Extreme Network Lag

I am regularly receiving 4000-6000msec ping in any given sim while in Second Life. Delays are so bad that saving notecards time out, movement is difficult (though with LOTS of patience it's possible). The connection has bandwidth to spare (tens of Mbps), however, scenery, avatars, even simple notecards refuse to load in a timely fashion.

I get the feeling that the problem lies in the fact that I am behind a hardware firewall which I cannot open ports on. I encountered a similar situation before, which was remedied by opening the appropriate ports, but that is no longer an option for me.

I am curious as to if anyone has tips for making SL tolerable in my sort of situation. (and Lindens, better firewall tolerance would be useful in 1.7!)

I'm confused why you think closed ports in the firewall would cause lag. Closed ports don't slow traffic through the firewall - they prevent traffic through the firewall. I venture to say the firewall has nothing to do with the lag you are seeing, and that if you could disable the firewall or direct connect your modem to the PC, assuming a router based firewall, you will still see the same lag issue.

Do a help about from inside SL, that will give you the URL to the sim you are at..

then do a trace route (tracert) to it and see where the hold up is...might be a point between you and SL...

And, most notably, if the pings outside of SL don't match those inside, start checking for software firewalls or other programs that are preventing SL from making the same connection.

I'm at school (Case Western Reserve) and I'm having the same issue... my bandwidth is reading between 3kb and 20kb but never steady, it hops up and down from 0. I'm stuck behind whatever port-blocking hardware firewall the school has set up. I usually download from external servers at about 200-800kbps according to load, distance, pipes, whatever. I'm fiberopticed to a gigabit connection out to Internet2... my point is I should be screaming through SL.
Funny though, my sim ping is huge and I can't get out of the starter island sim. I can only walk if I press up and then wait for about 2 minutes. My ping sim reads between 5000 and 20000ms.

A couple of people told me that it was a hardware issue and that my athlon 64 3400+ with 1g ram and a GeFo 6800GT could have these problem (even with really bad graphics settings).
Another thing I have noticed is that my cpu load skyrockets to 100% when I have SL running... which is a sight I've not seen with any other application.
I play many MMORPGs and I've never seen any of these symptoms before.
So, I did a couple of tests at the prompt (ping and tracert) with windows firewall turned off and no other unnecessary programs running. The results of those tests are attached as "test_ip.txt". The reading at hop 5 of the trace results is interesting, but what's it mean?
Another interesting thing happened....
I switched back to the game and the "Restoring..." bar loaded up... and then I was going at 200kbps for like 2 seconds and I could walk and I was d/ling a real texture!.

Thanks, in advance, for any further suggestions.
-Hye

Oh and I'm running XP pro w/ SP2 and .net frame if it matters at all?

And another thing.... I'm attaching a pic of processes running, a picture of the cpu load at 100% and a picture of my ingame stats. Hope this stuff will help some .

The picture with those statistics doesn't look good. The 11,000ms connection to our server (Ping Sim) shows a major problem with our network traffic. The traceroute shows problems of its own, but it's nowhere near the same.

I suspect your school may have strict measures in place against UDP transmissions. You'll be able to download files quickly from websites because they use TCP; however, UDP transmissions (which Second Life uses) are often restricted or completely blocked on university networks because they're the protocol of choice for file-sharing utilities. Left unchecked, filesharing will typically be the #1 consumer of university bandwidth, so most places are pretty strict about this. We're not like most MMOs (we stream content; that's why World of Warcraft comes on 4 CDs and we have a 20MB install), so we're more likely to set off any measures designed to stop file-sharing utilities.

That traceroute also shows several pretty long ping times for Internet2. If there's an ISP between you and us that's overworked and dropping data, there may not be much you or we can do.

my penny on this subject (not even worth 2 cents)...

i've been experiencing quite a bit of lag as well as problems with the cpu usage spinning up to 100%. in addition, i've noticed a great deal of packet loss.

the only problem i have some insight on at this time is the high cpu usage...i'm not sure how widespread an issue this is but it reminds me of circumstances in which there was a memory leak, especially since sl is purported to be a "thin client".

i'll do some pinging and traceroute investigation and let u know my results, but i'd be curious to know how linden labs does their internal load/stress tests and whether or not there is active monitoring on the servers and connections to identify potential bottlenecks into/out of sl.

just happened to notice this thread while researching the cpu usage issue--> /111/5a/58988/1.html