Why do objects take so long to detach from avatar, and why is the time so variable?

[Jennifer Boyle]

4 minutes ago, Henri Beauchamp said:

The question being: what is your computer connected through to your ISP router ?... If it's WiFi or PLC, then you loose a lot of the reliability (and bandwidth) brought by the FTTH link between your ISP and your home... Nothing can replace a good old Ethernet (cat 6 for 1Gbps FTTH) cable link between your ISP router and your computer !

Indeed, at least for IPv4 (more and more ISPs provide IPv6+IPv4 links). Some ISP routers can be switched to a (pseudo) bridge mode however, removing one (useless) NAT step to keep only the one in your router or firewall (I am personally using such a solution, with a small Linux PC as a firewall between my ISP router and my local network).

Then, there is the question of the router in use by the end user. Many so-called WiFi ”routers”, for example, are incapable of providing enough simultaneous connections (not enough ports) for SL viewers (that can use a lot of ports, for HTTP textures, meshes and assets fetches, plus UDP sim messaging)...

My computer is connected with an Ethernet cable.

The only router I'm using is an Arris model BGW210-700 wireless gateway supplied by AT&T. I do not have another router behind it.

[Odaks]

6 hours ago, Henri Beauchamp said:

Then, there is the question of the router in use by the end user. Some cheap so-called WiFi ”routers”, for example, are incapable of providing enough simultaneous connections (not enough ports) for SL viewers (that can use a lot of ports, for HTTP textures, meshes and assets fetches, plus UDP sim messaging)...

When purchasing a new router for SL use, is there a particular standard, or specification, that we should be looking for? I have no idea if the router I use is good enough or not, but this has prompted me to try and find out.

[Henri Beauchamp]

3 hours ago, Odaks said:

When purchasing a new router for SL use, is there a particular standard, or specification, that we should be looking for?

Make sure the router can keep up with all 65535 TCP ports routing (at once) when doing NAT.

Sadly this is usually not very well advertised or even listed in specs, and you can end up with situations where your router drops connections when it runs out of port slots in its internal NAT routing table.

Cheap ”SOHO” WiFi routers are the most likely to impose such limitations.

[Monty Linden]

For some perspective, I checked logs and you personally had 13 network blocking events on that region in a 24 hour period.  The region as a whole had 100 and the simhost on which it was running had 2000 (one every 43 seconds on average).  Yours correlated well with region entry and rezzing/derezzing operations.

None of this is necessarily a problem on either end.  But you might see some of this in action by pulling up the Windows monitoring tools and watching the network adapters.  The numbers may be adequate to show the correlation between these events and packet activity.  (Shift-Ctrl-1 needs better visualizations...  )

[Katherine Heartsong]

On 3/29/2022 at 12:45 AM, Lucia Nightfire said:

Detaching lately is delayed.

Even single prim and even unscripted, single prim objects take a long time to detach.

"Something" has changed.

I've noticed this too. Detaching an outfit or object has a noticeable delay recently.

[Monty Linden]

Another possibility is that your cable ISP isn't installing all their licenses correctly: 

 

[animats]

On 3/30/2022 at 6:29 AM, Monty Linden said:

I'm curious about these events.  I'll happily listen to details on particularly awful instances of this problem.  Jira or here:  where, who, when (to the second, timezone), and what happened.  (Have looked at some bad rezzing/attachment events - this is a different problem, I think.)

I'm encouraged that someone on the LL side is looking at logs at that level of detail. The rezzing problem is well known - things either rez very quickly or are delayed for 3 seconds. Forumilab has tests for this, and it really is bimodal. Good that someone is finally looking at this.

[Jennifer Boyle]

3 hours ago, Monty Linden said:

Another possibility is that your cable ISP isn't installing all their licenses correctly: 

 

Is there something I can do? My ISP is AT&T.

48 minutes ago, animats said:

I'm encouraged that someone on the LL side is looking at logs at that level of detail. The rezzing problem is well known - things either rez very quickly or are delayed for 3 seconds. Forumilab has tests for this, and it really is bimodal. Good that someone is finally looking at this.

This is not a rezzing problem. Detaching items from the avatar is sometimes taking over 20 seconds. Sometimes, it is very frequent, other times rare or non-existent.

[Monty Linden]

10 minutes ago, Jennifer Boyle said:

Is there something I can do? My ISP is AT&T.

Nope.  That's just the first time I've ever seen ISP license management as a reason for reduced bandwidth.  That's beyond dog-ate-my-homework.

[bigmoe Whitfield]

@Monty Linden   and people wonder why I want to be a linden, all the inner workings and all these little details fascinate the tar out of me.   

[Paul Hexem]

On 4/3/2022 at 9:19 AM, Monty Linden said:

But you might see some of this in action by pulling up the Windows monitoring tools and watching the network adapters.  The numbers may be adequate to show the correlation between these events and packet activity.  (Shift-Ctrl-1 needs better visualizations...  )

This is where I'd like to suggest SL should support multiple connections, like a lot of P2P/download software does (such as when Steam downloads a game).

With load balance routers and multiple adapters getting more popular, there's a lot more bandwidth we could be taking advantage of these days.

[Jennifer Boyle]

The issue is 99 percent better.

[Monty Linden]

For the record, I haven't touched anything.  So if you've been basking in the marvelous improvements in SL connectivity in the past few days, it's entirely placebo effect. 

(I have made a descent into the dark corners of the UDP code and now I'm sad.)

[bigmoe Whitfield]

5 hours ago, Monty Linden said:

For the record, I haven't touched anything.  So if you've been basking in the marvelous improvements in SL connectivity in the past few days, it's entirely placebo effect. 

(I have made a descent into the dark corners of the UDP code and now I'm sad.)

*sticks his tail in there and shakes it, grab ahold, I'll pull you out*

[solak Ohtobide]

On 4/27/2022 at 11:24 AM, Monty Linden said:

(I have made a descent into the dark corners of the UDP code and now I'm sad.)

How crazy would it be to use TCP instead of UDP for that data? I mean, not for streaming audio or video, UDP is great for that, but for these avatar and object transactions like attach ,detach, rez, derez, and so on, that are a small finite size rather than a pile of data of indeterminate length.

[Lilly Kiyori]

7 hours ago, solak Ohtobide said:

How crazy would it be to use TCP instead of UDP for that data? 

I rather have an occasional UDP packet hickup than stalled TCP connections piling up

Edited May 14, 2022 by Lilly Kiyori

[Monty Linden]

15 hours ago, solak Ohtobide said:

How crazy would it be to use TCP instead of UDP for that data? I mean, not for streaming audio or video, UDP is great for that, but for these avatar and object transactions like attach ,detach, rez, derez, and so on, that are a small finite size rather than a pile of data of indeterminate length.

You can experience what a direct translation to TCP would be like by using a VPN over TCP.  It's a tool people should consider when their UDP connectivity just can't handle SL or other games.

[Love Zhaoying]

Trying to imagine an SL in-world job where your job performance is impacted by the speed at which items detach. Oh..oh!

 

[Coffee Pancake]

9 hours ago, Lilly Kiyori said:

I rather have an occasional UDP packet hickup than stalled TCP connections piling up

Packet loss related weirdness is the number one support issue in the Catznip group, especially prevalent for users with wifi connections and less well served areas.

It would be really nice if the viewer had a TCP fall back option for users with unreliable connections. Spending money on a VPN just for SL is not always an option.

[Lilly Kiyori]

59 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

Packet loss related weirdness is the number one support issue in the Catznip group, especially prevalent for users with wifi connections and less well served areas.

It would be really nice if the viewer had a TCP fall back option for users with unreliable connections. Spending money on a VPN just for SL is not always an option.

I am suffering from that weirdness myself particularly during connect phase. I sometimes have to connect a couple of times, or do something idiotic like clear the caches just to force some timing changes during the first seconds after connecting. Otherwise my avi just gets stuck in place, I can turn (client side), but not move and time out after a minute or something.  Sometimes it sucks to connect from Europe, because with 180ms signal travel time you're constantly at the "beware pings over 200 are troublesome" limit. It's standard case for me, and that makes anything that needs a handshake a bloody pain (talk about having 50 objects in an inventory, good night). But I still would rather have some graceful handling of that on the UDP connection, like the server saying "this person is from a galaxy far, far away, I need to handle the gawddam timeouts differently". If Layer3 and 4 don't do it for you, the client-server communication has to take care of it. I mean .. if two morse code amateur radioists write at each other, and one side doesn't hear anything in a while, or gets something that is far off, then the other side says 'please repeat everything after ...'.   But if Monty has to lowly sob when looking at the UDP code, two morsecodeists may be more reliable ...

Edited May 14, 2022 by Lilly Kiyori

[Whirly Fizzle]

19 hours ago, Lilly Kiyori said:

I am suffering from that weirdness myself particularly during connect phase. I sometimes have to connect a couple of times, or do something idiotic like clear the caches just to force some timing changes during the first seconds after connecting. Otherwise my avi just gets stuck in place, I can turn (client side), but not move and time out after a minute or something. 

Your symptoms might be caused by the login timing out due to the "creating inventory views" stage of login taking too long.
This happens if you have a large "flat" inventory structure.
If clearing inventory cache lets you fully login without a disconnect then this very much points to a flat inventory problem - creating inventory views is instant when inventory cache is empty.
If your alts with smaller/less flat inventories do not have the same login problem then this also strongly suggests your inventory needs deflattened.
If you contact LL support at https://lindenlab.freshdesk.com/support/home & tell them your problem, they will deflatten your inventory if it needs to be done, which will fix your login timeouts.

A "flat" inventory means you have many hundreds of items loose in the same folder/s, rather then having them in subfolders.
A deeply nested inventory with subfolders within folders is best.
Many hundreds of items in the root inventory folder especially can cause problems.
The more you subfolder your inventory the better.

Hope that helps   

[Ardy Lay]

@Whirly FizzleIs there a practical limit to how deep inventory nesting should go?

[Lilly Kiyori]

On 5/15/2022 at 6:57 PM, Whirly Fizzle said:

If you contact LL support at https://lindenlab.freshdesk.com/support/home & tell them your problem, they will deflatten your inventory if it needs to be done, which will fix your login timeouts.

Did that, but the support decided to send me down a different route: "As a troubleshooting step can you please try the following: Go to Advanced > Show Develop Menu, then Develop > Avatar > Character Tests > Test Male or Test Female. This should turn you back into a normal default avatar. If the issue persists while your avatar is a default avatar please let us know."

I'm sitting here having to push my chin back up repeatedly while reading. With some troubleshooting requests ... a little bit more explanation about the purpose of the test would be neat. This does feel like a homeopathic treatment

 

 

Edited May 18, 2022 by Lilly Kiyori

[Aishagain]

@Lilly Kiyoriand anyone with similar issues, LL are, at long, very long, last doing something to help. 

Please see:

 

[Alisha Yardley]

I have been an orange cloud for days now, and cannot detach anything from my avatar.  I've tried everything from logging in at different locations to reinstalling Firestorm.  Nothing is working.  Any help would be GREATLY appreciated!