Unplayable ping times

Hello, I am new to second life, and since I started I have been having a problem with ping times. There is an extremely long delay between when I enter commands and when they actually occur. This has made the game nearly unplayable for me, but I would like to get this fixed so that I can give Second Life a shot.

I don't think that there is an issue with my connection, since the in game content loads fairly quickly, including streaming audio and video. However, the ping time listed by the game generally ranges from 1000 to 6000. I have tried pinging other sites through the command prompt, including sim530.agni.lindenlab.com, and the ping time is generally around 74.

Does anyone know what could be causing this problem and how I would go about solving it?

I've had SL get very high ping times occasionally - sometimes half an hour after login, sometimes (like last night) after a few hours. It has been happening less of late. If I ping the sim server directly, I get reasonable ping times (around 200ms). Except login out and back in, I haven't found any solution to that problem, if I stay on it only gets worse and worse. Sorry that I can't be of more help to you except confirming that I've seen that problem too.

What kind of computer and network connection do you have?

Are you getting any packet loss (indicated by the tiny left vertical bar in the top-right corner of the SL application window)?

If you are getting packet loss, try lowering your network bandwidth setting in SL's preferences window down to 100, and then hopefully you will have no more packet loss. Then raise it a little bit at a time until you start seeing packet loss again, and back it off a bit from there.

PS: If that doesn't work, please let us know your computer and network specifications if you have them

First off, thanks for the help.

I do have some packet loss for a minute or so when I first load second life, but after that there is none. I also tried reducing the bandwidth setting, but it didn't seem to have any effect.


My computer:
Pentium 4 running at 2.8GHz
512 MB ram
Radeon 9800 Pro


I'm a little unsure about my network. It is delivered over a home phoneline adaptor, but beyond that I'm not sure what type of service it is.

try testing it with this www.speakeasy.net/speedtest

you need least 300kbps+ or something , usually lays on 30-600kbps in SL download.

First time you start SL you need to cache aaalot, so it take forever, and youll lag all over the place till its done, take awhile depending where you are.

Download was above 750. Upload was about 250. Could that cause the performance problems I'm getting?

Have you tried a direct connection to your modem? Sometimes these adapters can do strange things to networks. Most of them I am aware of are not designed for broadband so you may be running into a bottleneck there. Its worth a try at any rate.