Protocol failure?

(I was going to post this to Linden Answers, but figured here was more appropriate)

Torley, Andrew, Cory, GridMonkies, or anyone-

This is a difficult time for residents... I can't help but wonder if many of these problems we're coping with have some sort of root cause, (sorry this is a long lead in for this question):

Invisible Water: A problem that seems to affect individuals, but not everyone in the sim at once. It's there but sometimes not seen until a poke at the estate tools causes a refresh.

Invisible Avatars & HoverName: Same. They're there, just not seen. Who I can and can't see doesn't seem to co-incide with what someone standing next to me sees.

Missing Textures: This seems a little more consistent, the person wearing the missing textures doesn't see them missing, but the people around them are usually all seeing the same thing. (So this problem doesn't support my theory... and may be a completely different problem)

Invisible Money: It's there in the database just not getting communicated out effectively. We can't see other people's balances so this isn't conclusive of anything.

Invisible Inventory: like money, "it's in the database but we can't see them" at times.

Illusionary Attachment Drift: Only encountered this one rarely, riding vechiles caused hair/jewlery to offset and remained offset... and wasn't able to confirm whether it was visible only to me, or to all present at the time.


These conditions exist during off-peak hours as well, with 9,000 people in world or less. So this doesn't seem to be strictly a 'failure to scale' problem to me.

One of three things seems to be happening:

1. SL's servers are wrongly assuming that our clients have received data they tried to send,
   
2. SL's servers know our client didn't receive bits of data and are not bothering to re-transmit... or
   
3. SL's servers are not sending all the data that they are supposed to in the first place.
   

If a service provider between SL and us was dropping/throttling packets, I'd expect to see more packet loss. But Truth be told, I'm not seeing any packet loss, haven't for ages, and yet I still see many of the above problems.

Login and Teleports are obviously high data exchange events, and things like missing water, invisible avatars seem most common after either a login or a teleport. Aside from the obvious reason (ie: I didn't see "no water" until I arrived, duh!), is it possible that these high data transfer events are contributing to the above problem(s)?

So... is this a network problem?

A protocol failure?

Both?

or something completely different?

(I'm not looking for "proprietary SL internals" ...
just a little insight into where LL thinks the issue is.)

Thanks... and good luck!

Addendum... No, I AM seeing packet loss too. Just wasn't watching closely enough.

And... with a friend, have been tracking down a behavior we haven't seen before: WRONG sim placement of prims.

For example: Object A, we'll call it, a tangle of prim branches, that exists in the northwest corner of a adjacent sim... ALSO appears in the northwest corner of OTHER adjacent nearby sims. (requires a draw distance setting of 256 or greater to encounter this.)

if you approach the 'echo' copies that appear in the wrong sim they vanish... usually. I got close enough to actually try sitting on one... but it said 'not in the same region' (trust me, I was). Wasn't until I bumped into it that it finally vanished.

Filing a bug report on that.