Second Life Forums Archive - Peer2Peer = 90% less lag

teddirez Escape

Virtual Steads GM

Join date: 21 Jul 2006

Posts: 14

02-20-2008 22:39

With the ever increasing network issue seen at the labs and everyone has no doubt experienced lag to the Nth degree at some stage wouldnt it make sense to address why its happening.

With connection speeds for ADSL getting faster and faster we can only do so much at our end. Its the bottle neck of routers and switches and different servers that slow us all down particularly in crowded areas.

The answer is P2P (Peer to Peer). There is already a number of online worlds using the technology and i would even dare to say why not go the whole hog and run it in a torrent fashion. Where the LL servers act as an ongoing seed, only when traffic is high it relies less on the server and splits it off to the people around us. Effectively reducing everyones load times and lag.

Yes it would require a major rewrite of the base code for both servers and client but its pretty safe to assume its current capacity has been reached and Lindens need to make a few bold moves in order to keep moving forward.

I have posted this in JIRA if everyone could take 10 seconds to go there and reply as well.. Cheers

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-5078

Rach Whitfield

Registered User

Join date: 3 Apr 2007

Posts: 1

02-21-2008 04:15

Bump !!

Kitty Barnett

Registered User

Join date: 10 May 2006

Posts: 5,586

02-21-2008 05:25

The majority of people have a large download bandwidth but only limited upload bandwidth, which is impossible to quantify. You run the risk of saturating the upload resulting in a near-total stall of all downloads.

There are also people who pay for their internet traffic on top of what they're paying for their internet connection, in some cases excess upload traffic is 10 times more costly than download traffic.

The file sizes for any individual texture are so small that the overhead of finding other peers and initiating a connection is so high that things will always be slower than a direct download.

Finally, if there is a bandwidth problem on LL's end the obvious solution would be for them to either rent a bigger pipe or to cap the bandwidth of the different kinds of accounts.

I already pay for my SL account, I already pay my ISP for my excess download traffic caused by SL, I'm not going to pay even more to support the drain of NPI accounts.

Thili Playfair

Registered User

Join date: 18 Aug 2004

Posts: 2,417

02-21-2008 09:33

P2P is bad for those who dont have a decent upload, less upload = less download speed and it requires connections to peers wich can be from 1 to 1000's if not set a limit, and that will really lag everyone if youre sharing line with someone.

No, i wouldnt vote for this, i know what happen if i put a download with many peers on , the isp grind to a crawl and ping will skyrocket if its enough peers connected to you.

They should rather make cache more usefull and larger , so the constant download of textures could be saved, since that is most of the traffic, if it was p2p you might as well just say let me have all the textures sendt to me, since anyone would have easy access to 'em , wich would piss off alot of texture/skin makers.

Not that its hard to rip them as its now, but p2p idea would just make it even easier.

Yes this is going in circles : p

But if LL ever allow us a huge cache wich could get more textures i would easy dedicate 100~250gig to it, they already lost the protect creators content anyway, cause theres' 1000's of people out there already reselling other peoples textures.

I do not make textures or share anymore, since it blatant obviously anyone just rip them off and resell them without anything being done about it, but would i like a huge cache so system could just check the frigging uuid on my drive instead of always redowloading a place i been many times before? oh yes.

Meade Paravane

Hedgehog

Join date: 21 Nov 2006

Posts: 4,845

02-21-2008 09:39

Hmm.. Everybody in the sim directly connecting to the PC of everybody else in the sim..

/me runs like hell from this idea.

_____________________

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Draco18s Majestic

Registered User

Join date: 19 Sep 2005

Posts: 2,744

02-21-2008 12:10

From: Rach Whitfield

Bump !!

...you bumped a thread after a mere 6 hours...

Wildefire Walcott

Heartbreaking

Join date: 8 Nov 2005

Posts: 2,156

02-21-2008 12:31

ISPs have begun banning and throttling customers whose P2P traffic exceeds the norm, by the way. Could be dangerous for users with otherwise good connections.

_____________________

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http://desperationisle.blogspot.com/

New Desperation Isle: The prettiest BDSM Playground and Fetish Mall in SL!
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Jopsy Pendragon

Perpetual Outsider

Join date: 15 Jan 2004

Posts: 1,906

02-21-2008 12:47

There real bandwidth killer is the massive transfer of assets (Textures, anims, sounds, sculpt-maps, ...) that happens when people simply move from place to place.

The model, as I understand it, is:

Asset Server ---> Region Server / Inventory Server ---> Client Viewer

To browse your inventory you need to contact the inventory server which then finds out which assets you have.

To look around the world, the region must cache the objects&assets and then send them to your viewer.

A big speed win would be made by taking the asset servers, replicating them around the world, "torrent style" as you say, and having people contact them without adding the extra burden to the inventory & region servers.

The problem is... you've just given up the security of having the region servers and inventory servers regulating who can obtain which assets and suddenly anyone can grab pretty much anything.

I'll put up with the lag for now instead, thanks. =)

_____________________

* The Particle Laboratory * - One of SecondLife's Oldest Learning Resources.
Free particle, control and targetting scripts. Numerous in-depth visual demonstrations, and multiple sandbox areas.
-
Stop by and try out Jopsy's new "Porgan 1800" an advanced steampunk styled 'particle organ' and the new particle texture store!

teddirez Escape

Virtual Steads GM

Join date: 21 Jul 2006

Posts: 14

02-21-2008 15:03

Some interesting points from all of you but i fear your looking at the more traditional concept of client P2P, where your uploads are throttled based on downloads etc etc. Whilst im not entirely sure how it was done i know that it has already been done by Outback Online devleopers. I was fortunate enough to see what its like to stand on a sim of 500 people and not have lag. All this on a 512/128 adsl connection. So client bandwidth is not the issue.
@Jopsy, i agree i havent really gone into much detail over torrenting assets, and yes there would no doubt be ways to try and steal items, just like there is now.

What i am saying is its easy for people to say oh just get a bigger pipe. Analogy here, I have a headache, i take a pain killer, the headache returns a few hours later. Wouldnt it be better to solve whats causing the headache as opposed to disguising the pain.

Im not saying we demolish the asset servers or anything like that, but ease the traffic/bandwidth that is an obvious cause to the spam of blogs relating to network issues we get.

I thank all you guys for your valid input but after having seen it already in action, im totally convinced.

Kyrah Abattoir

cruelty delight

Join date: 4 Jun 2004

Posts: 2,786

02-21-2008 22:42

Excuse me for the bluntness but... from where the hell did you pull out this 90% ?

_____________________

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Kitty Barnett

Registered User

Join date: 10 May 2006

Posts: 5,586

02-22-2008 03:49

From: teddirez Escape

I was fortunate enough to see what its like to stand on a sim of 500 people and not have lag.

If "not have lag" means that you achieved a high FPS then that's related to your video card, performance of whatever renderer they're using, the poly count of each avie, whether you're in a static environment that lends itself to precalculation or a dynamic one where things are optimized for speed or by people who don't know/care.

If it means that it's responsive (you press forward, you instantly walk forward, you suddenly turn, it turns along, etc) then that's due to a good network latency.

If it means that the "sim" was able to cope with 500 people then that depends on the internal workings of the sim software, the physics engine being used, etc.

If it means that things rez quickly then that could simply be due to the fact that it's somewhat more clever than SL's way of randomly downloading textures, whether the object it's applied to is distant or close (and people's tendency to slap a 1024x1024 texture on everything) or that it's not dumb enough to let you set a crazy draw distance like SL does.

If what you actually meant was all the trouble LL has due to being co-located in two different places (which doesn't translate into lag it all, if the link fails things just break which isn't lag) then that's due to LL's crazy way of linking the two together and the unreliability of the Dallas centre (although it's been behaving itself for the last half year).

I'm not sure what current problem you think P2P would solve. Most puters just aren't capable of rendering 500 SL avies and make a good FPS, and the sims themselves just aren't capable of simulating 500 avies on the same sim without choking and slowing down to a crawl. The network just isn't a limiting factor at all, puters and the SL software are.

Wildefire Walcott

Heartbreaking

Join date: 8 Nov 2005

Posts: 2,156

02-22-2008 07:44

The OP mentioned "Outback Online," which is an Australian Second Life competitor still in development (this is the first time I ever heard of it). They are indeed using a P2P protocol for sharing information about an avatar's immediate surroundings, and for interaction with the environment. The article I just read about the protocol says nothing about assets- so either it's not going to help with the assets issue, or Outback Online doesn't have user-created content.

Note that if this is a product targeted mainly at Australians/New Zealanders it might be feasible due to their geographic proximity, but if they're trying to do this with a multi-sim type of grid like SL with a truly worldwide audience, I don't see how P2P is going to buy anything but more lag.
http://www.3pointd.com/20070610/outback-onlines-peer-to-peer-gaming-protocol/

From: someone

Outback Online’s Peer-to-Peer Gaming Protocol
Posted Sunday, June 10th, 2007, at 1:52 pm Eastern by Mark Wallace
Tags: 3D Web, design, games, news, Technology, virtual worlds

I’ve been interested in what little information is available about Outback Online and the “user-generated spaces” that Yoick CEO Rand Leeb-du Toit is building there, so when I read (in an article I’ve since lost the link to) that Australian research institute NICTA had developed the peer-to-peer technology that is supposed to make Outback more scalable than any 3D online world we’ve seen before, I got in touch. NICTA’s Dr. Santosh Kulkarni was kind enough to give me some time on the phone. Between what Dr. Kulkarni was able to reveal and what I was able to understand I seem to have got a rough outline of NICTA’s technology that hopefully sheds some light on the new techniques being developed there.

Dr. Kulkarni described a system in which the basic peer-to-peer communications structure sits below a set of three modules that are designed specifically to tackle the problems of managing MMO information flows, and which work somewhat differently from the usual file-sharing protocol of services like BitTorrent. “What we have done is looked at the problem from a spatial point of view,” Dr. Kulkarni said.

His team broke the problem down into three parts. First, they tackled the challenge of indexing users in space, designing a spatial index that allows the various clients to discover users in the 3D space around them, without having to have all that presence information contained on a single server. Secondly, they tackled the problem of interacting, using multithreading techniques (among other things that got lost in a poor connection) to optimize communication between clients. Third came a security solution that obfuscates users’ IP addresses while still allowing clients to transmit the necessary information across the network.

That system of three modules is optimized for MMO applications, and then sitting atop that is an API that is designed to work with standard game engines. Connecting NICTA’s system with game engines is not a plug-n-play solution, Dr. Kulkarni said, but isn’t hugely labor-intensive either.

Essentially, the system is designed as a peer-to-peer online games protocol, replacing the file-sharing protocol that is most often thought of in connection with peer-to-peer systems. If Dr. Kulkarni is correct about its capabilities, it may allow virtual worlds to cale to much higher concurrency numbers than ever before.

Dr. Kulkarni confirmed that Outback was keen to use NICTA’s peer-to-peer system for Outback, and that the two were working on a licensing agreement (I still haven’t been able to schedule a chat with Rand — my fault, not his), but said the organization was still exploring business models and interest before deciding whether to commercialize the system broadly.

NICTA is also actively looking for feedback from virtual world and MMO developers, so if you’re interested in working with them on what sounds an interesting and possibly valuable project, get in touch.

_____________________

Desperation Isle Estates: Great prices, great neighbors, great service!
http://desperationisle.blogspot.com/

New Desperation Isle: The prettiest BDSM Playground and Fetish Mall in SL!
http://desperationisle.com/

Desperation Isle Productions: Skyboxes for lots (and budgets) of all sizes!

Peer2Peer = 90% less lag
teddirez Escape Virtual Steads GM Join date: 21 Jul 2006 Posts: 14	02-20-2008 22:39 With the ever increasing network issue seen at the labs and everyone has no doubt experienced lag to the Nth degree at some stage wouldnt it make sense to address why its happening. With connection speeds for ADSL getting faster and faster we can only do so much at our end. Its the bottle neck of routers and switches and different servers that slow us all down particularly in crowded areas. The answer is P2P (Peer to Peer). There is already a number of online worlds using the technology and i would even dare to say why not go the whole hog and run it in a torrent fashion. Where the LL servers act as an ongoing seed, only when traffic is high it relies less on the server and splits it off to the people around us. Effectively reducing everyones load times and lag. Yes it would require a major rewrite of the base code for both servers and client but its pretty safe to assume its current capacity has been reached and Lindens need to make a few bold moves in order to keep moving forward. I have posted this in JIRA if everyone could take 10 seconds to go there and reply as well.. Cheers https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-5078
Rach Whitfield Registered User Join date: 3 Apr 2007 Posts: 1	02-21-2008 04:15 Bump !!
Kitty Barnett Registered User Join date: 10 May 2006 Posts: 5,586	02-21-2008 05:25 The majority of people have a large download bandwidth but only limited upload bandwidth, which is impossible to quantify. You run the risk of saturating the upload resulting in a near-total stall of all downloads. There are also people who pay for their internet traffic on top of what they're paying for their internet connection, in some cases excess upload traffic is 10 times more costly than download traffic. The file sizes for any individual texture are so small that the overhead of finding other peers and initiating a connection is so high that things will always be slower than a direct download. Finally, if there is a bandwidth problem on LL's end the obvious solution would be for them to either rent a bigger pipe or to cap the bandwidth of the different kinds of accounts. I already pay for my SL account, I already pay my ISP for my excess download traffic caused by SL, I'm not going to pay even more to support the drain of NPI accounts.
Thili Playfair Registered User Join date: 18 Aug 2004 Posts: 2,417	02-21-2008 09:33 P2P is bad for those who dont have a decent upload, less upload = less download speed and it requires connections to peers wich can be from 1 to 1000's if not set a limit, and that will really lag everyone if youre sharing line with someone. No, i wouldnt vote for this, i know what happen if i put a download with many peers on , the isp grind to a crawl and ping will skyrocket if its enough peers connected to you. They should rather make cache more usefull and larger , so the constant download of textures could be saved, since that is most of the traffic, if it was p2p you might as well just say let me have all the textures sendt to me, since anyone would have easy access to 'em , wich would piss off alot of texture/skin makers. Not that its hard to rip them as its now, but p2p idea would just make it even easier. Yes this is going in circles : p But if LL ever allow us a huge cache wich could get more textures i would easy dedicate 100~250gig to it, they already lost the protect creators content anyway, cause theres' 1000's of people out there already reselling other peoples textures. I do not make textures or share anymore, since it blatant obviously anyone just rip them off and resell them without anything being done about it, but would i like a huge cache so system could just check the frigging uuid on my drive instead of always redowloading a place i been many times before? oh yes.
Meade Paravane Hedgehog Join date: 21 Nov 2006 Posts: 4,845	02-21-2008 09:39 Hmm.. Everybody in the sim directly connecting to the PC of everybody else in the sim.. /me runs like hell from this idea. _____________________ Tired of shouting clubs and lucky chairs? Vote for llParcelSay!!! - Go here: http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-1224 - If you see "if you were logged in.." on the left, click it and log in - Click the "Vote for it" link on the left
Draco18s Majestic Registered User Join date: 19 Sep 2005 Posts: 2,744	02-21-2008 12:10 From: Rach Whitfield Bump !! ...you bumped a thread after a mere 6 hours...
Wildefire Walcott Heartbreaking Join date: 8 Nov 2005 Posts: 2,156	02-21-2008 12:31 ISPs have begun banning and throttling customers whose P2P traffic exceeds the norm, by the way. Could be dangerous for users with otherwise good connections. _____________________ Desperation Isle Estates: Great prices, great neighbors, great service! http://desperationisle.blogspot.com/ New Desperation Isle: The prettiest BDSM Playground and Fetish Mall in SL! http://desperationisle.com/ Desperation Isle Productions: Skyboxes for lots (and budgets) of all sizes!
Jopsy Pendragon Perpetual Outsider Join date: 15 Jan 2004 Posts: 1,906	02-21-2008 12:47 There real bandwidth killer is the massive transfer of assets (Textures, anims, sounds, sculpt-maps, ...) that happens when people simply move from place to place. The model, as I understand it, is: Asset Server ---> Region Server / Inventory Server ---> Client Viewer To browse your inventory you need to contact the inventory server which then finds out which assets you have. To look around the world, the region must cache the objects&assets and then send them to your viewer. A big speed win would be made by taking the asset servers, replicating them around the world, "torrent style" as you say, and having people contact them without adding the extra burden to the inventory & region servers. The problem is... you've just given up the security of having the region servers and inventory servers regulating who can obtain which assets and suddenly anyone can grab pretty much anything. I'll put up with the lag for now instead, thanks. =) _____________________ * The Particle Laboratory * - One of SecondLife's Oldest Learning Resources. Free particle, control and targetting scripts. Numerous in-depth visual demonstrations, and multiple sandbox areas. - Stop by and try out Jopsy's new "Porgan 1800" an advanced steampunk styled 'particle organ' and the new particle texture store!
teddirez Escape Virtual Steads GM Join date: 21 Jul 2006 Posts: 14	02-21-2008 15:03 Some interesting points from all of you but i fear your looking at the more traditional concept of client P2P, where your uploads are throttled based on downloads etc etc. Whilst im not entirely sure how it was done i know that it has already been done by Outback Online devleopers. I was fortunate enough to see what its like to stand on a sim of 500 people and not have lag. All this on a 512/128 adsl connection. So client bandwidth is not the issue. @Jopsy, i agree i havent really gone into much detail over torrenting assets, and yes there would no doubt be ways to try and steal items, just like there is now. What i am saying is its easy for people to say oh just get a bigger pipe. Analogy here, I have a headache, i take a pain killer, the headache returns a few hours later. Wouldnt it be better to solve whats causing the headache as opposed to disguising the pain. Im not saying we demolish the asset servers or anything like that, but ease the traffic/bandwidth that is an obvious cause to the spam of blogs relating to network issues we get. I thank all you guys for your valid input but after having seen it already in action, im totally convinced.
Kyrah Abattoir cruelty delight Join date: 4 Jun 2004 Posts: 2,786	02-21-2008 22:42 Excuse me for the bluntness but... from where the hell did you pull out this 90% ? _____________________ tired of XStreetSL? try those! apez http://tinyurl.com/yfm9d5b metalife http://tinyurl.com/yzm3yvw metaverse exchange http://tinyurl.com/yzh7j4a slapt http://tinyurl.com/yfqah9u
Kitty Barnett Registered User Join date: 10 May 2006 Posts: 5,586	02-22-2008 03:49 From: teddirez Escape I was fortunate enough to see what its like to stand on a sim of 500 people and not have lag. If "not have lag" means that you achieved a high FPS then that's related to your video card, performance of whatever renderer they're using, the poly count of each avie, whether you're in a static environment that lends itself to precalculation or a dynamic one where things are optimized for speed or by people who don't know/care. If it means that it's responsive (you press forward, you instantly walk forward, you suddenly turn, it turns along, etc) then that's due to a good network latency. If it means that the "sim" was able to cope with 500 people then that depends on the internal workings of the sim software, the physics engine being used, etc. If it means that things rez quickly then that could simply be due to the fact that it's somewhat more clever than SL's way of randomly downloading textures, whether the object it's applied to is distant or close (and people's tendency to slap a 1024x1024 texture on everything) or that it's not dumb enough to let you set a crazy draw distance like SL does. If what you actually meant was all the trouble LL has due to being co-located in two different places (which doesn't translate into lag it all, if the link fails things just break which isn't lag) then that's due to LL's crazy way of linking the two together and the unreliability of the Dallas centre (although it's been behaving itself for the last half year). I'm not sure what current problem you think P2P would solve. Most puters just aren't capable of rendering 500 SL avies and make a good FPS, and the sims themselves just aren't capable of simulating 500 avies on the same sim without choking and slowing down to a crawl. The network just isn't a limiting factor at all, puters and the SL software are.
Wildefire Walcott Heartbreaking Join date: 8 Nov 2005 Posts: 2,156	02-22-2008 07:44 The OP mentioned "Outback Online," which is an Australian Second Life competitor still in development (this is the first time I ever heard of it). They are indeed using a P2P protocol for sharing information about an avatar's immediate surroundings, and for interaction with the environment. The article I just read about the protocol says nothing about assets- so either it's not going to help with the assets issue, or Outback Online doesn't have user-created content. Note that if this is a product targeted mainly at Australians/New Zealanders it might be feasible due to their geographic proximity, but if they're trying to do this with a multi-sim type of grid like SL with a truly worldwide audience, I don't see how P2P is going to buy anything but more lag. http://www.3pointd.com/20070610/outback-onlines-peer-to-peer-gaming-protocol/ From: someone Outback Online’s Peer-to-Peer Gaming Protocol Posted Sunday, June 10th, 2007, at 1:52 pm Eastern by Mark Wallace Tags: 3D Web, design, games, news, Technology, virtual worlds I’ve been interested in what little information is available about Outback Online and the “user-generated spaces” that Yoick CEO Rand Leeb-du Toit is building there, so when I read (in an article I’ve since lost the link to) that Australian research institute NICTA had developed the peer-to-peer technology that is supposed to make Outback more scalable than any 3D online world we’ve seen before, I got in touch. NICTA’s Dr. Santosh Kulkarni was kind enough to give me some time on the phone. Between what Dr. Kulkarni was able to reveal and what I was able to understand I seem to have got a rough outline of NICTA’s technology that hopefully sheds some light on the new techniques being developed there. Dr. Kulkarni described a system in which the basic peer-to-peer communications structure sits below a set of three modules that are designed specifically to tackle the problems of managing MMO information flows, and which work somewhat differently from the usual file-sharing protocol of services like BitTorrent. “What we have done is looked at the problem from a spatial point of view,” Dr. Kulkarni said. His team broke the problem down into three parts. First, they tackled the challenge of indexing users in space, designing a spatial index that allows the various clients to discover users in the 3D space around them, without having to have all that presence information contained on a single server. Secondly, they tackled the problem of interacting, using multithreading techniques (among other things that got lost in a poor connection) to optimize communication between clients. Third came a security solution that obfuscates users’ IP addresses while still allowing clients to transmit the necessary information across the network. That system of three modules is optimized for MMO applications, and then sitting atop that is an API that is designed to work with standard game engines. Connecting NICTA’s system with game engines is not a plug-n-play solution, Dr. Kulkarni said, but isn’t hugely labor-intensive either. Essentially, the system is designed as a peer-to-peer online games protocol, replacing the file-sharing protocol that is most often thought of in connection with peer-to-peer systems. If Dr. Kulkarni is correct about its capabilities, it may allow virtual worlds to cale to much higher concurrency numbers than ever before. Dr. Kulkarni confirmed that Outback was keen to use NICTA’s peer-to-peer system for Outback, and that the two were working on a licensing agreement (I still haven’t been able to schedule a chat with Rand — my fault, not his), but said the organization was still exploring business models and interest before deciding whether to commercialize the system broadly. NICTA is also actively looking for feedback from virtual world and MMO developers, so if you’re interested in working with them on what sounds an interesting and possibly valuable project, get in touch. _____________________ Desperation Isle Estates: Great prices, great neighbors, great service! http://desperationisle.blogspot.com/ New Desperation Isle: The prettiest BDSM Playground and Fetish Mall in SL! http://desperationisle.com/ Desperation Isle Productions: Skyboxes for lots (and budgets) of all sizes!

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Peer2Peer = 90% less lag