Bandwidth

Hi

I'm fairly new at the game and pretty much experiencing the same problems that I'm reading in this forum. Here's my biggest concern right now, the game starts off ok but as I continue playing, my bandwitdh , which starts off at about 300-400 kbs just slowly deteriorates to nothing and I have to reboot.

I immediately run several ping and speed tests and they come back ok. 0 to 3% packet loss and download speeds into the 3000 to 4000 kbs range. Is there something that I should be doing, or adjusting?

Thanks
Peter

1.2 gig athlon, 512 Mb mem, 128 Mb Video, cable modem of course, and I still set my settings to almost bare minimums...kinda annoying when I set video low enough to not lag badly and then have to stand almost on top of a building before all the walls materialize.

Bring your network settings down to a minimum and see if that solves your problem. This will cause objects to load slowly into the world, but may prevent deterioration.

If that works, start moving your bandwidth settings up until the problem shows up. This is the "effective bandwidth" of your connection when talking to SL.

Setting the bandwidth higher than this may increase packet loss, but shouldn't cause deterioration... I'm not sure what that is, however one thing you have to try is reinstalling the app then logging in again.

Be sure to post your results so we know what happened.

Thanks Andrew, I'll give all that a try and monitor the progress over the next few days.

Thanks Aychcee, yeah I hate that lag, especially when flying around and hitting things you don't even see. I guess I'll just keep adjusting until I find an acceptable setting. I've got similar equipment, Athlon 2000+ at 1.6 Gb, also 512 MB Ram but only a 64 MB nvidea card and cable. My streaming is excellent at 32 to 40 fps.
I think the norm is about 10 to 12 fps.
Thanks for your response

Peter

It seems that no matter what adjustments I make on the preference tab, the readings are always the same.

1. When I first start the game, the red bandwidth indicator tops out at between 3000 and 4000 Kb/s but the green vertical line indicator never goes beyond about 400 Kb/s and keeps moving down as the game progresses, deteriorating to 0 Kb/s after about 45 minutes to an hour and all action stops.
2. The moment it stops, I exit the game and re-enter immediately and the whole cycle starts again, with the same readings as given above.
3. I have reinstalled the game several times during this monitoring period and the problem still persists.
4. This behavior causes the following results when playing the game:
a.) Even when the bandwidth gets to around 50 to 75 Kb/s
on the way to the "frozen state" of zero, the game still allows me to build and edit objects but the avatar is unable to walk and since I'm standing still when I build and edit, I don't know when that time comes.
b.) The result is that anything that I built or edit after being unable to walk, is NOT saved and when I restart the game I see that all my work was wasted, all the changes I made after the inability to walk , is gone.

When you cease to be able to walk, that indicates you have totally lost connection with the server, or else the server itself is not responding.

After about 60 seconds of that, the server should show up red on the map.

It sounds like this is a reliable and reproducable problem for you so it is probably not an unresponsive server, since they've been holding up much better these days.

One way you could help us figure out what is going on is by emailing your C:/Program Files/SecondLife/SecondLife.log file to:

[email]support@lindenlab.com[/email]

along with a description of the problem. The logfile may provide some clues as to where the connection is being dropped.

ive never had any luck with bandwidth, the curse of a satellite modem. i rarely see my bandwidth above 150k and it jumps from 0 to 100 whenever i play SL. I'm still waiting for them to get cable here (apparently we were promised cable about a year and a half ago, so much for that). as far as bandwidth goes im in the dumps. but im definately seeing improvements in performance, i have most of my settings set near max and it runs very smoothly. keep up the good work.

(still waiting for cable)