Why Can't I Use Second Life Anymore

[Smoothy Schmooz]

I am an avid user of Second Life and I am an American currently living in Suzhou, Jiangsu, China and find it comforting that I can go to a place where I can still converse in English. Just the past few days, I have been having problems with the application. I am able to log on, but that's as far as I get. Usually I appear as that crazy puff of smoke and my home region is only partially loaded missing big chunks of land. Some times I am logged into some dark  underwater place although the toolbar clearly says I am in my home region, Isere. When I do arrive in my home region, I cannot get my avatar to rez and eventually will get the error messages "Failed to find clothing named XXX in database" for each piece of clothing that my avatar should be wearing (if it were to rez). I tried on both my Mac and my PC and both are giving the same results (each run SL fine up till now and each cover the system requirements). It could be the "Great Firewall Of China" which blocks many online websites, but I have never had this problem in the previous two years that I have been here and the fact that can logon says that the connection is happening. I also tried emptying my cache and even tried a different version of SL (the current BETA version) to no avail. Please help me! I don't want to be without my second life.

Smoothy

[Karouu]

I have noticed the same problem since the last round of maintenance from LL in early October.  =(   I've been on SL for 3 years and NEVER had this type of issue --- I live in the U.S.A.... have a brand new Alienwarex51 PC -- and a strong cable connection.  My lag meter keeps giving me this message:

"Connection Ping Time is over 600 ms Possible bad connection or file sharing app."  

I read this explanation on a yahoo forumn about SL:

"it depends on you location and second life's server location.

When you connect/logon to second life, you could be connecting to a server in another country and theres really nothing else you can do to lower your lag."

Makes sense to me.............and now it's time for LL to acknowledge the problem and FIX it!

[Perrie Juran]

You want Linden Lab to redesign the Architecture of the Internet?

Did you run a Trace Route?  A ping test to SF & Dallas?  Could something have gone wrong with your Modem?

You went to Yahoo Answers with a technical question about SL?????

Unless this is an Alt account you are using here it says this is your 2nd post?

Second Life requires a solid internet connection no matter where you are.

I used to live in a town where any time we had heavy rain I'd have trouble with SL.  My ISP claimed there was nothing wrong with the lines.  One day some one ran into a telephone pole down the street from me with a truck.  After the telephone company finished fixing the wires and replaced a junction box of some kind on the pole I never had a problem again.

There's no question that Linden Lab does things that can send every one into a tizzie.

But shoot first, ask questions later only leaves you with a dead witness.

[Qie Niangao]

For whatever it's worth, all SL datacenters are in the US. (At one point there were plans to put some servers in Europe, as I recall, but I don't think that ever actually happened.)

It's certainly possible that an ISP may throttle bandwidth after a certain level of usage in a month; that horrid practice has become more common, but presumably there'd be widespread complaints from users of that ISP. Still, not everybody is having the problem, by any means, so there's something strange going on in the network somewhere, either in the ISP or in the home network itself.

Rebooting the router would be the first thing to try in either case. It's not likely to work, but it might, and it's easy.

In the OP's case, specifically, I kinda suspect some ports are getting blocked, because the overall connection is made but other stuff seems to timeout altogether. I've no experience with proxying ports in SL, but the facility is there, and may be worth investigating, although first I'd probably want to hear from somebody who has it working from China to know what they're using as a proxy server.

[Smoothy Schmooz]

So, if I understand, you are saying that even though I have never had any problem with SL on the connection I am running, it may be due to the connection I have now. I have used the same connection for two years, but according to your input, maybe there was a change in my internet connection here? I was hoping that wasn't the case because there is really nothing I can do about that except to say goodbye to my second life. I was hoping for some kind of way I could fix this on my computer or something that was happening from the source that was making this happen. I am not happy about this, but thanks for your reply anyways...

[Orca Flotta]

It's definately your connection. Please run a speedtest to SF or Dallas ... and a ping test too. SL is a bandwith hogging monster and you really need a decently fast and stable connection to get any smooth experience. That's why most users won't even use wireless if they can avoid it. And that's in the States! But you're connecting from the other side of the earth, so go figure. Your latency is probably even worse than mine (I'm connecting for South Africa) and your speed will suffer big time as well. Do a Tracert to some American server and look at the result. I bet you'll faint when you see it.

Sorry to say it but there's not much LL or anybody can do about it. It's just the basic physics of overseas networking that makes it so bad.

 

[Smoothy Schmooz]

Thanks for all the responses. I really do understand that I am not in the optimal place for getting a rich connection to the SL servers. I also am well educated on the difference between being in America and using SL and being here in China doing the same. I have had all of these experiences first hand. My concern was that I had SL running here for two years with just the minimal, expected problems till now. I really just needed to know if there was something in the system that caused this change or something that is with my connection and, from your responses, it appears to be a connection change at my end. Unfortunately, this will be unresolvable since I don't speak the same language as my cable provider nor can get around the Chinese internet limitations. . :matte-motes-frown:

 

Thanks again for all of your help

At least I can stay in touch with my SL friends on this forum...