Dear Lindens: Voice does TOO affect performance.

I'm on an older computer, so maybe you don't care about people on those.

However, this business about how voice was not going to affect us much if any, since it's run [somehow, by someone, somewhere else] was baloney.

I've got HUGE packet loss, and constant huge packet loss, interspersed by small amounts of packet loss, interspersed by brief periods of no packet loss.

My performance has gone from the rather sucky range (being on an old computer) to the virtually impossible range.

Just thought you might be interested to know.

coco

This shouldn't be surprising to anyone unfortunately.

Of course it makes a difference, and if linden labs has said otherwise, they're 100% wrong.

Once again linden labs has re-invented the wheel and come up with an inefficient bandwidth hog that everyone else developed past when MIT came up with "pgpfone" (I suggest you look it up, lindens---its open source as far as I know, and would probably fix all your voice problems--since it actually does duplexing properly).

This is not surprising. Anyone with half a brain could foresee a MULTITUDE of problems with voice and implementing it.

Sorry, but I've been doing this at every log-off and log-on, running the newest updated v1.18, and guess what, even at 96m resolution, if I want to crash, all I need to do is to left-arrow (or right-arrow) rotate my avi POV 180 degrees, and kaboom. And this is on Cl V servers with no presence-load, no time dilation, no script load to speak of, and below 50% prim load...so, what now, Linden?

This is in voice-enabled and voice-off sims, it seems to me like the extra burden of all that extra voice-state tagging might be the culprit???? Nah, can't be voice, we worked on that for 18 years (oops, sorry, make that "months", and we *know* we have it right...now. And it's all better, right, now that LL assures us it's not his problem, but our systems.

And Coco, I'd bet your system, as lame as you think it is, is well within the mid-range of what most folks have to work with, so don't be too quick to absorb this one as "yours", hon!

I work as a helper on Orientation Island, which is an always overloaded sim. But with voice it is now impossible. Lag has become so great that even simple movements causes the screen to freeze and the Mac 'spinning beachball of death' to appear for a good 15 - 20 seconds before clearing itself.

Now, this would be bad, but just about barely tolerable, if voice was working properly. Ha! Sometimes it is there (the white dots..), sometimes it is not, but without any predictability or warning as to when or why it works. And when I do manage to get it, the sound breaks up so bad that I can barely hear 1 word in 10. In a less crowded sim I can just about manage somewhere near 50% of the chat. Compare that with the effect of a DJ streaming in his audio contributions and interacting live with the text chat - the sound then is perfect. If it can be done that way, then why......?

I am seriously thinking of restoring the previous version (which I still have) to see if things improve. I am 100% confident that they will. And I can live without voice if this is going to be the experience, but will welcome it back again when it works somewhere like it's meant to. Right now, it's horrible.

Going back to the previous version will definitely help, that's what i've done, like you say better to be without voice than be crippled with lag.

Personally i'm not that interested in using voice anyway, but even if i was I think i'd be too put off by the lag to use it.

They won't improve. The problem with voice and lag has to do with server side function, not client (mostly). Now, that's an interesting thing. Why would linden labs want to pump each half of every duplex voice chat going on in second life straight through the middle of the server involved, rather than do it straight client-to-client? It really would only be another checkbox or two to deal with the ins and outs of DCC (another thing thats been invented already and is open source), so that the lag on the servers could lift a bit and things could be all dandy...

That is...unless they WANT all voice chat to be directed right through the server involved, and therefore the grid...but why would they want that? The only possible reason I can see is if they're planning on keeping actual chat logs of voice...chats......

Oh, dear.

Interesting - but my client was fine before I upgraded, and suddenly got a lot worse when I did. It can't all be server side function - could it also be an independent little program my Activity Monitor has been watching, "SL Voice"...? Which continued to pump disembodied voice chat out of my speakers for 15 minutes after SL crashed on me - until I relogged? Hmm...

you act like the voice uses the grid servers. They have their own servers completely, it doesn't access if barely any information from the grid servers. Its basically just like running a completely second app.

Oh its certainly that too, but that's not the same thing as lag. That's your computer grinding under the piece of crap that linden labs wrote, once again proving their ability to re-invent another wheel, very, very badly.

I wish I understand the technical side of voice, but I don't. I do know that in the several places where I've been privvy to conversations in voice, I've found them to be extremely distracting and annoying. When I am shopping or enjoying a view, I don't want to hear someone else's banalities or vulgarities. It feels like an invasion because it comes right into the room with me.

The alternative is, of course, to turn off my volume, but that leaves me without the music or the nature sounds I really enjoy as part of the Second Life experience. To the extent that any sim or place of business becomes more annoying because of voice, I will simply take my business elsewhere. Quality of experience is important to me, and the conversations I've heard thus far do not justify what we have lost. Somehow hearing a guy comment on a woman's anatomy in his real voice rather than in text is much more invasive and more difficult to ignore. Some folks seem to be using voice to shock because they now can. HEY, LET'S OFFEND AS MANY PEOPLE AS WE CAN!!! WHAT A COOL TOY THIS IS!!!! Perhaps when business suffers, more store owners will say no to voice.

Does anyone know what server is handling all the avatar-voice presence-tags? My impression, from reading thread posts elsewhere, from folks much more knowledgeable than me, was that all presence-tagging is handled by the region server, is that right? Also, doesn't duplex/half-duplex audio streaming eat up a huge chunk of bandwidth? Is voice only going to work on T1-connections? Did Linden test performance on "run of the mill" standard PC/Mac's, as well?

Bronte, you can turn down voice indepenently - check the volume sliders that popup from the volume tab at the bottom of your SL window.

Would have helped alot of people if Lindens had given some instruction of use out with voice.
sheesh.

How do I get back to the non-voice version?

I don't still have it. I had First Look, to try it out (at which time I quickly switched back to the non-voice version, once I saw how it hurt performance).

But then when they said it was coming, I upgraded to it on the main version, which I believe I had to.

I would like to go back to the non-voice for as long as I can get away with it.

And by the way, I forgot to mention in my original post, but I disabled voice for me (so that now I can no longer hear anybody), thinking that would improve things, but it doesn't seem to have.

Another finicky detail: Once I disabled voice for me, I wasn't able to see anybody's little white dots, it seems. Apparently, who all is talking on voice is information the Lindens felt was only appropriate for those on voice to have. (In other words, you'd think that even though I have my own voice turned off, I'd still be able to see other people's white dots, which would clue me in on who is talking aloud.)

So anyway, how can I get the non-voice version back, so I can move again? Or will that even help?

Would it help if the whole sim were not voice-enabled? (In other words, if everyone on it disabled voice on their parcels?)

coco

http://s3.amazonaws.com/download-secondlife-com/Second%20Life%201-18-0-6%20Setup.exe



Probably. Sim owners can, I believe, do this sim-wide.

@Parsimony: You will not need a T1, lol. All the voices are mixed into one stream before they send it to you. In general, it will only use about 64-100kbps on your link. I don't know what voice encoding they're using, certainly there are compressed codecs that go down even lower than 64kbps. But that would put a little more strain on your CPU ...

Since the introduction of voice to sl, the following things have been happening to me on a regular basis...and I didn't even download voice on my computer.
1. When I log on, I get the "clothing is downloading, but everyone will see you as usual"..
not so..I look like a dwarf..large head and feet..hair like tentacles.
2. Packet loss..almost constant.
3. Can't rez any objects.
4. Can't teleport anywhere out of my home sim.
5. Can't edit appearance because "you can't change appearance until shape and clothes have loaded"...a task that has been taking 15-20 minutes since voice came along.
6. Notecards that I have created and used successfully for months, I no longer have "sufficient permissions to view".
7. Inventory that takes 15-25 minutes to load completely.

I've tried all the usual steps to fix this..cleared the cache..restarted the computer (a very powerful MAC)...completely shut down the computer...and downloaded an older client of sl. It's still not working. Please LL, fix it.

Thank you! I downloaded the old version, and things are now back to normal. (Normal being, for me and my computer, sucky rather than flat out impossible.)

I'm thinking, whatever they are trying to send through the bandwidth pipes is just to big to get through the pipes.

Could that be the case?

coco

There's something borked about the Voice viewer too. The machine I upgraded to voice is now experiencing 60% cpu usage running that viewer, on a parcel with voice disabled to boot.

Normal is 15%, on my non-Voice viewer. *sighs*

voice: the mother of all problems

What are you talking about? It doesnt matter what kind of server it is at ALL. What matters is that whatever it is (or they are), it's (they're) attempting to manage thousands of full duplex connections.

"Originally Posted by Missy Malaprop
you act like the voice uses the grid servers. They have their own servers completely, it doesn't access if barely any information from the grid servers. Its basically just like running a completely second app."

But think about it? if that server get "LOADED UP" well of course its going to lag as well. You can`t get away from lagging if the servers are not strong enough to support high voluums of users of voice.

You can count on a POTS (plain old telephone service) quality signal, full duplex, eating 64k (bits, not bytes) of bandwidth--which for cable modems and DSL lines is trivial. The problem isn't bandwidth, its latency. To reliably sync a connection like that, you need very low latency, at least something below 150ms. Right now I'm seeing, from my cable modem in New York City, 220ms.

Me, too, all of this, and running on a less-than-a-year-old heavy-hitter Vaio with all the most current Sony/WindowsXP/QT/Graphics/Sound drivers/patches/updates

quite simple.. disable voice, don't use it.
but about hte performance.. weird, since voice runs on seperate servers, then again this hits performance cause you gaterh information fromt he sim server and then again from vice server and all other servers you're connected to anyway.

So yeah ,disable it who needs voice if you have teamspeak lol