How to reduce bandwidth usage

My BF is in a conflict with his ISP over the amount of bandwidth he is using. And indeed, SL does consume a lot of bandwidth. My statistics say I usually use between 1 and 2 gigabytes dayly.

We are now looking for ways to reduce bandwidth consumption. We have already reduced viewing distance to 64 m. We use streaming audio sparingly. And we are now experimenting with wireframe view to prevent downloading textures.

Do you have any other ideas on how to reduce bandwidth usage?

Go to Edit, Preferences. In the Network tab, there is a slider to control how much bandwith you allow.

Would increasing cache size have any effect at all if (I suppose) one had places one normally visited? I'm asking - I don't know.

Right, and consider upgrading your service.

Yes, increasing cache can help.

Also, consider calling to CANCEL your service. Most services treat this as a "sales opportunity" to keep from losing you, and it's actually quite difficult to actually stop the service. Explain that your reason is simple, you've been warned that you use too much bandwidth. See if they make a reasonable counter offer. Chances are very good that they will! You can probably do even better if you first research your alternatives and know what the prices are: "Gee, I can get that much bandwidth from X for only YYY."

For best results, when you're ready to commit to a new service, record the call (and get their permission in the recording) and have them restate any promises that were important to you.

Meanwhile, find out how much bandwidth is acceptable to you, using the control in Preferences.

Changing how FAST the data transfers wont change how MUCH data is transfered so changing it in the settings to lower then 1500kbps would only slow things down for you rather then save bandwidth.

Limiting view distance is a good idea. But other then that, check your ISP. You may have to upgrade your plan to something that supports higher transfer. That or tell your boyfriend to knock off the illegal file sharing... You aren't using all 1-2gb on SL are you? If so, you must visit an insane amount of places with no caching on.

There are plenty of countries where a monthly data transfer cap is simply the way things work and switching ISPs doesn't change a thing since they all have one.

1Gb/day seems pretty normal to me and I don't do anything online anymore except for SL because of the mass transfer usage.

To the OP: changing your draw distance will have an effect (96 or 128 should be more than enough). If your boyfriend regularly listens to audio streams (about 60Mb/hour) or watches video streams (100-300Mb/hour and up) in-world he'll have to start limitting that.

Voice is going to be about the equivalent of an audio stream as well, so he might consider cutting down on that as well except for the times when he's actually using it.

Lastly, if he's camping all day that's going to be a big hit on his transfer limit as well.

Keep in mind that bandwidth is a lot like closet space--the more closets you have, the more stuff you'll acquire to fill them up, or cash--the more you carry, the more you'll spend. It's one of those immutable truths--the more bandwidth you have, the more you'll use.

In fact, one can make the case that bandwidth is becoming one of those commodities that are embedded in our daily lives, like water, salt, sunshine and air. Yes, it costs money, but you have to have it to survive in the 21st century.

Bandwidth (and I'm using the term in a very broad sense) is also one of the most powerful enablers available to people today. It allows you to do things and learn things that are impossible without it.

I know that in different countries ISPs will "cap" bandwidth usage, or offer differently priced packages with monthly allowable download rates. I would follow the advice of earlier posters and shop around ("do a cost/benefit analysis" of all the ISPs available to you, and bargain for the best deal.

In the long run, I think, you'll save more time and money, have fewer frustrations, and derive more benefit by just getting the most bandwidth you can find and ensuring you have unlimited access to it.

Good point Shiney.

I recommend sticking to 64 draw distance if per-day bandwidth usage is an issue. Then you'll get the most ingame time before you hit the limit. I actually change mine a lot, because I crash less with a shorter draw distance. I only set it higher when it matters.

For those who are interested in the math, 1 GByte is 8 Gbit, and our link bandwidths are usually specified in bits per sec. For example, typical cable is 2 to 3 Mbit/sec. The highest you can set the Prefs slider to is 1.5Mb/sec, and I usually have mine set to 500k to reduce packet drops. At that max rate, it would take 8000/.5 seconds, or 16000 seconds of time in SL -- over 4 hours. But that's 4 solid hours of hopping from place to place, because once I'm in a location and have looked all around, textures all loaded, the data rate goes way down, to well under 50k, where it would take 40 hours to use up the allotment.

So, spread over two users, if you spend 10 times as much time hanging out as you do moving, you should be able to play about 20 hours a day each. (Of course, busy places where people keep coming and going, reduce that somewhat because it uses more bandwidth than sitting in a place where things don't change.)

Still, 1 GByte is a lot of bandwidth, and takes a bit of an effort to use up playing SL. Are you sure they didn't say 1 Gbit?

BTW, for those who don't know the convention: capital B means byte, and lower case b means bit, when used in data rates such as 100KB/s and 100Kb/s. Lots of folks post numbers without knowing the convention, though, so you often have to check.

Kitty, you quoted the wrong source. Shiney said that, not me -- though I do suspect he's correct.

How do you monitor your bandwidth usage? How do you know that you're using typically 1 Gb/day -- and do you mean 1 Gbit or 1 GByte? Because 1 Gb is 1/8 of the rate we're talking about here, assuming the OP meant what she said.

Eep, sorry. Not sure how that happened . I'll edit it .

The only things I still do online besides SL are surfing (web page surfing, nothing related to media such as youtube) and email, neither of which is going to push me above 100Mb/day.

My ISP has a page where you can check your data transfer usage for the current month, split by day, so it's easy to see how much I'm using and 99% of it is due to SL.

I think the OP did mean data transfer (in Gb, not Gbit); people generally (mis)use the term bandwidth to mean both the actual transfer rate and the transfer amount.

There are numerous options beyond simply downing view distance. You can de-render the sky, ground, clouds, and water. That will help without altering the appearance of the game too much.. you just will not see any water and the sky will appear black. Disable vertex shaders, shiny, local lighting, and put terrain detail on low. Also, down every Mesh Detail to 0. If none of that helps, well blah. Frankly, I would rather quit Second Life than use it on wireframe.

Ramsus, almost all of those affect client frame rate but not bandwidth usage. For the most part, those are options to tell the client how to render the data provided by the server, rather than to reduce the amount of data sent by the server.

Some of those might actually reduce bandwidth usage, and if anyone knows for sure please let us know!

I have to admit I get sometimes confused by the difference between bps and Bps. Not because I don't know the difference, but because it is not clear what other people are talking about.

The green gauge at the top right of the SL client screen for instance: Does that measure bits per second or Bytes per second?

Using SL's wireframe mode doesn't cause textures not to be loaded, it just causes them not to be drawn, so wireframe mode doesn't reduce the amount of data sent.

Seriously, what if you just get another feed to your house. You use one, he uses the other.

Also, do you log out when you are not actually using SL? I know it is nice to be able to glance over and see your self partying while you do chores, but maybe you should log out. Remember Groucho Marx.

Maybe you can get a wireless bridge, and steal bandwidth from a neighbor.

oh, oh, I know. Move into a college dormitory.

My BF has solved the crisis by making a new contract with his ISP. We both have our own connection. (He lives in Brasil and I live in Holland, so sharing a connection would only be possible with a VERY long cable )

Thanks all, for thinking along with us, I think this uncovered some interesting information.

Start off by reducing your inventory, every time you loggin, the LL servers replenish your inventory. Turning down your ingame bandwidth is useless. All this does is set a potential limit to prevent timeouts on packet loss, and the client manages this dynamically, albiet very slowly. The more packet loss, the more data you send requesting new data refreshes.
If you are using a router, you can limit the amount of bandwidth allocated to any Mac address (signature for an individual PC).
Don't tp about SL, don't go to laggy places or anywhere with heavy scripts and or textures. Give yourself the largest HD cache you can (use the client debug options to set a cache larger than is shown in the Network preferences tab), keep your cache defragged as much as possible. Don't listen/view any media. Turn down particals to 0, composite layers to 2, fog to 1.5, draw distance to 64, turn off bump mapping and shiny, local lights, low terrain.

The SL platform is a dynamic programme, your avatar is always interacting with the surroundings, that requires data to be sent and received at all times.