Download Issue

Just wondering if someone can give me some info, I am new to SL and I would like to know just what kind of download resurces SL uses?
The reason being that tonight at midnight my new month with my isp kicked in. Both my hubby and I logged into to SL after midnight and stayed about an hour. Now according to our ISP we have, in that hour gone over our 2gb limit????????
Is this possible???
Someone please give me some advice

If you are on a limited bandwidth, you choose the wrong thing to do online. SL can and will eat up that much data, especially with 2 computers.

I'd have to agree with Striker, a metered network connection wouldnt work well for SL.

Although I dont think it should have used 2GB in an hour, even with 2 players. On average I see about 25Kb to 30Kb per second which in an hour would be about 100 Mb/hr ... although I tend to stay in one spot working quite a bit....

But if you were both constantantly moving then it potentially could have... Ive seen 600+ Kb/second from SL at times so 600 Kb/Sec *60 * 60 WOULD be 2.16 Gb EACH per hour

The more you move around in SL the more bandwidth is needed as new objects (and most importantly, the textures for those objects) come into range and need to be downloaded from the server. Unlike other "games" (and I use the term generically here since SL is really a "Virtual World" all of the content of the world is dynamic in nature... Other games can store the objects and object maps on your harddrive and just reference them but since ALL of EVERYTHING is user made in SL... it must be downloaded from the server each time you encounter it.

Just having ME walk up to you would cause your computer to have to download about 250 new objects, being as my avatar is mostly made of Prims. (My head alone is over 100 prims, although it just uses one texture so isnt all that bad... its the textures that kill the bandwidth)

Well thanks for the help guys, much appreciated