Duplicate Chat, Double Payments, Double Rezzed Items

[doctor Shackleton]

Are you having this trouble?

I recently ran into this problem last week (Jan. 8, 2015) and it toook me quite a while to track down the problem. What was happening was three different things.  1) Duplicate lines of chat. Everything I typed into local chat appeared twice and in IMs, even though it appeard only once to me,  the person I was chatting with got them as well. 2)  I got two copies of everything I tried to rez.  3)  Every $L transaction I made, I got charged twice.

This seem to be a problem a few years ago and there's even some JIRAs concerning this, however, in my situation, it was not a problem with Secondlife or their servers.

In my troubleshooting, I found that this would happen to me on both of my avatars, my main one and my backup alt.  It would happen whether I used the LL Viewer or the Firestorm viewer.  It would happen on another computers connected to my home network.  It would happen if bypassed my router and plugged directly into my PC or another PC.  Obviously the problem was with my ISP. 

Some of the things I read suggested that the problem was with duplicate packet transmissions and sure enough, that was the problem.  There was a problem with my ISP.  

Even though I tried pinging and tracert from my computer, I couldn't see any problem until I went to a couple of different websites to check my connection - www.dslreports.com  and www.pingtest.com.  On DSL Reports Line Quality test, my results showed that when the server pinged my IP address, it got back 2x as many packets as it was sending.  Same with the utility at www.pingtest.com.  I called my ISP and explained the situation to them and they agreed that this shouldn't be happening. 

The person I talked to said there had been a recent change in their system and by the next day, they had the problem resolved.

I spent a lot of time trying to track down the problem as there's not a lot of info anywhere on the SL Forums about this, and everything I did read, simply suggested to do a clean install.

I am posting this here to save anyone else a lot of time and trouble by going to the websites I've listed above and trying their tests. If you are getting the same results as I did, then don't waste your time, and contact your ISP immediately and explain your ping results and see if they can duplicate the problem on their systems.

You will have to know how to set up your computer or router to be able to respond to pings from servers outside your network, which can be tricky if you don't know much about networking.  However, you may be able to have someone at your ISP check for you.

If you are reading this, then chances are you are having the same trouble as I did.

Good Luck!

 

[Mister Acacia]

Long ago there were reports made in the Phoenix Firestorm support groups about double posts and back then it was pretty quickly determined that the problem was in the network. A lot of times the affected user was using either a public hotspot or hotel internat, and mostly using WiFi. Once they returned to their home network the problem stopped.

Thanks for posting, it points out that no network is immune from such problems, even when the usual performance tests show no problems.

[Sasha Birman]

"user was using either a public hotspot or hotel internet, and mostly using WiFi"

 Not the problem.

[Alwin Alcott]

41 minutes ago, Sasha Birman said:

"user was using either a public hotspot or hotel internet, and mostly using WiFi"

 Not the problem.

2015 ...

[Alley Ella]

I've been having this problem too, in the past few days.  Thanks to doctor Shackleton for the detailed post.  Are those internet sites still in the same configuration?  I've been to both of them, but I can't see how to get the ping results described.

[Alley Ella]

For me, the problem was that IMs I sent to other people would come across double to them, although I only saw one.  When I posted to local Chat, it would come across double for me as well.  It may have affected payments.  I experimented by purchasing a 1 linden item.  My account balance momentarily dropped by 2 lindens, then snapped back up to only one linden down.  I credit the sophistication of the vendor for that.

I tried logging out of SL, disabling and re-enabling the network adapter, shutting down the modem and restarting that, re-installing to the latest Firestorm browser version, and fiddling with the settings in Preferences, all with no effect.  What finally worked was just restarting the computer itself.  If other people having this issue are like me, and are resistant to closing everything they have open and simply leave their computers in sleep mode for months at a time, they might want to start early with the tried and true software repair technique of rebooting the computer. 

Thanks also to Alwin Alcott for the more detailed advice given at