Surely voice shouldn't lag me that much???

Hi All,

ok - so I've got 3GB of RAM and my downstream currently reports in at 9403, and upstream at 509. I usually don't experience any lag at all, and generally have graphics settings very high and everything works fine. I tend to drop the draw distance in busy areas, but apart from that, no problems.

Except when I use voice... I just had a training session with four other people (so there are five of us on an island sim which is not overly-built or scripted). They can all hear me fine, I hear them intermittently and my SL experience is like glue..... things taking ages to rez, etc, avatars disappearing. I exit SL, turn off voice and everything is back to my usual high-speed experience.

Any ideas?

Thanks in advance,

DG


postscript.... have tried another laptop running XP instead of Vista. Similar hardware configuration.... same problem. Have completely removed SL, including user files and reinstalled.... same problem... Have checked VOIP through firewall - checks confirm everything is ok (and SL Voice is supposed to be 'zero configuration anyway...)... same problem..... would really appreciate any ideas...

I have those problems and don't even use voice. SL has been very laggy and slow loading lately. I've noticed avatars disappearing partially or completely the past couple of days too.

I've reported this issue, also.

It happens a lot in the welcome area where there are lots of talkers.

After a few minutes, everything gets laggy.

You can go into preferences and toggle voice on and off. That usually clears it up for a little while.

Voice chat will bump your upload and download bandwidth up noticeably.

If your pushing your limit already voice will easilly push it over the edge.

This is the bandwidth of your ISP, doesn't matter if your running on 3gig RAM or 512K, if your saturating your bandwidth your in trouble.

Best thing to do it turn your bandwidth useage in SL down and should help.

Edit->preferences->Network in SL

Note that the OP mentioned very excellent network speeds (9 Mbit download, nearly 1 Mbit upload). I'm on a regular DSL line (1.5 Mbit down, 250 kbit up) and voice lags me, but not extremely bad. OTOH, I have both the pre-voice and voice clients loaded on my machine in two different installation directories.

Other than having to re-enable voice every time I log in with the voice version, it's been very helpful. Most of my friends are used to me saying "BRB, gonna relog in voice/no voice mode..."

Edited to add, and somewhat on-topic: Didn't I remember seeing that part of the voice backbone, so to speak, for SL is Skype?

Reason I ask is that whenever I do use voice, then later go to shut down my computer, Skype throws up about 100 message boxes cascading down my screen describing some type of error. It only does this if I shut down after having used the SL voice version.

SLVoice and SKYPE do *not* get along well... KB says to turn off SKYPE - doesn't matter whether there's an active SKYPE session / call (whatever the appropriate term is)... just having SKYPE running causes conflicts.

I have 4GB's, worse month in SL since my first, in February when I started I crashed a lot every 5 minutes, took m a week to do orientation island, god knows why I stuck at it, glad I did, was a DSL problem, sorted whizz connection…

…anyway since then maybe 1 crash, in the last 4 weeks at least 1 crash a day sometimes even 3 in an hour, usually happens if I do something unusual like turn while walking or flying! So yes SL on the whole has to be pretty borked to affect me this way.

It seems WoW crashes more often than SL at the moment. lol


It doesn't matter what speed the network is for Voice to lag you. The lag is due to the internal buffers being processed. The buffers fill up and it starts to lag everything. The entire system gets affected. Windows has a bad way to deal with full sound buffers and usually means some kind of manual fix to clear them.

In PREFERENCES > NETWORK, be sure to up your allowed SL bandwidth to the max. Not sure how much of an improvement this will make, but it can't hurt.

If you are on a pretty new cable modem, your bandwidth should be fine--even at peak hours. Many standard cable modems can stream up to a mega byte a second...that's fast...fast enough that SL won't bog you down too much...

We've giv'in 'er all she's goat Captain!

Looks like today's update has fixed the voice lag. Try it out and see if it is fixed for you also. If it works for everyone, then I can close the jira issue.