what is "ping sim" really ?

I was at a place and "ping sim" showed 8000+ ms with 80% packet loss !

Running a packet sniffer and ping alongside SL I got 172ms with zero packetloss from pinging the sim I was in.

???

duh ?

so what really is "ping sim" measuring ?

For ages now I've been putting big ping times down to a bad connection, but it obviously isn't the case. While my client was frozen solid reporting huge 8 second ping times, a parallel "ping" on the same machine reports this ...


PING sim696.agni.lindenlab.com (69.25.105.12: 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 69.25.105.128: icmp_seq=0 ttl=45 time=167.957 ms
64 bytes from 69.25.105.128: icmp_seq=1 ttl=45 time=166.207 ms
64 bytes from 69.25.105.128: icmp_seq=2 ttl=45 time=168.532 ms
64 bytes from 69.25.105.128: icmp_seq=3 ttl=45 time=168.840 ms
64 bytes from 69.25.105.128: icmp_seq=4 ttl=45 time=167.180 ms
64 bytes from 69.25.105.128: icmp_seq=5 ttl=45 time=169.522 ms
64 bytes from 69.25.105.128: icmp_seq=6 ttl=45 time=169.061 ms
64 bytes from 69.25.105.128: icmp_seq=7 ttl=45 time=168.197 ms
64 bytes from 69.25.105.128: icmp_seq=8 ttl=45 time=166.257 ms
64 bytes from 69.25.105.128: icmp_seq=9 ttl=45 time=168.545 ms

--- sim696.agni.lindenlab.com ping statistics ---
10 packets transmitted, 10 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 166.207/168.030/169.522/1.081 ms

so "ping sim" is the amount of time it takes a sim to reply to the client and is not a simple ping at all ?

The same sim had just 3 AVs, a high FPS of over 700, and the highest peak I saw on the stats was 3ms for "run tasks".

Something must be amiss somewhere surely ?

Since the SL client is not yet multithreaded, your ping can be affected by your framerate and vice-versa.
If you were getting 80% packet loss then that probably means you were trying to download more data than your connection could handle.
Try turning your bandwidth slider down a bit.

Thanks Eggy but that was also my first assumption. Reducing it made no difference ( nor did increasing it ).

I forgot it wasn't multithreaded, nonetheless 8 seconds to render a frame is not usual even on my machine. In the circumstances I described I would expect around 10-15 fps at least.

Roll on 1.7 !!!