One of the issues which is really limiting my experience of SL is the chat.
Sometimes it takes 30 seconds or more for my messages to get through. And when they get through they come out of order. For a little test, I tried counting to 10 each as separate messages. It came out looking like this:
2 4 5 7 6 8 9 10 1 3.
I can't chat like this, conversations don't work.
My internet connection seems to be fine for the most part. Websites, downloads work flawlessly.
I can ping google.com and have no packetloss when I'm not playing SL. Pingtimes to google are around 30ms. Then when I do play SL and try to ping google.com I get around 10% packet loss, but at the same ~30ms. (The SL statistics bar reports no packet loss). I imagine this is affecting the chat, but it doesn't affect any other chat programs I am using at the same time, say AOL instant messenger or IRC.
I think perhaps the chat routines need to be made more robust. Maybe be made TCP instead of UDP.
Just my 2 cents.