Unable to connect

[sam4086]

Hi,

Every time I log in through sl viewer or firestorm viewer, after few mins I get logged out by sl stating "the region may be experiencing trouble. please check your connection to the internet."

I tried logging in through windows 10 as well as through IOS Catalina several times, also I tried changing the region while logging in. I have a stable internet connection. download and upload speed of 45 mbps. 

Can someone help?

[Rolig Loon]

Download and upload speeds are almost irrelevant in this context, so don't worry about those unless they are truly terrible.  It's more important that you define how "stable" your connection is.  Unlike most online games that you may have played, SL does not do most of its work in code that is downloaded to your computer.  It relies on instructional code and data that are in Linden Lab's servers and are managed locally by the viewer that you install on your machine.  Those two parts of the system trade information 45 times a second as your avatar and the world around it keep updating.  In order to be "stable", they cannot be very far out of sync at all.  Specifically, if your connection is lagging or is dropping occasional packets of information, the system can't stay in sync, so it drops your connection.  It can still be great for watching YouTube videos and playing games, but not for SL.

Next time you log in, type CTRL + Shift + 1 to open your diagnostics panel.  Look right at the top for the values of Ping Sim and Packet Loss.  Ping sim is the time it takes for a signal to travel between the servers and your computer.  In most of North America, that's typically well under 100 msec.  (Mine is normally about 60 - 70 msec) The farther away you are from California, the longer the travel time, so it is common for ping time to Europe to be 150 msec or so.  SL residents in Australia and India report much longer times and can have frequent disconnections as a result.  So do residents who use satellite connections or  .... maybe this is you ... residents whose signals are being routed through slow nodes in the Internet. 

Packet loss is what it says, a measure of how much information is being lost in transit.  If it's much more than a fraction of 1%, you're losing enough data to lose a connection. (Again, mine is never more than 0.1%.)  If yours is much more than that, suspect your router and cable connections.  Try rebooting both the router and your modem and restarting everything.  Keep the cat from chewing on your wires.  Avoid using a wifi connection if you can, because there can be interference with nearby electrical equipment.

Consult Nalates's blog at http://blog.nalates.net/2011/10/26/troubleshoot-your-sl-connection/ for more detailed suggestions and ideas about how to test your system.

 

Edited July 25, 2020 by Rolig Loon
typos. as always.

[Love Zhaoying]

Connecting is difficult. Especially during these trying times. I wish you good fortune in all your connections.

[sam4086]

33 minutes ago, Rolig Loon said:

Download and upload speeds are almost irrelevant in this context, so don't worry about those unless they are truly terrible.  It's more important that you define how "stable" your connection is.  Unlike most online games that you may have played, SL does not do most of its work in code that is downloaded to your computer.  It relies on instructional code and data that are in Linden Lab's servers and are managed locally by the viewer that you install on your machine.  Those two parts of the system trade information 45 times a second as your avatar and the world around it keep updating.  In order to be "stable", they cannot be very far out of sync at all.  Specifically, if your connection is lagging or is dropping occasional packets of information, the system can't stay in sync, so it drops your connection.  It can still be great for watching YouTube videos and playing games, but not for SL.

Next time you log in, type CTRL + Shift + 1 to open your diagnostics panel.  Look right at the top for the values of Ping Sim and Packet Loss.  Ping sim is the time it takes for a signal to travel between the servers and your computer.  In most of North America, that's typically well under 100 msec.  (Mine is normally about 60 - 70 msec) The farther away you are from California, the longer the travel time, so it is common for ping time to Europe to be 150 msec or so.  SL residents in Australia and India report much longer times and can have frequent disconnections as a result.  So do residents who use satellite connections or  .... maybe this is you ... residents whose signals are being routed through slow nodes in the Internet. 

Packet loss is what it says, a measure of how much information is being lost in transit.  If it's much more than a fraction of 1%, you're losing enough data to lose a connection. (Again, mine is never more than 0.1%.)  If yours is much more than that, suspect your router and cable connections.  Try rebooting both the router and your modem and restarting everything.  Keep the cat from chewing on your wires.  Avoid using a wifi connection if you can, because there can be interference with nearby electrical equipment.

Consult Nalates's blog at http://blog.nalates.net/2011/10/26/troubleshoot-your-sl-connection/ for more detailed suggestions and ideas about how to test your system.

 

Well I was able to log in and enjoy SL since I joined. its just past few days I am facing this issue. the ping sim is 1000 ms and packet loss is 1.1%.

is there any solution to this issue?

[Rolig Loon]

Yeah, both of those numbers are way too high.  Packet loss is the easier of the two to deal with, because it's most likely right at your machine.  As I suggested earlier, your router is the most likely suspect.  Reboot it by unplugging it from the power for a minute or so.  Do the same with the modem, just in case.  I have to do that once a month or so, myself.  Consider the possibility that your router needs replacing.  These things do get old, after all, and a new router is pretty cheap.

It's harder to deal with lousy ping time.  Consider adding a new DNS server to whatever is already listed in your router now.  Many people I know have added Google's free public DNS server.  Follow suggestions on Nalates's blog and then talk with your ISP, armed with good data about your connection.  With luck, they may be able to find a weak spot close to home.  My own ISP was able to diagnose a bad connection in the box at the street outside my house a few years ago.  Usually, though, the solution involves finding a better way to route around a slow node somewhere farther along the Internet.  That's why you need to be armed with good, detailed data when you talk with them.  @Nalates Urriah may have more thoughts to add.

[Nalates Urriah]

@sam4086 There probably is. But, you haven't given us enough info to know what needs to be fixed. Your first step is to work through the article I wrote on troubleshooting your SL connection. Tell us the results. Then we may be able to add more suggestions.

Restarting the gateway/modem/router and your computer is always the easy first steps.

Also, the problem may just disappear. Something between your computer and the SL system has has likely changed. A cable got eaten by a rat, a car drove over a junction box, a telephone pole got knocked down, a microwave dish moved from a storm, a router over loaded from a DOS attack... this list is endless. These things get fixed. Sooner for you if you complain to your ISP. But, you have to provide them with evidence there actually is a problem and you are not just another mental midget that forgot to turn the computer on.

[animats]

Packet loss, as reported by the SL viewer, isn't just network packet loss. There's a "throttling" mechanism in SL's UDP networking code. If too many updates reach the viewer in one frame time, some are dropped. Unreliable-mode ones (like "you are here") are lost and superseded by the next update. Reliable ones get retransmitted. This is done to prevent bursts of network data from killing the frame rate. It's mostly a legacy from when assets (meshes and textures) came in via that route. Now they come in over HTTP/TCP from Akamai/AWS, independent of the UDP networking, and are not part of the viewer's packet loss calculation.

So, if the frame rate is low due to a problem on the user's machine, the viewer-reported packet loss rate rises, without any packet loss in the network itself. For example, if you're out of memory on your machine and are paging to disk, the viewer will report a higher packet loss rate. This confuses everybody.

Real packet loss is when you run "ping" to an SL server and get reports of packets being dropped.