Accordinng to this site
http://whisper.ausgamers.com/wiki/index.php/Tickrate it says that the formula
of upload bandwidth used in relation to current players has the following structure:
upload bandwidth / 8 * 1000 / player number = the theoretical maximum sv_maxrate you can run your server at.
This implies that the relation between upload bandwidth and players is linear.
But , I own a server and counted the upload bandwidth usage when the server was empty , near-empty, near-full and full and just found out that this is not right , I mean @ 10 players , the upload usage may be 120 KB/s but at 30 players , we expect it to be 3 * 120 KB/s , but it is near 900 KB/s!!!! So , that means that this function is maybe exponential instead of linear.
Guys , what do you think? I was expected to host around 80 maxplayers with my 9 Mbps (1152 KB/s) upload but in fact I cannot host more than 35 players!!!
Also , I try to find out the minimum sv_maxrate which the server has no choke at all.
Thanks.