 bytes msgs, as low as 8% for stuff like 400 bytes msgs, so it depends), just wanted to mention some numbers here so people don't think it uses 2x as much bandwidth or anything ;).
