New Lag Meter Question

ok confused, for network it is yellow and says

Connection Ping time is 250-600 ms
Possible cause bad connection or file sharing app

My connection is fine (According to my ISP) and I have no file sharing app so what else could be causing this? oh and what is ping time?

It's the time just before pong!

I believe ping time is the time it takes for an answer to arrive at your PC after a request is sent out by your PC....or something to that effect.

It is caused by delays anywhere in the network route in use between you and the SL server. Could be in LL's internal network or their gateway(s) to the internet, which would affect everybody using sims hosted at that facility. Or it could be in the internet itself (your ISP's network or the backbone between it and LL's gateway provider). If this is a persistent problem, there are ways (like the traceroute command, aka "tracert" on Window$) to investigate where the delays are happening.

Many service providers are using "traffic shaping" to control the impact of file sharing apps like bittorrent. Some of these introduce slight delay in packet propagation even for the "unshaped" apps, but without them localized congestion can have a very much worse effect on delay. So, in fact, you could well be getting hurt by a file sharing app--just not yours.

Note that ping time does not measure bandwidth, but rather delay; one could have a massive pipe with great bandwidth that runs over a satellite link--which would have dreadful ping times because waves take time getting up and down from the satellite. In that case, I suppose you might have great Frames Per Second, but things would still feel sluggish because those "seconds" would be at least "ping time" after you interacted with the world.

250 to 600 is common for people who are far away from Linden Lab, such as Australia and New Zealand.

The 600 would lead to sympotms like you tell your avatar to walk forward, and there is a pause of about 1.2 seconds before it does. Somethings, such as rotating, are done locally, so they are instant. Moving, or retireving from inventory, is done remotely, so takes longer.

SL often sends lots of small packets of data, and then waits for some small reply. If the ping time is large, then they can get lost or arrive in the wrong order. SL can deal with this, but it slows things down a little in general.

Personally, I connect over satellite. My ping times are around 1200 to 1800. This is why I frequently walk off into the water or whatever. I am hitting my arrow keys, but the packets are taking too long to get there. I have become used to it.

Thank you for your replies i kinda understand it now.

I do have another question though, can this be the reason i keep disconnecting?

I will be standing around or not do much and all the sudden my mini-map goes red and i have to relog. This happen 20 time last night in 3 hours. That was really annoying.

Yes, the redmap is caused by your client losing touch with LL's server. It could easily be that every once in a while you get a spike of traffic that causes your network link to "slow down" enough that the server thinks you are no longer there (or vice versa).

If you are connecting over wireless, redmap connection loss is very common. Wireless is prone to large variance in actual bandwidth for no very obvious reason, and SL is a streaming video game; SL seems happiest with a steady, unvarying download bandwidth of 300kbps or more. I don't know it's latency (ping) requirements well, since I live comparatively near to them.