Monitoring Messaging Statistics

While the Microsoft® DirectPlay® protocol handles many aspects of messaging automatically, your application should still monitor messaging behavior. For example, if you are consistently sending messages faster than they can be delivered, you might need to modify your messaging scheme.

Because network conditions change continuously, your application should periodically check the behavior of the network and adjust its messaging scheme accordingly. To do so, call the GetConnectionInfo method that is exposed by every DirectPlay interface that supports messaging. GetConnectionInfo returns a structure that contains a wide variety of statistical information that you can use to refine your messaging scheme, including the following:

Round trip latency
Throughput
Packets sent
Packets received
Packets resent
Packets dropped
Messages transmitted at different priority levels

Note The messaging statistics are obtained by monitoring the actual network traffic. If you call GetConnectionInfo immediately after you initialize the connection, there will have been little time to collect data and the statistics might be misleading.