I wouldn't trade zero-lag streaming for the world the ability to instantly share and react to games or movies with friends in real-time is arguably the single biggest boon for online socializing since VOIP itself. So we're talking about dozens of hours of low-latency HD video, sometimes at two or three streams at a time. That's way faster than Twitch, Google Meet, or Zoom. The delay is barely noticeable, maybe less than a second. I imagine what costs so much data is Discord's extremely low latency video streaming. Of the seven coworkers who let me peek at their data, the average was more like 8GB (the second highest was news writer Mollie Taylor, who did enough Discord-ing to rack up 22GB).Įven with my heavy usage, 255GB still seems really high for video. I assume it's also counting the 20 or so hours of Midnight Suns I've streamed recently, and the data churn rate can be double or triple if I have multiple friend streams open at once. At least 30 or 40 of those gigabytes are the first three seasons of That '70s Show. There's always somebody in our group streaming whatever they're watching or playing. It's almost never exclusively voice, either. I use Discord a lot-at least two to three hours (or more on weekends) multiple nights per week. That's alarming, but not surprising if you're me. I don't know why the total is divided between three different Discord executables, but altogether a single chat app accounted for about one fifth of my total data. You're reading that right: Discord ate up a whopping 255GB over the last month. To that end, I solicited the data usage results of some of my PC Gamer colleagues to see how it compares to mine.Ī single chat app accounted for about one fifth of my total data. I've become fascinated by these breakdowns mostly because it's enlightening to learn which apps leave a surprisingly huge footprint, but also because it's fun to learn what our highest-traffic apps say about our computer habits. Most of that came from downloading games-no surprise there, it was a big month for me and downloading games. That would put me over the limit of most US data caps. In one month I've used over a terabyte of data (1,224.26GB to be exact). Data Usage tracks only the last 30 days of download traffic, but the neat part is how the data is broken down by individual apps and executables. It's all stored in a settings submenu called Data Usage, which you can find via the Windows search bar or by going to the "Network & Internet" section of the settings app. Turns out, Windows 11 (and Windows 10 before it) has been keeping track for me, and pretty closely, too.
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