terrible packet loss for months

[LibGwen]

Second Life went to Server Side Appearance at the same time as my ISP upgraded.  Starting from that point I have been suffering packet loss of 25% or higher for a minute (or 2-4 with SSA) every time I look at anything in-world.  Consequently, I axed my normal activities in Second Life and spent my Second Life time wading through bad advice trying to find out what's wrong.

I've tried different viewers, I've switched in and out routers and modems, I convinced my ISP to do line tests, I tried configuring ports, I changed security suites (more bad advice).  I went back to a pre-SSA viewer because unlike SSA viewers it can cope with lossy teleports, lossy dressing, lossy instant messaging ... without permanently losing information or crashing me out of SL.

Finally today I stumbled across the tracert command.  It appears to report the problem is somewhere between above.net in Phoenix and lindenlab.com (and lines 10 and 11 might be questionable too).  After all these months, is the problem finally defined?

What do I do now?  And why isn't anybody else having this problem?

Thank you.

 

UPDATE:

If there's any difference, it's small.  HTTP Get Textures was already off.  Reducing MeshMaxConcurrentRequests to 8 may have made a little difference, but I'm still getting 16-144% packet loss every time I teleport and about 15% when a texture is (finally!) coming into focus.  And now I can never see mesh the first time I log in; I have to relog.  I can't imagine how *that* works.  This is absolutely crippling since entire stores are made of mesh now.  Not to mention wintertime scenery.

If I crank bandwidth down to 500, packet loss is 20-30%.  But 500 makes my computer loud; I'd much rather use 2000.

[Theresa Tennyson]

That tracert doesn't look unusual - the repeated time-outs right before the SL servers are common because the servers don't give tracert pings high priority. I see that all the time and have no problems like you're seein where I am now. I previously had packet loss issues similar to yours at another home but I was able to work around them and they vanished when I moved somewhere with a different connection and modem.

Between this problem and the mesh-viewing problems you had/have I'd say you're having HTTP connection problems. Second Life tries to open a lot of connections at the same time and some services/modems don't handle that well. SSA opens still more connections and may have aggravated this.

Try turning HTTP textures off - that will close some connections. Also go into the debug settings and reduce "MeshMaxConcurrentRequests" to 8. If you've previously increased that over the default of 32 because of advice to do that to see mesh? More bad advice. That number is the number of meshes the viewer tries to bring over AT THE SAME TIME. The more you try to load simultaneously the higher the chance of the requests timing out and the viewer re-attempting to load them in a sort of death spiral.

[KarenMichelle Lane]

In addition to Theresa's spot on advise, make sure that you:

1) are using a "wired" connection to your ISPs internet router.

2) have applied all your PCs Operating System maintenance & security patches, especially any hardware related patches for your Ethernet card.

3) have added your SecondLife program directory to the "Excluded from Live Scanning" List of any Anti-virus software you have installed. [This service adds to your ping latency and is totally unneeded]