Bandwidth??

Question....maybe silly.....but I'm never sure what I 'should' be setting my bandwidth to in preferences. My connection is pretty fast with cable....moooost of the time..... but here and there it will seem to hiccup. So......what's a optimum bandwidth to use in-world....or should it be changed according to sim performance and so on? Just curious.

Well, hiccups should not be used as part of the analysis. It could be your computer, your ISP, the grid ...

In general though, I tell folks 1000 for DSL and 1500 for cable. I have noted an increase in degraded performance with the bandwidth set too high for the connection, but on cable you should be screaming right along. Theoretically.

You change it according to your availible bandwidth.

Use a website like http://www.speedtest.net/ to figure this out.

Don't rely on a single test against one server, do several, then average them. this is becuase your connection speed is always going to be: your bandwith minus the diference between your bandwith and the servers bandwith you are connecting to.

Mine is always set at the max of 1500 and the little colored indicators at the top right seldom ever go yellow or red for me.

:0 can vary widely - i guess we'll all have our own recommended setting... ;0 i'm on cable but find that 800 is my usual optimum - there's been occassions where i've been okay for awhile at around 1100, but that never seems to last; 800 just seems to be the best 'set it and leave it' setting for me. can just go up and down depending on who-knows-what.

find a quiet-ish area and crank the bandwidth all the way up. see if you get any redbar, and knock down the bandwidth by 100 until you have as little redbar as possible. but a little is almost always inevitable - in fact, go too far down and you may just get big redbar all over again! so don't overdo it when cranking down your setting... try to find your happy medium.

i keep mine around 500 to 700 and when i get to a sim i jump it up for rezz then go back down..
i've had cable and DSL
the only bad thing about cable is it is based on how many people are using it in your area..i would ping really well most times but when i hit a certain time of the night my ping would go from 21 to sometimes 500...so your connection speeds can vary at times.

DSL is more based on where you are in the line of connections or users..the closer you are to the node the better you connect..the farther towards the end of the line you would have less..but it was a consistent connection speed.

i'm on DSL and i used to live in town down the street from the node..now i am in the country and probably at the end of the line of users and my connection is half what it used to be..

Ya know...I have tried splaning this to my fiance cause he gets all wigged when he plays his on-line 'Call of Duty' game and his ping varies. He insists our computer should perform better.....and I keep trying to tell him with Cable it's going to vary depending on users in the area. *sigh*

Anyway....thanks for the feedback gang....mine has been set to 1000 with no problems...but the other day it was giving me a lot of static and the red bar came up a lot.....

Setting your bandwidth in the client is merely telling the Linden Lab servers how much your computer and connection can handle in the way of data being sent. If you have a fast CPU and GPU in your computer and a fast connection through your ISP then setting the bandwidth to the max will not cause you any problems (as a general rule)......most computers built in the last couple years can handle anything SL can throw at it with the network LL has set up for the data transfer across the internet. The main limiting factor for most is the ISP download speed they have for access. If you have a cable connection your average download speed will almost always exceed the 1500 kbps cap LL has put on the viewer. DSL is something else though since a lot of average downloads are less than 768 kbps.

What you don't want to do is tell the servers to send 1500 kbps and your computer and/or connection will only handle half that.....you'll set yourself up for high packet loss. And that will lag the hell out of you.........sometimes to the point of loosing the connection entirely. Many things can and do cause packet loss that you have no control over...but setting your bandwidth too high for your computer and ISP download is one source you DO have control over. Keep it at or below that one limitation and you have it set for the optimum. There is no way anyone can arbitrarily tell someone else the best setting to use......it's something everyone must determine for their particular computer and it's connection. General rules of thumbs can be guessed at like if you are on a cable connection with a Core2 Quad at 2.08 ghz speed and a modern GPU with DDR onboard VRAM you can pretty safely set your bandwidth at the max. Take the same computer and put it on a DSL connection with 768 kbps you should probably lower that bandwidth to somewhere around 700 kbps. You don't want to create a bottleneck where some of the packets of data are lost....that's the whole point of giving us a bandwidth setting in the first place.

If you will watch the your bandwidth you will see that even with the max setting you will seldom see the bandwidth go over 800 kbps. Even on days when the grid is lightly loaded and you are on an empty sim. There's a finite number of servers available to send all the data to all the clients so every client must wait their turn for any data to be sent.......with a setting set as high as you can really handle you will be getting more per burst of packets sents to your client. Set it lower than your computer/connection can handle and you'll be getting less........which will slow stuff down a little for you. Set it too high and you are likely to loose some (even most) of the data being sent which means the next time your turn comes up that data will have to be sent again.........which will slow stuff down for you (often more than it would if you have your setting set too low).

Everyone has to figure out their optimum for themselves.

bandwith is very difficult to setup/analyze or monitor properly.

reasons:

- server side, if the route to the server is bad (many hops with according lag), you will get bad results. (even if your side is top notch) AND if the server side bandwith is full, you will get bad througput (speed) from it back.

- client side, bandwith can be overbooked, like many dsl, cable connections utilize. Overbooking is a technique that allows one to burst to the max speed of the connection, for brief periods of time.
You connection capacity is shared with x number of near customers.

e.g. overbooking of 1/25 means, that the max capacity reserved for your living block (physical neighbourhood), is shared with 25 other users max. (thus if 25 people are online on the same time, and utilize the bandwith maximal, your speed will drop 25th of the top capacity.)

- client side2: your hardware and or software might come into play, software (background processes) can block your throughput of your internet connection (e.g. background updates being downloaded, processes getting more priority etc)
hardware can also be in play.. e.g. with wireless, if something interferes your connection (e.g. television) your speed will drop too.
Also cabling, can become broken or bad.. (e.g. irsa points for telephony)

- provider side:
sometimes the routers and switches at the provider side are overloaded, or behaving badly (faulty switch e.g.) that can become into play.

as you can see, it's very difficult to locate the origin of the problem.
Try as you go along... for as long as you have direct influence on the problem. And then hopefully you discover the source of the problem, and can adjust/replace/reconfigure it properly to eliminate it.

the advice on different bandwith throttles for dsl vs cable, is rubbish.
since modern versions of these techniques have way more throughput than SL can hold (client side).
1500 is not much, it's KiloBits/S not not KiloBytes/S.
granted that your connection exceeds (and thus not capped) byond this speed. (most do worldwide)

1500 kbps = 187.5 KBps and that's 1,4 Mbps and that's not much nowadays for broadband.. heck that was high speed 5 years ago.

If you're on Comcast, you should set that to "zero" or not log in until you can drop them and move on to someone who didn't mislead you into thinking that unlimited really means unlimited. If you have two people using SL in your house, you will go through your bandwidth allocation in a single lazy weekend.



Usually 50% of what your connection tests as is a good ballpark figure. 500-750 for most people on DSL. If you're on comcast or have heavy bandwidth restrictions, you probably want something far lower to avoid capping out (things will take longer to rez but at least you'll be able to hold a conversation without running into the bandwidth limit as fast).

Having worked for a telco and a cable company before, you've got it backwards. Cable operators very rarely have more than 30 households on a headend (more households and you start having problems distributing TV signals at acceptable strength from the headend). Problems with cable are more likely the result of RF interference thanks to Uncle Henry's do-it-yourself cable installation back in the 1970s. Everybody has an Uncle Henry whether they know it or not, and odds are, he had a hand in the cable wiring at some point.

DSL, all your connections in an entire city, area code or even state go to the same ATM cloud, on which OCx and Tx line subscribers get gauranteed first grabs at the bandwidth from the cloud, leaving the DSL folks to fight over the scraps.

Which is better? It's both a bad situation, but at least the DSL providers don't tend to be monopolies, and don't tend to claim 'unlimited service' then say, 'surprise, you're shut off for using more than 5GB a month!' a week later.

Should one be looking at download or upload speeds to determine the setting?

Download.