Why does it take so much bandwidth to run this game. It slows down any other computer in my house

[bigbear52211]

Why does SL take so much bandwidth to run it? It slows down my computer so much that my brother complains about me playing it and its becoming no fun to have a set hours in the morning to play anymore.

[Griffin Ceawlin]

Because it has to download everything to your computer.

What is your brother doing online that it's slowing him down? (Tell him that if he stopped downloading torrents he probably wouldn't notice that you're playing at all.)

[Rolig Loon]

It just does.  This is not like an on-line game that does most of its work on your own computer.  Second Life moves data back and forth between your computer and SL's servers continuously.  Some functions === like your avatar's appearance --- are handled completely on your computer but the results need to be uploaded to the servers so that other people can see them.  Others --- like the positions of all objects --- are handled by the servers and need to be updated on your computer about 45 times a second.  The more users there are in your immediate area in SL, the more data has to be handled, so everyone starts to experience lag.

[Peggy Paperdoll]

Well when everything you see and experience in SL is housed on remote servers, how much bandwidth would you say is acceptable?  If you want 2D graphics on a simple background (like those Zingo games on Facebook) you don't need a lot of bandwidth to run the games.  Make all that 3D (meaning that flat object in Zingo suddenly has a front, back, right side, left side and everything in between) the bandwidth needed for your computer to display increases dramatically.  Throw in the fact that all that content is dynamic (it changes as objects within your field of view come and go constantly)......it gets pretty heavy on the bandwidth requirement to show all that stuff.

If you have a connection of around 5 mbps your brother should not see much of a difference.  If you are on a DSL connection you will probably see problems with concurrent SL usage (or your brother might see some slowing on his computer).  It's a pretty complex system..........and it takes huge amounts of data to display what is in SL.  Large amounts of data require large amounts of banwidth to get loaded to your computer.  It's the nature of the beast....no way around it.

[Abigail Longmeadow]

Draw distance has a big effect on your bandwidth load and on frames per second. Keep draw distance low, and turn off streaming music to reduce bandwidth. You can also limit the maximum bandwidth used in the viewer preferences settings, on "network settings".

[Baloo Uriza]

You're streaming a virtual reality in realtime.  Try turning your bandwidth settings down to minimum, turn off media streams, voice and set your draw distance to 128 or less.