Physical distance from LL and bugs

Please delete this message.

My ping times are relatively the same as yours (UK) and I don't have any problems since I got some more RAM, I'm only running on 512mb now..

Kris Ritter comes to mind though, shes had awful problems and can't put it down to anything..

Mine have 768mb RAM and graphics card (Nvidia) have 128mb. Try to keep my pc in tip top shape too.


Lis

I need another 512 megs of RAM myself, old girl ain't what she use to be.
<pats his tower which he's currently resting his foot on>

On a more local front, I'm on the East coast of NA and I'm getting between 150 and 180ms ping times, so it's not a geographical deal. Actually I'd be thrilled to get your speeds given your geography, I hear crossing the channel really use to kill your ping times (what with all the NA/Europe traffic being done with a thick bundle of cables along the sea floor in the past). But then again we live in a world of high technology now, more or less, so I suppose international communication via satellite is cheap and affordable now.

Hi Hi Lisbeth Cohen,

Distance is pretty much the same for me as you, another Norwegian here, 5/1mbit line (155/155mbit sometimes rare now tho), ping times 120-240 varies , but usually about 200 ish.

Have some friends in US that has way more issues with SL' bugs then i have so i dont think its distance,had one trouble with distance a few months back when prims kept flying back , my isp where pretty bad right then ( Canal Digital )

Right now the bugs (?) i have is pretty common i think

; Local light = kill pc (bug or not its awefull slow after last updates since 1.6)
; Texturing several prims and SL "forget" some sides when adding textures
; Snap broke when doing things with prims , 0.10 = 0.09 | 0.15 = 0.14
; Music / sound , randomly turning itself on when changing something in options (why i now run SL with -nosound)

to early ~.~ i know theres more cant think of any right now

Local lighting is a problem for us all, but be sure to voice your opinion about ways to fix it.

I get mediocre performance with a fairly high-spec computer (2Gb RAM, for example). But I am in the UK, and my pings are more or less the same 100-200 msec, which might explain why.

Again in the UK, with a 2 gig cable sonnection, with a ping that generally sits around 240, but ocassionally spikes to 4 figures for a few seconds now and again.
I have a 2.8 ghz processor, 512 mb ram and a 256mb nvidea fx5200, and consider an FPS in 2 figures a reason to celebrate. Which admittedly has been occurring more frequently in the last couple of updates.

I have what seems to be average performance on a 1.5GHz Powerbook, 1 gig RAM, 128meg VRAM, and I live in London. I say "average" judging by other people's comments - I've never seen SL running anywhere else but here.

I certainly don't have a lot of crashes. I've had a couple, but those were client problems and reproducable, and I almost never have any sort of random crash for no apparent reason, whereas I know people in the US who do quite frequently. SL is quite reliable for me.

edited to add: and what's more, I'm using BT *spit* who are generally appalling in terms of reliability as an ISP

Random crashes, lockups or weird video corruption usually means either:

* Driver bugs. Try upgrading or downgrading your video driver
* Components may be overheating. Open up the case and check for excessive dust. Be especially careful with this if you got your computer from a less mainstream dealer - budget PC manufacturers sometimes use very poor quality components that can cause voltage fluctuations.
* Spyware/viruses on your computer. Make sure your system is clean.

Making sure your system is clean is easier said than done, unfortunately. The latest generation of bots and viruses are able to render themselves invisible to virus scanners, and in some cases will actively attack and disable anti-virals and anti-spyware programs.

To add another data point... I am in continental Europe and see ping times around 200-300ms (I run SL with the debug window open pretty much all the time). When running a traceroute or mtr to the sim server, it is visible that most of the delay occurs on the transatlantic connection, and then again from east to west coast.

I have all graphics options off except shiny, draw distance set to 128, detail sliders to the max. I get 18-25fps in my skybox, 7-10fps on the mainland with few people around; when there's a lot of people around fps drops to 5-7, not too much. Prims and textures rez pretty fast, it usually takes about 15-30secs for a place to load, but once it starts streaming in, everything appears almost at once. Even with 5fps, the client response is still smooth. Ripple water totally kills performance, especially in void sims.

Any packet loss, even only 2%, leads to immediate and pretty strong degradation of fps, useability etc. I've twice seen packet losses on the Sprintlink network (over which traffic from my provider to the US is routed), and both times SL was a pain to use.

Crashes: very, very occasionally - maybe monthly. I had one the other night, but can't remember the one before.

PC specs:
2.8ghz pentium CPU
1gb ram
geforce fx 5200 with 128mb
2mbit adsl (I think...)

Moving a box from California to the Eastern US caused no change in ping times (100-200msec is pretty nominal everywhere but perhaps inside LL) nor visible change in statistics or qualitative performance despite doubling the number of hops.

I've also got roughly equivalent machines attached to the same residential drop with the only significant difference between the boxes being that one runs CPU at 3GHz and the other at 2GHz. The slow box runs SL considerably faster than the other despite the slower box running at 1600x1200 resolution with the faster running at 1280x1024. Contrariwise, pshop and other heavy applications comparatively zoom on the faster box.

There is simply no rhyme nor reason between configuration, locale, and performance for SL.

I can confirm this. I'm like 30 hops away from LL and it seems to do nasty things to packets - when I open the debug view I see those "packet out of order" messages all the time. It makes building and working with inventory a pain, vehicles are basically unusable.

Thanks Mack Case is allways open, and I check for virus/spyware once each week - at least.

I used much time maintaining my pc yesterday (cleared sl cache, win update, checked drivers, freed up space, checked for and removed spyware/virus using 4 programs, installed another firewall, tuned system etc). Haven't checked for dust, but I will when I get home. Doubt cooling is a problem, but will check that as well.

Thanks to everyone! The only thing I can say in my deffence is... Superstition take over where logic fails


Lis

When I tried to connect with DSL, I had similar issues. I now have an 8mb/s cable connection and my lag is minimal.

You remembered to disable Windows Firewall, right? I know that sounds like a silly thing to overlook but sometimes the little bastard likes to re-enable itself in XP. That can cause all sorts of issues like this.

Hmmm... I haven't checked packet out of order, but will next time I'm in SL. Thanks for the tip Candide!

That is interesting, Corvus. I allways thought dsl were superior to cable tv connection (unless you mean like T1 line...?). I have that option too, so perhaps I should think about going from adsl to cable tv. The one and only program - and connection - who gives me trouble is SL on that machine. Nothing else! My old SL machine is another matter. It DOES overheat, so I have turned down the speed of the processor.

Replacing XP firewall with someting usable was the very first thing I did when I got XP - first on my laptop, then on my current SL machine. But thanks for reminding me, Corvus

I'm not usually plagued by lag, unless I'm at a club of course - or other crowdy area. Even local lights combined with shiny and shadows work pretty good, as I turn those on for photography. I have mostly pretty good fps - 18 - 30 in non crowdy places. So you can imagine I was a bit surprised when Torley thought my ping rate is far too slow. Reading your ping numbers makes me realise my numbers are pretty normal. Which is good

Despite all the tips you have given me, it's still mysterious to me why I'm SO plagued by bugs (and lately crashes). Hopefully the maintenance I'm doing to my pc now will help.

I will again thank every one of you for sharing your information and for great tips!


Lis

OK, it's cool that you check often but as I said, it depends how you check. This crap is getting nasty far far too fast for my liking. A clean bill of health from a virus scanner doesn't mean as much as it used to. Unfortunately I can't give you much advice on this, if the problems only seem to occur with SL then overheating is my guess. If you are experiencing glitches with other aspects of your computer try running a dedicated anti-spyware tool and/or a rootkit scanner like BlackLight or Sysinternals.com RootkitRevealer.

Having your case open all the time doesn't necessarily mean it'll stay cooler. It'll probably suck in more dust from the room that way. Take a look underneath the fan around the CPU heatsink when the system is off (make sure to touch the case first with the cable plugged in so you ground yourself). If there seems to be a lot of dust there, you can buy compressed air canisters from shops that will let you blow the dust out. Be careful not to get it in your lungs though!

Good luck!

Im in the uk too on a 2Mb adsl connection, i get around 180-220 pings which seems about average, but i do alot of testing in preview and hopefully catch most of the latency related bugs, the ones that come to mind are texturing a multiprim object, if your editing and object and moving it around, it may appear to jerk around the screen, and the biggest one is sim crossings.

Mack, I use PC-Cillin for checking for viruses. Also for checking for spyware, together with AdAware and SystemMechanic (belive those 3 combined catches most parasites). Firewall is both PC-Cillin's firewall plus ZoneAlarm. I also check manually both running processes and run in registry when suspecting something - very aware of much disk activity. Use SystemMechanic from time to time to keep performance on top. Often when I've downloaded movies and music, as well as installed programs, I scan for parasites.

Like I said I have my case open, but pc is still inside a room in my desk. It get plenty of air there as well as some protection against dust. I checked for dust yesterday, and it wasn't much. Just a little on the graphics card and edges of processor fan and case fan blades. No dust on main board, and nothing below cpu fan. Power supply seemed pretty clean as well.

Have only been in sl only two times after I did maintaince on my pc, and it appears to function much better. A bit early to tell of course, since my visit in sl yesterday was mainly to test the result of maintenance in different sims and environments. SL is not using the harddisk much now, only reading/writing to cache when neccesary. It used to be worse earlier - used virtual memory a lot. Network connection is stable and without any lost packets (unless SL lies).

Kona Linden adviced me to get a better graphics card and more memory, which I will.


Lis