Bad ping time and packet loss today?

[Timothy McGregor]

I am getting packet loss in excess of 5-6% at times, and ping times sometimes over 300ms, even with my draw distance down to 64 meters. Earlier today it was fine. Speed tests to two different endpoints (Spectrum and Frontier) are good. 300/20 and single digit pings. It feels like this may be aws. (Of course according to their own status page, everything is perfect)

So I'm just wondering if anyone else today is seeing this.

[Vicious Hollow]

I didn't notice anything during the day or through the evening, but I have experienced bad pings and packet loss in the past. This is what I've learned, though someone with more tech know-how can probably explain it better but - It can turn out to be a number of things, most of which are out of our hands. The first one is a busy network, or flooded...as in lots of folks online, but usually with that you'll see slower speeds. During last summer I saw ping numbers that could make a person cry, but that was due to throttling. Ironically, I had no packet loss, just super amounts of latency.

 

Another cause would be your ISP's network itself might have an issues, causing connectivity to SL (and other things) to be "off", which in turn would cause packet loss and weird ping numbers. Sometimes just a relog (to SL) can remedy it, and in other, and more common cases, a router restart may and can remedy it.  Again though, if your ISP is having an issue, even reboots won't help and all one can do is ride it out. 

With that one in mind, could be your own local network might have an issue, which a router reboot might remedy.

 

On a personal note, another thing I've seen, and I guess this falls on the AWS side of things, or the hosting "server" for each sim, is I can log on to SL to my home, and see a slight bit of packet loss, and then TP to our shop or our club, and it drops to back none. *to add our club and shop are mainland. 

 

I'm on wireless and as mentioned I've seen some horrid numbers as far a packet loss goes (as in double digits) Not sure what type of net you're on,  be it fixed or wireless, if you keep seeing packet loss and high ping number, as I was saying, try a full router reboot. If you're on wireless, try a router reboot, then an antenna reboot and see if it clears up. 

[MarissaOrloff]

It all depends on where the loss is coming from. You can use a program like mtr (or winmtr run as administrator in windows) but you have to translate it as a lot routers filter ping requests. To get the exact ip of where you are in SL to trace go to Help > About Secondlife (Firestorm). You will see something like this simhost-099521a3748252071.agni (that is for the region Lime) append secondlife.io to it (ex simhost-099521a3748252071.agni.secondlife.io) and you can then trace the exact route your packets are using. Again the results have to translated as some routers along the way will either reject or limit ping requests. The last hop is where you will see your total true loss then just match the true loss % to the hop with similar loss. Your output will look something like this bellow. This trace is showing zero packet loss. The hop that is showing 31.2% loss is just not playing nice with ping requests and can be ignored.

If packet loss is showing in the first hop that is your computer to your modem/router. Second hop is from modem to the local node of your isp. Call your ISP if loss is there to troubleshoot. Anything farther down the chain is out of your control. Hope this helps

Edited February 14, 2022 by MarissaOrloff
OCD