Internet speed required for second life

[Michael Fairplay]

I'm thinking of downgrading my Internet speed a little to save money. I'm a disabled male on a limited income.What is the least speed required  to be able to play SL well?  Please help if you can the system requirements just say DSL or cable. Which unfortunately doesn't help me.

[Fritigern Gothly]

Reliability is actually more important than the speed rating your ISP puts on your connection.

I have used SL over mobile internet (tethered my phone to the PC so that the PC could use my mobile internet) as an emergency measure, during which my speedtests on fast (dot) com showed a 500kbs-2MB/s connection, depending on the quality of my phone's connection at the time. 
I am currently using a 100mbit connection (my household just upgraded from 50mbit) and as much as one would expect a dramatic difference, I actually don't notice a huge difference on SL between my current connection and my mobile one.

So, if your internet is reliable (and NOT a WiFi connection!) then I guess a 5-10mbit subscription should IMO suffice.

[sandi Mexicola]

I get 30Mbps, and that seems just fine to me  

When I used to get 9Mbps, that was way too slow.  For instance, I couldn't hear the music at live concerts with 30 other avatars or so... until maybe half an hour into the concert.  

 

[Wulfie Reanimator]

Second Life actually uses fairly little bandwidth, especially once you start going back to places you've been before and things are loaded from your viewer's cache instead of downloaded. The worst offenders are textures, but they're stored onto your computer for later use.

27 minutes ago, sandi Mexicola said:

I get 30Mbps, and that seems just fine to me  

When I used to get 9Mbps, that was way too slow.  For instance, I couldn't hear the music at live concerts with 30 other avatars or so... until maybe half an hour into the concert.  

9Mb/s is over 1MB/s (bit vs Byte) which should be more than enough to listen to a music stream with SL open. It sounds like a poor quality connection rather than slowness.

Just for the purposes of testing things myself, I've gone into my router to limit my whole connection to 3000 Kbps (Under 3Mb/s or 0.3MB/s) and going to places I've never been to before. SL remains totally usable, though most mesh avatars are understandably slow to load and animations don't quite play right. Listening to voice/music starts just like normal, even though I'm watching videos on Youtube (in glorious 240p resolution).

TLDR: Low bandwidth isn't an issue in Second Life, but you will see lots of blurry textures and out-of-sync animations.

Edited July 14, 2019 by Wulfie Reanimator

[sandi Mexicola]

yes, you are right about the quality of the 9Mbps connection I had... the quality was very low.  Sometimes packet loss was 15%.  

and i prefer 1040p for youtube, which i get now.

 

[Fritigern Gothly]

45 minutes ago, sandi Mexicola said:

yes, you are right about the quality of the 9Mbps connection I had... the quality was very low. 

That's why I said "Reliability is actually more important than the speed rating your ISP puts on your connection."

Even if your connection is rated 1GB/s but there is 15% packet loss like you mentioned, then it becomes difficult to use for SL. Avatars will render really slow, parts of the scene remain blurry or grey, and streaming music will get choppy and low quality.

[sandi Mexicola]

Yes, I must agree about the reliability.

I don't know how to test reliability of my connection to SL servers, though, without running a viewer?  

[Fritigern Gothly]

Assuming you use Windows (I use Linux myself), open cmd or Powershell, and ping a server. 
Just enter:
ping secondlife.com
or 
ping google.com
or 
ping 23.32.46.35 (this is the IP address of secondlife.com)

You will see a list of ping times (latency) and other info. See the image below which I found using Google:

The longer you let the ping run, the more accurate the number representing the average packet loss becomes. 

See https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/windows-commands/ping for a comprehensive list of options and whathot for ping in Windows.

[sandi Mexicola]

2 minutes ago, Fritigern Gothly said:

Assuming you use Windows (I use Linux myself), open cmd or Powershell, and ping a server. 
Just enter:
ping secondlife.com
or 
ping google.com
or 
ping 23.32.46.35 (this is the IP address of secondlife.com)

You will see a list of ping times (latency) and other info. See the image below which I found using Google:

The longer you let the ping run, the more accurate the number representing the average packet loss becomes. 

See https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/windows-commands/ping for a comprehensive list of options and whathot for ping in Windows.

Sweet!  Thank you for that awesome reply!  

[Mollymews]

only in the last yearr was I able to go on fibre (had to wait years for the fibre to come down our street). For all the time before that I was on ADSL and then ADSL2.  On ADSL (which was 4 down and 0.8 up) SL ran ok.  With ADSL2 (12 down and 1 up) it went a bit better.  I also had a very long ping time 300+ on ADSL, 250+ on ADSL2.  With fibre my ping is about 160+ to the USA

SL went ok in all that time on ADSL/2. The only real issue was getting the assets and textures down into my cache. Took a long time compared to fibre.  But once I got them down then it all went ok

as Wulfie mentions above. Is not so much about the speed of the connection. It's the reliability.  A good hub/router which can handle/cache large numbers of near simultaneous http requests is the key to reliability on a slow connection

 

[bigmoe Whitfield]

I did SL on a 1.5mbit down/ 768 up connection for many upon many years,  with other people using that connection. so 4 people, using the same connection, youtube,  facebook, ect and SL running.  it did okay.  was not the fastest, but did work.

[Nova Convair]

If I TP into a club full of avatars my texture buffer holds 2 GB and that's not all that's loaded. It can take seconds until you get a clear view or several minutes depending on your speed and how good the CDN endpoint works for your location.

This is a worst case scenario of course - but you can never have enough speed. 😎

Rough approximation: a 10 Mbit connection will need 2000 seconds to load 2 GB and 100 Mbit will do it in about 3 mins

You can easily live with less speed of course - you just need to wait longer - and if you mostly visit the same places - most of the data will be cached. (that is if you have set a sufficient size for the cache) (note: cache on SSD gives a major boost compared to cache on HD)

However - if you get into masses of avatars you have to load masses of textures!

You need some quality for the connection or SL will kick you out all the time. So it's not as easy as just comparing speed/pricing.