Problem with two folks playing SL at once in same house

So the husband and I are trying to use our DSL to play SL at the same time. We don't have a problem both using DSL at once if we're on the net, or if I"m on SL and he's on the net, or any other applications we might share at the same time. We played EQ together briefly over a DSL connection a few months back with no problems.

But now, when we are both logged onto SL at the same time, we get huge packet loss so awful neither of us can move in the game. We've tried hooking his computer up to a wireless connection, which is what he uses for his laptop, and that doesn't work. We're already on a router, which is only 10mb, so we're considering getting a faster router -- but that's the only thing we can think of that will solve the problem. Does anyone have any suggestions? Thanks much!

Zana

Try if you havn't already, different brands of nick cards.

Lyn and I had this issue too, and was totally resolved when I changed the nick to an off brand in my system compared to hers.

She has intel I have realtek.

It could also be that you just haven't got enough bandwidth. How fast is your DSL?

Our DSL is pretty screaming fast. Averages 100 mbps on a normal day, we live right next door (literally) to the switch so we don't have very many slowing-due-to-distance issues etc. I'm showing my ignorance here but what is a nick card Charlie?

BTW last night we were able to make it work for about an hour with no problems. But we don't have a clue as to what we did differently. It just suddenly seemed to work fine. Of course, our phone lines aren't working ATM (i.e. our house phone is dead) but the DSL is working just fine. Maybe we just have some kind of weird phone line issue?

Thanks!

Zana

The nick card as I said I actually said it wrong lol.

Its called NIC for Network Interface Card. It is your ethernet card that the cable connects to at the back (or side if laptop) of your computer. then to the router.

I'm fairly sure the technical limits of DSL is far below 100mbs. Unless they just ran CAT5 from the switch instead of standard phone lines.

10mbs is actually probably faster than your connection. However a faster router may be able to handle more data comming in at once (larger buffer, better packet handling are both possibilities), and that could solve some packet loss problems.

Also make sure when you are both connected to set your network speed in preferences to 100k (the lowest). If that works fine, incrementally move it up until it doesn't. On a standard DSL connection getting it back up to the default 300 will be supurb I think and I wouldn't expect to get it much higher.

Advice: Increase coffee dosage.

And as far as bandwidth...SL lets you configure that more than any game I've ever seen before, if it's a bandwidth bottleneck then I'd just tweak the heck out of it. But unfortunately SL probably uses alot more bandwidth than EQ does...

I use two machines both running SL on a 700k dsl with no problems what-so-ever. The maximum you'd generaly expect from a "consumer" dsl connection would normaly be a 2Mbit connection. 512kbit is more common. (I payed extra for 700kbit, yes I can tell the difference).

By comparison, your local home network running at 10Mbit is hugely fast (20 times faster than a standard 512k DSL), so this in itself will never cause the problems you're having.

Most likely cause would be firewall settings on the hardwear doing the connection sharing. Whether you're using a PC to share the DSL or a dedicated DSL modem/router, they will both have configuration settings to tell it what to share and what not to share. You'll need to find out from the tech guys which ports SL uses and make sure that they are not locked or restricted in your firewall.

As a general rule you should be able to set the bandwidth property in prefs to the same speed as your DSL even though you're using 2 SL machines through it. You only get high bandwidth use when you first login or move to a new area that you don't have cached. The rest of the time is just position data and chat for surrounding avs, and file checks to see if your cache needs updating. I've measured this 'background noise' as averaging around 50k, often as low as 20k, so not a problem for multiple machines on one DSL.

If you're using a PC to do your connection sharing, make sure it's not doing its own local caching of files....

Most Internet DSL Companies Limit the upload speed to 64k or 128k. Even though the download speed is faster .

It May also be in the router Settings . You may have to set the router up differently

The net is a funny thing....and SL too. I also have same setup and me and my sweetness play toghether in game. There were a few days right in a row where he had been all that afternoon.....with lightning speed, I come home around 5 or 6ish and blam....trouble getting on then once on dont go anywhere, computer acted like it had forgotten every recent link it had been at.......would wait and wait then just to get booted. So as the evening goes on things begin to pick up....its like a slew of people traffic right after rush hour.

So I know exactly what ya mean....so dont go wasten time thinkn its you or your connection....

The net is a funny thing....and SL too. I also have same setup and me and my sweetness play toghether in game. There were a few days right in a row where he had been all that afternoon.....with lightning speed, I come home around 5 or 6ish and blam....trouble getting on then once on dont go anywhere, computer acted like it had forgotten every recent link it had been at.......would wait and wait then just to get booted. So as the evening goes on things begin to pick up....its like a slew of people traffic right after rush hour.

So I know exactly what ya mean....so dont go wasten time thinkn its you or your connection....

am i stuttering?????