Ping Sim peaks with Firestorm

[ChinRey]

My turn to ask a question for a change.

About two weeks ago I started to get these huge ping sim peaks - sometimes up to 3000 ms. I eventually figured out my firewall was the msot likely cause, seems McAfee had suddenly decided that Second Life is something really bad and automatically switched back on  full firewall protection against it.

So I open the McAfee controller and eventually figured out how to configure the firewall. (Digression: I have to take back many of the bad things I've said about viewer interfaces, a clumsy, amateurish attempt to make a user friendly interface is much better than a sleek professional one deliberately designed to be misleading!)

I deactivated the firewall for all viewer applications and all slplugin.exe files I could find. That seems to have solved the problem for all viewers except Firestorm. So the question is, did I miss some helper application or should I look elsewhere for the cause?

The problem isn't nearly as bad now as before I corrected the firewall settings and it seems to only happen when I move. As long as I stand still, everything is fine, the moment I touch an arrow key, ping sim jumps, sometimes as high as 1500 ms.

 

Edit: Thanks Madelaine and Rolig, your answers helped a lot! :)

Btw, I found out that hard drive activity is very significant here. After I fixed the friewall the big peaks only happen while Spyhunter is scanning, keeping my hard drve busy. Once Spyhunter has finished its work, the peaks are still there but far smaller and not big enough to cause any serious problems.

[Madelaine McMasters]

It might be time to pull out something like Wireshark, and see what's talking to what.

[Rolig Loon]

I've noticed the same thing with Firestorm, Chin, though not quite as severe as what you're seeing.  When I TP to a new region  (or to a new spot in the same region) Ping Sim spikes for me but several hundred msec.  It drops back very quickly to my normal average 60-80 msec.  I don't see anywhere near that spike when I am just moving around, but it's not uncommon to have Ping Sim jump to 150 or so.  Again, though, it drops back almost instantly. I've never studied it carefully, nor have I looked seriously at what the SL viewwer does.  It's just one of those things that I have noticed in passing.

[Madelaine McMasters]

In another recent thread, it was mentioned that some anti-virus software will scan every file created by the viewer, including texture cache files. That comports with your observation that hard drive activity correlates with your excessive ping times. If Spyhunter is examining every texture as it's added to the cache, it might be your culprit. Perhaps you can get a report from Spyhunter and use it to make a white-list?

[Lindal Kidd]

I'm glad you've fixed most of the problems!  But maybe the ultimate solution is to deal with the problem at its source.  Get rid of McAfee.  And Spyhunter while you are at it.  I use Kaspersky myself, but my son, who's very computer-savvy, says he's given up on all the expensive (and often top-heavy and ineffective, to boot) third party software and just uses Windows Defender.  Or Microsoft Security Essentials, depending on your Windows version.