Does LL wind down servers?

Probably just my imagaination but maybe not:

I live in the U.K. and mostly access SL during the European peak times but occasionally like tonight, I'm on SL during American peak times. All to do with my variable hours of work.

I've noticed that during American peak times SL is as fast as fast can be but during European peak times SL is terribly slow almost to the point of stopping completely with loads of lag, teleporting problems and login problems. To underline that, I've found it to be pretty much consistent with no exceptions. This cannot be attributed to the speed of my own cable internet connection because I have tested it and the speed is much the same whatever time I'm online.

So my question is whether LL turns off servers during the American off-peak times, essentially making the network and therefore network response to accesses noticeably slower. If so that means that European residents and those residents from other countries in similar time zones get an inferior product for the same cost!

You answered your own question... UK peak times. On Cable internet, you share a total allotment of bandwidth with everyone on the same node or router as you.. basically everyone in your area. You're not going to get soopah speed when everyone else in that part of town is online and downloading/file sharing at the same time. Off hours for you gives you better latency (lower ping in gamer talk) on your local network, and reduces the chances that congestion at your ISP will cause something to get dropped (packet loss) and cause lag/tp fail/login fail. Your ISP may also be using some type of traffic shaping during their peak times, and that can also cause the symptoms you describe.

Thank you Dana. I understand what you're saying and it seems credible except that it doesn't stand up to scrutiny: I don't experience the same slowdown in Europe's peak hours such as when accessing another virtual world based in Germany or when downloading large files. The speed on those appears to be constant and only SL slows down. It has been noticed by others, for example at /354/22/296275/16.html#post2378213 that SL does slowdown and stop during Europe's peak hours.

Yep, and many ISP's will throttle you, even if they won't admit it, when they buy bandwidth, they aren't going to buy enough to cover every user at peaktime running at maximum speed, when there are 10,000 people sharing a cable with you instead of 1000, they'll trottle everyone a bit to keep it from jamming up

It sounds like the bottleneck occurs somewhere over the atlantic.

One thing is that your idea of peak times my differ from your ISP's peak times. I don't know what times you consider to be peak so I'll relate what happened to me, since I'm in the UK and suffered something similar, and you can see if it fits what is happening to you.

SL, including this forum, used to go smoothly at all times for me but sometime last year it suddenly started going slow during my evenings. I could even tell the approximate time by seeing it suddenly slow down and speed up again some hours later. It slowed down around 5 - 6 p.m. every day and sped up again at 11 p.m. But the evening is not a peak period here in the UK.

Some time later, I got a letter from my ISP (Virgin) explaining what was happening. They had instituted a system in which there are 2 peak periods during the day. I forget the exact periods but one is in the morning and lasts either 2 or 3 hours, and the other is in the afternoon and lasts an hour longer. Everyone's download total has a limit of n gigs for each of those periods and the limit depends on the bandwidth level that's paid for. If either limit is exceeded, then downloads are throttled for a while. I never exceeded the morning limit so I was never affected by that period, but I exceeded the afternoon's limit every day and I was throttled from around 5 or 6 p.m. until 11 p.m. I was paying for 4M bandwidth at the time. I increased it to 20M and I haven't had any problems since.

The thing to notice is that the throttling was not during the peak period - it came after I'd exceeded the period's limit, which meant that throttling started as the peak period was about to end, and it continued for some hours during non-peak time.

That's the way that Virgin deals with peaks. Other ISPs no doubt do it differently but what you are finding may be down to your ISP's handling of peak loads.

So, to answer your question, I am in the UK and I find no evidence that LL turns servers off at any time. SL runs the same at all times.

Well there ya go. Getting close to the European peak, 2:23PM in the UK and 3:23PM in the CET countries and "failed to find clothing in the database", logging out during TPs, textures failing to load at different locations, group IM lag. Probably familiar to most residents *wry smile*. A point to note is that it's around this time that Americans start to complain about the slowdown.

Which ISP are you using?

Almost all UK->USA traffic crosses the atlantic through Sprint, and commonly goes through BT's trunks to get to Sprint - so if those lines are busy, you'll experience slowdown.

One thing you could do is to download a "traceroute" tool and use it to trace your network path to LL - it'll identify if one particular stop is causing lag, although there isn't a great deal you can do with the results.

Well, yes I could ping the server but that won't take account of accesses to other servers such as databases within the same network. The "unable to find clothing in the database" notice I received does point to a failure of a network server to network server connection and not a fault with my ISP's connection in the same way that a "unable to connect to the database" on web sites points to an overloaded database server on that same web site.

Well how come if I run SL on dialup I get those sort of errors continually if it's not related to my ISP speed?

Yes you have discovered our secret. All of us americans get special treatment from LL. They also give us 75 groups and $2000 per week in stipend.

Transatlantic bottleneck. I used to see that years ago (in reverse) on an old text-based MU* I played that was hosted in Sweeden. Apparently the transatlantic cables just aren't up to the bandwidth task.