What is the upper limit of people we can have in a relm? We did a test to find out.

Semi-frequently we get asked what the upper limit is on room capacity. Considering that these worlds are completely in-browser, how many people can join a single relm and still participate with an avatar without it overwhelming someone's computer hardware or connectivity between computers?

There are two answers to this typically, one with videos running and one without.

If video and audio connection is important for a particular online event, the participant count can affect the computing power of an average machine. The video feeds themselves take up more bandwidth and computer processing than the rest of the worlds, and we have varied results from participants with around 30 people in a space all simultaneously sharing video and audio.

However if the event does not require video and audio feed, then the space can accommodate many more autonomous guests than the video-enabled counterpart.

William, one of our newest team members made a programmatical test harness for measuring the speed and max participant limits of our engine with 200 avatars (no video or audio) in a typically sized relm space. The result gives off a bit of a zombie vibe because they are so colorful and facing the same direction, but it gave us numbers we we were looking for.

What were the results? Well, with 200 people, on a fairly new and fast machine,  8 fps was achieved, which considering each avatar was moving and each movement is being rendered in a browser, we gotta say, it's a pretty decent reference.

In future, we will be doing even more tests within and around these questions so we can give more accurate data to those asking.

For now, we want to give a shout-out to William for starting us down that road of finding more accurate answers.