Network/CPU Grab

Tonight I was on-the-air and people were telling me that I was Buffering. (In Internet Radio, this means that at times the DJ is unable to send packets fast enough to keep up with the music stream, causing the players to pause and "buffer" the music stream.) With 512k upstream, this should never happen to me....

I pulled up the windows XP performance monitor and watched my network interface. It showed a large number of spikes in the OUTBOUND network traffic. It would be fine for awhile, then It would drop to near 0 bytes output for about 500ms then swing way up suddenly (as it aparently shoved out it's buffers) then level out at about 10kBps (where it should be when I'm broadcasting and running SL at the same time)... stay there a few seconds, then swing a little again, stabilize, then swing a little again, and again... it would go back to near 0 bytes and start over. The cycle seemed to be several small "grabs" every few seconds then a big one anywhere from 30 to 60 seconds apart...

Since I already suspect the SL client, I first tried reducing its priority, which didnt seem to help. Shutting down the SL client however DID stabilize my output.

Some routine in SL is grabbing the CPU or network drivers for extended periods of time without allowing other events to run. (Well, extended periods in computer terms... 500ms is a long time for a multitasking computer to be stuck on a single process.)

I would suspect this is where the packet loss is comming from...

Network Radio Broadcasters depend on a smooth network output... and those on my station like to be able to be in Second Life at the same time since many of our listeners are in-world.... so giving this issue a bit of priority would be highly appriciated

I managed to grab a couple of screenshots of the fast timers debug window at the point when this happened tonight. The two shots were taken about ... 10, maybe 15 seconds apart, note the packet loss indicators.... Bloody heck, easily those cycles which went off the side of my screen were a couple of seconds long each! (The edge of the debug window reads as just over 500ms) ... I was in a VERY crowded location during this so the normal cycles are longer than I would normally see by about 4x, which I would expect with 20+ animated av's around me.