Question: Traffic and cost assessment

[IdefixRC]

First of all thanks for creating this. Adds another level to my DCS server !

After running DATIS now for a few weeks I received my first usage alarm from AWS (running 2 Carrier Reports, 2 Airfield reports and 1 Weather Station). From the looks of it the stations are broadcasting nonstop even if no player is on the channel. Is that correct?

Would be interesting to know if someone looked into the traffic in more detail. As the services charge per character, I believe the free usage of 5 million or 4+1 million in case of google, is quickly exhausted if the broadcasts go 24/7 based on 2 broadcasts per minute (every 30 seconds from what I see). e.g. weather has 200+ characters per call from what I can see from the json.

Is there a way to limit the broadcasts to only activate when another player is on the channel?

Thanks !

[rkusa]

Thanks for the report!

Is there a way to limit the broadcasts to only activate when another player is on the channel?

There probably is, since the SRS client also shows the player count in a certain frequency. So definitely worth looking into.

e.g. weather has 200+ characters per call from what I can see from the json.

TTS is actually not executed per call. If the content of the broadcast does not change, it re-uses the result from the previous TTS. So in case of ATIS, if it only updates every hour for a new report letter, there would only be one request to AWS per hour.

Same for Carrier and Weather reports. If their report content does not change, the cached TTS result is used. At least in theory. Your report sounds like there might be a bug somewhere. I'll look into it.

[IdefixRC]

Thanks a lot. Here are some additional details. This is the traffic generated by 2x Carrier Report, 2x Airport ATIS and 1x Weather Station based on the notification email from AWS. I assume the cap resets on a monthly basis and is not rolling from the date I signed up (which I can't remember when that was :-) ) Also after I received this report I could not access the server for another 1/2 day or so after which the usage showed 92%:

Your AWS account xxxx has exceeded 85% of the usage limit for one or more AWS Free Tier-eligible services for the month of December. -- AWS Free Tier Usage as of 12/16/2020 AWS Free Tier Usage Limit 4,335,055.0 Characters First 5,000,000 characters (across regions) per month are free

P.S. I did the math and yes, you are correct it takes something else into account as the weather report alone would generate 19million characters a month in case each and everyone is counted. So there is some caching ongoing (else above would have been reached in 1 day) but traffic still is quite high.

[rkusa]

I've checked the cache of all types of stations and all seem to work fine. If you want, you could enable debug logging (in the DATIS section of the DCS SPECIALS settings) and check Saved Games/DCS.openbeta/Logs/DATIS.log for entries that end with report has changed -> executing TTS. This is only ever logged when an actual TTS happens.

I gave the idea of disabling the SRS transmissions while no one is on that frequency another thought and am not sure about it anymore. I quite like dialing into a frequency where something is already broadcasting - so basically dialing into a frequency while an ATIS report is already half through. But I suppose it could make sense to offer a setting to control that behaviour (turn it on/off). 🤔