For those experiencing general SL suckiness...

This may, or may not, be of use to those people who suffer from the many SL problems such as: Red Sim Disconnects, freezing, Rubber Banding, poor rezzing, Invisible Avatar Syndrome, and so on.

In the UK a lot of us are now using something called MaxADSL. Basically this is a high compression method of squeezing up to 8,000Kb down copper telephone lines. Which is clever but not always that stable. After conversion to MaxADSL there is a 'training' period where the systems tries to determine what speed you can reliably sustain given the quality of your line - which is mostly determined by your distance from the telephone exchange.

Ever since my conversion I've been getting a Sync speed of around 2,200Kb with a Broadband Remote Access Server (BRAS) Data Rate of around 1,700Kb. The BRAS Data Rate is the important part here as it represents a cap on the true data rate that is delivered.

However, there is a nasty gotcha included in MaxADSL. If you experience a few bad connects at a lower Sync Speed the BRAS cap is automatically lowered, and it will only 'recover' after around three days of good connection. Something hideous happened to my connection recently and my BRAS Data Rate has reduced to 152Kb. Yup, pretty sucky. The Sync Speed is back to 2,200Kb but I'm currently stuck with the crap BRAS Data Rate.

I didn't immediately realise this had happened and continued to use SL with a Maximum Bandwidth setting of 1,500Kb. Only instead of my usual 1,700Kb, I'm running at a maximum of 152Kb! I pretty quickly realised something wasn't right when I started getting absurdly high Packet Loss and all of the playability problems I see reported here so often.

I therefore reduced the SL Maximum Bandwidth setting to 150Kb. Now, this still doesn't produce an exactly sparkling SL experience but it is stable... stable but slow. Packet Loss is okay, no disconnects, but inevitably downloads are horribly slow. I'm also seeing (or not seeing) quite a lot of the Invisible Avatar Syndrome.

The point of this post: Sync speed is no guarantee of actual data rate. You may think you have a high speed connection but do you? For MaxADSL in the UK you can check your data rates at: http://test.speedtester.bt.com:50301/ (when it's working ). But in general I'd suggest that anyone getting a lot of SL glitches should do an independent speed test (http://www.speedtest.net/ is very pretty) on their line and then if necessary set the Maximum Bandwidth accordingly - Edit Preferences... Network... Maximum Bandwidth

One thing I can see is that a slow and stable SL connection is a lot better than an over optimistic and glitchy one. I'm not saying 150Kb gives a very slick SL performance but even at this speed I am avoiding most of the really bad performance symptoms.

Thank you for that site! I used to be able to play SL very smoothly and now I can't play anymore. I kept wondering what it could be. But I found out that I only have 130kbs ( I pay 45 bucks a month for it too) *mumbles* Well good to know that it wasn't just my computer.