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Does anyone know the real truth behind Second Life Servers?


Lord Derryth
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46 minutes ago, Lord Derryth said:

I know what you mean about that delay.  It's almost like a 3 second rollback.  Maybe my second life days is over. The constant lag is causing stress on my fingers typing and moving around.  Too much to handle.  That's my speed to Portland.  I should have no issues with servers.  

13167074358.png

You know your ISP prioritizes traffic to speed test websites, right?

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1 hour ago, Coffee Pancake said:

You know your ISP prioritizes traffic to speed test websites, right?

That didn't make sense.  AWS servers are in Oregon.  My connection to Oregon is strong.  You are saying because it's a speed test my connection will be strong.  When in SL, it's weak?  This is turning out to be a joke.  My connection to Oregon is strong and it has nothing to do with prioritizing.  

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2 hours ago, Lord Derryth said:

When in SL, it's weak?

Probably not, but… not impossible. And I suppose Xfinity wouldn't be the last ISP to do anything evil, but the network question isn't necessarily about your connectivity. In some cases, sure, but here? Looks plenty good enough not to be a focus.

Right now, if I had time, I'd poke around at the draw depth thing. Like: is that really what it takes to feel the lag? Is there something "out there" (a big hairy sim surround? some texture-animated megaprim? something?) that slows everything down when it's in the scene?

What points me in this direction is that you're feeling lag that others of us don't see. One thing that's different is that long draw depth, so probably we should try it, too. (Personally, I run with short draw depth, almost always 96m unless I need more for a photo, because textures load so painfully slowly. But that's not what's generally called "lag" so probably not relevant here.)

One other thing that's inherently different between you and everyone else is what we're all wearing. Just as an experiment, I might suggest removing everything but a full alpha mask on the system avatar and, especially, all HUDs, just to see how much it reduces lag. It'll matter some for any normal user, but if it's night-and-day, there'd be one or more specific attachments that's making the difference, and that would be an easy fix. (This of course would make SL lag in other regions, too, and I kinda think that's the experience?)

(Incidentally, I've found it completely useless to gather information from visitors with questions like "Does it feel laggy here to you, too?" Everyone always says yes—on every platform, not just SL. That's not to say SL isn't laggier than other platforms, but subjective measurement of "lag" is 99% confirmation bias.)

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How wonderful to have a "strong" connection! Even if the ISP does priotitise speed-test traffic to ensure a rosy result, that's a pretty slick connection.

Here in the UK, where cable TV never got established to the same degree as the US, we have only started to break free of the limitations of copper telephone wires over the last few years. Very many of us are, at best, now only able to get FTTC (Fibre-To-The-Cabinet) connections; fibre to the nearest roadside cabinet, then copper wires to the house. The best this system will offer seems to be in the order of 67 Mb/s down, maybe 15 up. My own FTTC connection promises a maximum of 40 Mb/s (I typically get 36, being not very far away from the Telephone Exchange). To cap it all, I have a "pigeon-post" ping time of between 180 and 210 ms to LL's AWS servers.

But I do not have any continual problems with lag; certainly nothing like that described by the OP.

Weird, huh?  

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11 hours ago, Lord Derryth said:

That didn't make sense.  AWS servers are in Oregon.  My connection to Oregon is strong.  You are saying because it's a speed test my connection will be strong.  When in SL, it's weak?  This is turning out to be a joke.  My connection to Oregon is strong and it has nothing to do with prioritizing.  

Poopcast absolutely engages in traffic shaping and they lie to your face about not doing it. But whatever, please continue your slow "LL bad" flounce.

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On 5/16/2022 at 12:36 AM, bigmoe Whitfield said:

Second life is now run on Amazons aws servers out of Oregon,  they have no physical servers anymore,  costs according to oz linden whom was the one whom did most of this,  has said,  it costs LL more to use aws than it did having their physical servers (which were upwards of 10 to 12 years old),  so as of now,  bringing down costs is not happening.

This bothers me every time it comes up.

I'm still not sold LL would opt to spend more money on something for no reason. I'm convinced this move is absolutely saving them money somewhere, or they wouldn't have done it. 

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4 minutes ago, Paul Hexem said:

This bothers me every time it comes up.

I'm still not sold LL would opt to spend more money on something for no reason. I'm convinced this move is absolutely saving them money somewhere, or they wouldn't have done it. 

That's why I said there needs to be an investigation.  I think they're scamming everyone.  A memo went out notifying the real estates that prices would drop by 50%.  They figured if they keep it in the dark, they make more money.  Something is not right with Second Life.

 

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19 minutes ago, Paul Hexem said:

This bothers me every time it comes up.

I'm still not sold LL would opt to spend more money on something for no reason. I'm convinced this move is absolutely saving them money somewhere, or they wouldn't have done it. 

It's not always about cost. The AWS move removed a liability from the books and was a requirement to securing new owners.

 

Buy the thing! It has buzzword!

vs

Buy the thing! It depends on a crapped out datacenter full of computers old enough to find in a thrift store.

 

One is a going concern, the other is a concern that needs significant expenditure before going.

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16 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

It's not always about cost. The AWS move removed a liability from the books and was a requirement to securing new owners.

 

Buy the thing! It has buzzword!

vs

Buy the thing! It depends on a crapped out datacenter full of computers old enough to find in a thrift store.

 

One is a going concern, the other is a concern that needs significant expenditure before going.

Securing new owners who will invest more money. Still about money, just thinking long term for a change.

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54 minutes ago, Lord Derryth said:

That's why I said there needs to be an investigation.  I think they're scamming everyone.

*investigates*

Aw, what a bummer. Turns out it's not a conspiracy or a scam by LL after all, but the increasingly more complex mesh landscaping/buildings/furniture items, the increasing amount of 1024 x 1024 textures, layers upon layers of alpha blending textures and especially all the mesh attachments that creators can not be **rsed to make decent low LoD models for.

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1 hour ago, Lord Derryth said:

That's why I said there needs to be an investigation.  I think they're scamming everyone.  A memo went out notifying the real estates that prices would drop by 50%.  They figured if they keep it in the dark, they make more money.  Something is not right with Second Life.

dun Dun DUNNNNNNNN....!

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"it's not ME/MY machine nor is it somewhere between MY machine and LL!", "There's a conspiracy afoot with the Cloud move!"

...

And so on.

Reality: Yes, it certainly can be your machine or a hitch in the connection somewhere and no there's no conspiracy or other such nonsense.

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They are now renting as opposed to owning servers that had probably paid for themselves years ago as they were old.  So, a new expense for LL which they didn't have before.  Perhaps they could have increased costs for us even more so they could purchase state of the art servers?  Either way, someone is going to complain.  It's SL.  It's what people do.  There is no grand conspiracy.

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49 minutes ago, Solar Legion said:

"it's not ME/MY machine nor is it somewhere between MY machine and LL!", "There's a conspiracy afoot with the Cloud move!"

...

And so on.

Reality: Yes, it certainly can be your machine or a hitch in the connection somewhere and no there's no conspiracy or other such nonsense.

..especially if others, who tried in good faith, did not experience the same issues..

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On 5/18/2022 at 12:54 AM, Lord Derryth said:

That didn't make sense.  AWS servers are in Oregon.  My connection to Oregon is strong.  You are saying because it's a speed test my connection will be strong.  When in SL, it's weak?  This is turning out to be a joke.  My connection to Oregon is strong and it has nothing to do with prioritizing.  

the internet is not straight lines,  you are routing through whom knows what's backbones and other routing points.   you have zero direct connection to aws server farm.   

even when I was in utah, with the physical LL data center in arizona,  if my isp dropped a link some place, my ping could go from 12ms to 1500ms almost instantly... because of routing.

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13 hours ago, Lord Derryth said:

That's why I said there needs to be an investigation.  I think they're scamming everyone.  A memo went out notifying the real estates that prices would drop by 50%.  They figured if they keep it in the dark, they make more money.  Something is not right with Second Life.

Again, for the umpteenth time: whatever lag is involved here, it's nothing to do with the sim; its performance is rock-solid, and specifically scripts on all sims are running several times more efficiently than they were a year ago (which improvement is actually nothing to do with the AWS migration).

So theories of "scams" can trundle along with fringe on top, but none of it has anything to do with the supposed subject of this thread.

For my own personal "lag", I wish they'd spend some time streamlining whatever their CDN provider is doing to texture dispatch, but that's not likely to cost nor save them any money, and is again 100% orthogonal to the AWS migration.

As for the finances of cloud computing, it's not mysterious, it's just accounting: they traded-off capital vs expense. With cloud hosting they shifted from incurring a big batch of capital investment buying new servers to depreciate, in favor of paying expense to Bezodyne to carry that capital equipment on their books instead. Why? Could be many reasons, some encouraging (rapid scaling up), some not (what goes up may come down), and some known only to the IRS Illuminati.

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On 5/18/2022 at 12:54 AM, Lord Derryth said:

That didn't make sense.  AWS servers are in Oregon.  My connection to Oregon is strong.  You are saying because it's a speed test my connection will be strong.  When in SL, it's weak?  This is turning out to be a joke.  My connection to Oregon is strong and it has nothing to do with prioritizing.  

Note that your "strong connection" is 22 times faster on downloads than uploads. Most Internet connections are advertised for things like movie streaming that are 99% downloading. With Second Life, you need to constantly upload your position to the servers for them to know where you are. It may be that your Whore of Babylon ISP is messing with upload packets to keep the fancy "download" speed looking high.

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1 hour ago, Theresa Tennyson said:

Note that your "strong connection" is 22 times faster on downloads than uploads. Most Internet connections are advertised for things like movie streaming that are 99% downloading. With Second Life, you need to constantly upload your position to the servers for them to know where you are. It may be that your Whore of Babylon ISP is messing with upload packets to keep the fancy "download" speed looking high.

Download bandwidth is what matters in Second Life, since only ~3% of the network traffic for SL is data you send to the sim at idle.

Even then, SL lives on less than 24 KB (0.02 MB)/s total traffic at a quiet sim (5 people nearby), sending and receiving... bandwidth is just not a factor.

 

Just to test, I went flying around the sim with a draw distance at 168m (same as OP). The sim itself is running absolutely perfect like others have said. At worst, Firestorm was sending a whopping 5 KB/s of data, and receiving ~450-500 KB/s (mostly textures/mesh I presume). My ping to the sim is about 180 because I'm European but that didn't make my movements at all difficult, and no rubber-banding.

For reference, me watching a 720p video on Youtube takes about 5600 KB/s of downloading. Ten times more than I spent with the sim. A major difference is that SL sends its data in tiny itty bitty little pieces, rather than large blocks like Youtube.

So in conclusion, there's barely any network traffic happening even if you're basically streaming the entire sim at once, which shouldn't happen when you're just walking/standing around. Something's causing reliability issues (latency/packet loss) for OP, but it's not SL.

Edited by Wulfie Reanimator
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I have experienced symptoms that made me suspect the Second Life services or the network between me and them.  Once it was a Linux router I had set up being stupid.  Admittedly, I don't know enough about using Linux in this capacity to get it right.  I chucked that and replaced it with a real Cisco router with firewall feature set.  (None of that Linksys by Cisco garbage.)  Once it was a service provider traffic management system that was supposedly prioritizing "normal internet user traffic" over "abusive internet user traffic", but, what it was doing was Classifying Second Life's UDP traffic as BitTorrent traffic and applying an aggregated policer to the Class, resulting in Second Life Viewer not getting the important stuff.  (The network manager at the ISP let me show him what the problem was then PAID ME TO FIX IT FOR HIM.)

TL;DR:  Network operations must be near optimal.  ANYTHING in the path can affect traffic differently, even a corroded cable!

Every other time I got these weird symptoms, I traced it to a failing mass storage device or controller in my computer!  One was a SATA controller on a motherboard.  I chucked the whole board and declared _UPGRADE_TIME_  The other three were controller chips in SSDs failing.  (Corsair: controller locking up and responding to RESET commands, Mushkin: controller locking up and NOT responding to RESET commands, and OCP: controller taking short naps then resuming operations as if nothing had gone wrong)  I now use Samsung SSDs and have no such problems with them.

TL; DR:  Second Life needs the OS and storage system to be there and be responsive.

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On 5/16/2022 at 12:10 PM, Lord Derryth said:

I'm on Embraced.  There have been times where the sim runs perfectly fine.  The next minute, I can barely move around. 

I just went there as well. The sim is running perfectly. What is your computers spec? CPU/GPU/Memory? That could very well be your issue.

As far as for traces you cant use shouldn't use speedtest to test your connection to SL. It's not going over the same route as you are. You can't even use it to guesstimate be cause there are hundreds if not thousands of entry points to where you want to go. You need to do an actual traceroute (or better MTR (WinMTR run as administrator for Windows)) to the IP of your region. In your case that is simhost-0a9e7f9cdba4f953e.agni.secondlife.io  But beware AWS filters traceroute and ping requests (as do other hops along the route) once it enters their network. You can find the IP of your region by going into Help > About Secondlife (firestorm, ect) and see your location of  simhost-0a9e7f9cdba4f953e.agni you just need to add the domain secondlife.io   

This is a sample trace to your region from NYC. Blacked out is my ISP, Level3 is a backbone provider and after that it entering AWS. 

Below is showing that IP is definitely an AWS address.

marissa@marissa-MS-7D53:~$ nslookup simhost-0a9e7f9cdba4f953e.agni.secondlife.io        
Server:         127.0.0.53
Address:        127.0.0.53#53

Non-authoritative answer:
Name:   simhost-0a9e7f9cdba4f953e.agni.secondlife.io
Address: 52.43.86.7

marissa@marissa-MS-7D53:~$ nslookup 52.43.86.7
7.86.43.52.in-addr.arpa name = ec2-52-43-86-7.us-west-2.compute.amazonaws.com.

 

Trace To Embraced001.png

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2 hours ago, MarissaOrloff said:

 

Trace To Embraced001.png

I'm not able to show the aws tool I use, but my backbone (I'm in a dc close to the aws site in oregon and inside aws site themselves with hosting)

but I'm seeing 3 links down right now, so there is some routing issues currently, but that changes day to day, hour to hour.

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On 5/19/2022 at 1:07 PM, Rowan Amore said:

They are now renting as opposed to owning servers that had probably paid for themselves years ago as they were old.  So, a new expense for LL which they didn't have before.  Perhaps they could have increased costs for us even more so they could purchase state of the art servers?  Either way, someone is going to complain.  It's SL.  It's what people do.  There is no grand conspiracy.

i under estimated amazon with selling books online what if this turning into an amazon experience. that would be sick.

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