MB per Send/Receive

Question

I’m wondering how many MB a Send/Receive uses. For instance, lets suppose a team works on revisions to 40 verses in two different chapters. How many MB would that be over the internet?

I’m asking to figure out how best to have PNG teams send data, buying a plan, or just using their credits directly.

Thanks,
John+Wickberg
PNG

Answer 1

@anon084052, I remember having this same question in PNG. The answer was VERY little. Even with multiple S/Rs per day, Paratext might only use a few MBs total.

Another issue to consider is whether things like automatic updates, background data, etc have been turned off on whatever device you’re doing S/R with over a mobile data connection. This is a challenge because many devices are configured to gobble up data as soon as they are connected. :-/

So a suggestion would be to disable whatever auto-updates you can on the device and then do something like this:

1. Be ready to do Send/Receive
2. Turn on the connection
3. Do Send/Receive
4. Turn off the connection

That would (hopefully) help limit the time the device could download things.

james_post

Comments

That’s very helpful.
John+Wickberg

Answer 2

There is no fixed answer to how much data will be transferred during a send/receive - it depends on how many changes the user needs to receive and how many it needs to send.

The changes only contain the differences and these are in a compressed format, so I would think 1MB would represent some large changes. If the users do send/receive every day, the data will be related to the number of changes made that day and I would expect it to be small in most cases.

There is some overhead in getting information about the user’s projects from both the registry and the send/receive server, but that should be small for the average user who is only a member of a couple projects.

Maybe others can weigh in who have actual experience with a metered connection.

John+Wickberg
Paratext Support

Comments

I wouldn’t try to send receive an active project to a new user over a metered connection unless perhaps the project itself was quite new as well. But for that first time of sharing an active project there can be quite a lot of data, not just the Paratext text, but the change history, notes, and pictures. But after that, as John+Wickberg says, a daily connection can be quite small and our teams send receive regularly that way.
Sorry, I don’t know megabytes, but I have vivid recollections of sitting through long transfers to new users and some failures at that point if the connection is bad. But paratext is very good these days at preserving the data and keeping the project safe in the registry through even the network failures, for which we are very grateful to the developers. We haven’t had to do a data rescue in a very long time now.