Support please read. Terrible network code :(

This is in response to my absoloute frustration with the networking with SecondLife. I am on a campus data connection that runs about 30KBps. If i stay at my house i am fine. AS SOON AS I MOVE AROUND my ping begins to spike nearly at geometrical proportions. I have set a multitued of setting ranging from graphical to cache settings, and most importantly, the almight "Rate". I have had this set every where between 150 and 600 for extensive periods of time to see what would generate the best results. In my unprofessional opinion i belive that the network comunications needs to be broken down into two channels: movement and chat, and resource transfering. And to have the movement and chat have the utmost priority. Im tired of moving only small distances and having my ping spike to 7000+, and teleporting to new places and having my ping go wildly out of control going WELL OVER 40,000+, that number is not and exaggeration in fact its a painful constant in inter sim travle. I have tried just standing still in case resources were transfering and the spike will pass, but it continues to jam my network conection and skyrocket the ping. I am hoping that some one in the development dept. will see this and take it into consideration. I belive that the network code needs reworking, I'm not trying to complain but it has gotten to the point where SL starts jamming other things with it pinging out of control.

I hope you understand
Thanks for your time.

Pardon my ignorance, but is 30kbps even considered broadband?

56kbps is a modem, which, if I recall correctly, can download up to 5k/sec.

Second Life is mega-bandwidth intensive... it's how it was designed. Even with heavy compression and the client knowing there can only be maybe 10 main shapes to download, I've seen my client peak at 1400kbps (before they instituted the 1000kbps limit).

Are you SURE your campus connection is just 30kbps? Because if it is, I don't think you can play SL

LF

30KBps (bytes not bits ) sorry my typing mistake, aprox 6 times faster then a 56k connection (i know thats noting special) but it should still be sufficient.

I agree with the thing about movement, somewhat. There's always the problem of you moving somewhere before the house arrives, and then being stuck inside, or invading the privacy of someone.
Do you have a recent nvidia graphics card though?
Do you have the latest AGP chipset drivers for your motherboard?
With the current single-threaded client, network lag and rendering speed are tied to each other.
So if something's wrong with your card, you will experience lag.
Also, 30KB/s is 240kbps, indicating you might have a 256k connection. In that case, turn your bandwidth slider down to around 200, and reduce your draw distance, cause your connection sucks
SL is a major bandwidh hog, since its continuously streaming the state of the world to you.

The rule of thumb I've seen is to set your rate to 1/3 of your downstream bandwidth. In your case, that would be a rate of 80kbps. From that point, start working it upwards until you see ping spikes or packet loss.

erf.

1. Where geographically are you located?
2. What is your draw distance set to?
3. Does your campus network have a mondo-slow-firewall that scans everything?
4. 30kBps is still slow for SL, period. Normally while loading a new scene I'll spike up around 700kBps. I would complain to your campus how far behind the curve they are with campus network connectivity.

700 kilobytes per second? That's more than 5.6mpbs... what sort of connection is that?
I mean, the 'rate' setting only lets you adjust up to 1mpbs max, right?..

Hehehe he probably meant kilobits.
It used to be that the network settings had a much more complex dialog box that allowed you to prioritize downloading of objects, textures, terrain, wind, clouds, by allocating a specific amount of bandwidth for each, and it wasnt capped either.

Yeah, I meant kilobits ... though my pipe is 3mbits wide... so I have that slider all the way to 1mbit

SL has terrible CHROME CODE.

I wish they would not let the chrome suffer, as my immense knowledge of CHROME CODE tells me, they should improve their CHROME CODE!!!

LOLOMGWTFBBQ!!!!!!11!!!1!!!!1!ONE

* - Feel free to substitute 'CHROME CODE' with any other area of the application you know diddly-squat about.

I just couldn't let this one slip by - everyone and their FPS brother thinks they know how to fix things, its one of those truisms of the internet.

</satire>

Indeed, the very point at Linden Labs is that they know what they are doing.. ESPECIALLY when it comes to networking code, dynamic streaming etc..

i do miss the old networking code tho... it was nice to be able to give custom priorities to the varying things that make up SL... also was nice to be able to exceed the 1mbit barrier, as most US broadband is well beyond that.

as to the connection, chances are pretty good yer not *even* getting 30kbytes on a campus connection these days... have ya actually tried measuring yer throughput through some of the tools on broadbandreports.com?

i know alot of campus connections now generally HEAVILY cut down on upload speed so while yer 30kbyte down ya might only be 1-2 up.. and thats not nearly enough to work well with SL

Actually, funny story... I was once told that examination of the actual code indicated that those sliders didn't actually work. Whether or not that's true, I don't know, but I know I never noticed any difference by moving them around.

Ezequal, Eggy's correct about the networking and rendering being part of the same thread. What make and model of CPU, video card, RAM and motherboard do you have? Do you have the latest video and motherboard drivers? If not, it might not just be your internet connection that's causing this.

heh the sliders did work... at least minimizing them could make SL an awfully weird place (like basically nuking the land priority would leave huge gaping holes in the terrain grid that it would take the client forever to fill heh

Also bear in mind that there are probably a dozen or so routers and switches between you and the SL servers, owned and operated by 3 or 4 different service providors. Any one of those could be throttling the traffic between you and the LL datacenter.

- Ace

Make sure you are not running any file sharing programs. I used to share my connection with other people who ran that crap and it absolutely killed SL for me. I told them not to do it anymore, and yet, I would see the router lights for their machines flashing CONSTANTLY, 24 hours a day. After I blocked all the file sharing ports I could find, traffic MAGICALLY went back to normal, and SL was useable again.

Ok, couple things:

System spec: 3.2GHz P4 HT | Radeon 9700 Mobility | 1024 DDR400 RAM
(everything is updated)

The network here is saposed to go 60KBps but there is some dampening from other traffic (campus netword), BUT I do get avg ping of 20-30 in Counter-Strikeource servers.

I do not run ANYTHING in the background when running SL (its bad enough as it is ) (Photoshop momentarily dosent count especialy with my specs)

So, as i restate my complain, movement and chat should be on a seperate data thread from content streaming and shuold have absoloute priority, ergo preventing lag from simply loading resources.

Check to be sure your not infecting the world with e-love...or that you have a computer virus.

You could be mass mailing everybody in the world and launching porn attacks on unsuspecting websites ;P

Counter-strike is suprisingly low-bandwidth.

Bottom line, your connection is on the low-end of broadband. SL runs well on the good-end of broadband. Consider DSL.

No Solution here for you, but I am experiencing exactly the same problem as yourself with the crazy ping! I have a high spec pc with all driver updated and am on a 750k cable connection.
Strange thing is I've been in SL since July '04 and it is only in the last few weeks I've experienced this problem.

Just so you know your not alone here,

Zero