Movement Lag

[BaileyFarrington]

Recently, after picking up Second Life for the first time in a few months, I began having significant movement lag. For example, I press and hold down the movement key for a good four or five seconds until my character actually starts moving. Then, I can't get her to stop walking until the same amount of time after I ease up on the key.

I've done quite a bit of research, through forums, answers, and the like, but everything seems to point to a bad internet connection. That can't be true. I am currently on a university network, and I used to be able to play smoothly, but suddenly that's not the case. The internet hasnt changed, just my location on campus.

When looking at the statistics bar, this is what it looks like:
FPS : 28.7 to 30+
Bandwidth: 0-34  
Packet Loss: 0 (but on occasion will jump up to 80%, but only for a second or two)
Ping Sim: (Here's the clincher) I've seen it as low as 120, and as high as 10000, but on average it sits around 3000.

I've tried everything, including following several guides designed to speed up my veiwer (which is a fully up to date Phoenix), but I can't seem to make the movement lag go away. I would be grateful i someone could walk me through a solution.

 

Edit: I just took a test using Speedtest and my download speed is at 61.81, my upload speed is at 48.82, and my ping is 8.
Edit 2: I live in the USA, on the east coast. I just ran the tracert command, and it gave me a bunch of numbers I don't understand. I'll post them here and hope one of you can make sense of them.

traceroute to 216.82.46.94 (216.82.46.94), 64 hops max, 52 byte packets

1 192.168.1.1 (192.168.1.1) 9.763 ms 7.619 ms 1.088 ms
2 172.18.102.129 (172.18.102.129) 4.666 ms 11.910 ms 1.470 ms
3 10.100.3.1 (10.100.3.1) 3.139 ms 3.834 ms 1.594 ms
4 12.127.169.41 (12.127.169.41) 5.023 ms 3.238 ms 3.015 ms
5 12.122.117.70 (12.122.117.70) 9.088 ms 11.415 ms 27.299 ms
6 cr2.attga.ip.att.net (12.122.1.221) 9.518 ms 9.458 ms 10.376 ms
7 attga02jt.ip.att.net (12.123.22.153) 95.248 ms 61.429 ms 7.223 ms
8 192.205.35.234 (192.205.35.234) 4.993 ms 6.663 ms 7.449 ms
9 xe-1-0-0.mpr3.atl6.us.above.net (64.125.31.45) 7.385 ms 37.056 ms 45.418 ms
10 xe-2-1-0.cr2.iah1.us.above.net (64.125.31.50) 90.315 ms 20.257 ms 21.878 ms
11 xe-0-1-0.mpr4.phx2.us.above.net (64.125.28.73) 71.546 ms 44.527 ms 50.329 ms
12 xe-1-0-0.mpr3.phx2.us.above.net (64.125.27.97) 61.704 ms 48.879 ms 42.249 ms
13 64.124.161.254.allocated.above.net (64.124.161.254) 43.216 ms 80.949 ms 44.794 ms
14 * * *
15 * *

And then it just trails on witha  bunch of stars.

[Innula Zenovka]

It's the ping time that's the problem, I'm sure.   I'm on a cable connection from the UK, and my ping time is normally around 120 or so, though on a bad day it's as high as 250.    So I would ask whoever runs your university's network what's the problem.

You might to take some readings with http://www.speedtest.net/ (which gives me ping times for local servers of 12 or so).

 

ETA -- I've seen your edit.. i think you need to do a traceroute, as Rolig suggests; clearly you connecting with the local testing base ok.   So let's see where the hold-up is.

What country are you in, if you don't mind my asking?

ETA 2 -- I'm open to correction by someone who understands these figures better than do I, but that all looks pretty normal and reasonable until the 14th hop, where it's just timing out (that's what the stars mean).     I really don't know what you can do about it, though.   I guess, first I'd try rebooting my router (can't do any harm, and may well do some good), and maybe try logging in at a different sim.  

I think what's happening is that it's falling over when it tries to connect to LL's servers; here's an extract of what happened when I did the traceroute for that address:

  4    48 ms    33 ms    30 ms  0.ae1.mpr1.lhr1.uk.above.net [213.161.65.149]  5    30 ms    32 ms    34 ms  ge-7-0-0.mpr1.lhr2.uk.above.net [64.125.28.25]  6   111 ms   104 ms   111 ms  xe-5-2-0.cr1.dca2.us.above.net [64.125.26.21]  7   134 ms   135 ms   137 ms  xe-1-3-0.cr1.iah1.us.above.net [64.125.31.213]  8   139 ms   135 ms   134 ms  xe-1-0-0.cr2.iah1.us.above.net [64.125.30.70]  9   221 ms   161 ms   159 ms  xe-0-1-0.mpr4.phx2.us.above.net [64.125.28.73] 10   160 ms   161 ms   165 ms  xe-0-0-0.mpr3.phx2.us.above.net [64.125.27.41] 11   162 ms   200 ms   163 ms  64.124.161.254.allocated.above.net [64.124.161.254] 12   164 ms   163 ms   167 ms  sw-core0-83.phx.lindenlab.com [216.82.7.226] 13   171 ms   173 ms   168 ms  sim9952.agni.lindenlab.com [216.82.46.94]Trace complete.

 (my hop 11 is the same as your hop 13,  I think).   Might be worth opening a support ticket with LL, too, and providing them with the traceroute details.   

[Rolig Loon]

Yes, that's a seriously bad Ping Sim value.  My own Ping Sim is typically around 60 ms.  SL residents in Europe report values between 150 and 250.  Anything over 200 will start to give you severe movement problems.  3000 is a disaster. Basically, Ping Sim is a measure of how long it takes data to travel from your computer to SL's servers, or vice versa.  If it takes too long, there will be a big delay between the time that you use your keyboard or mouse to do something and the time that it actually happens.

The biggest factor affecting Ping Sim is distance.  That's why Europeans typically have higher values than those of us in North America.  If your signal is routed through a tortuous path to Linden Lab servers in San Francisco  or Dallas (from Boston by way of Atlanta and Boise, for example), that can slow things down.  Unfortunately, you can't do anything about  distance.

You can find out where the bottlenecks between you and the Linden Lab servers are, though.  Use the tracert program in your computer or Google for a public equivalent on line, and run a trace on the path from your machine to your sim's server in SL (The IP address is in the Help >> About menu in your viewer).  When I do that, I find that the slowest step is in Dallas.  I suspect that you will find that the slowest step is the very first one, however, right at your own computer.  You could have a faulty router or maybe an unshielded data cable running over a power line, for example.  Or you could be on a very busy node on your campus, competing with hundreds of other students for limited access to the Internet.  That's especially probable if you are using wireless --- almost always a bad idea for SL, even if you are the only person using your router.

For more suggestions, see Nalates's blog at http://blog.nalates.net/2011/10/26/troubleshoot-your-sl-connection/