Bandwidth, again

[Jackson Redstar]

I know this has been talked about alot already, but I was thinking about it again the other day. The beandwidth settings are still the same now as they were when SL first started and 1meg download speeds were then kinda blazing fast. And while there mayhave been other reasons to limit this such as processor speed, graphics cars and system memory, in 2023 , does it make anysense to use 2005 settings? 

I had been using 30000 as my max download for a long time no issues. My current internet is 300mbs down and up, and I used only wired LAN. So I now have set it to 200000 (200mbs), I set this in debug setting and I have yet to see any issues with that. I think modern computers can process all this stuff thrown at them without much a hassle at all. I mean back in the early-mid 2000s I was designing websites based on 800x600 max resolution and 1 meg download speeds to be exceptional. Times have changed. I don't know what is 'under the hood' here, maybe the code is so old it just maxes out the download speed no matter how fast your internet is anyways, dunno. But if this really is early 2000 standards - maybe it is time for an update to the standards?

[Qie Niangao]

The bandwidth setting used to matter, back when almost all viewer comms went over UDP. Now it's like the "close doors" button on most elevators: it doesn't actually do anything but it gives some folks comfort to push it anyway.

[Jackson Redstar]

42 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

The bandwidth setting used to matter, back when almost all viewer comms went over UDP. Now it's like the "close doors" button on most elevators: it doesn't actually do anything but it gives some folks comfort to push it anyway.

In that case, why not just delete that setting from preferences to begin with?

[Aishagain]

True, the UDP bandwidth setting matters far less now than it did, since most server data, certainly all texture and object data is sent by http, not UDP.  The operative word though, is "most".

The servers still cap their sending capacity at about 2mbps, and from my experience, setting the bandwidth value much above 1500kbps or 1.5mbps merely increases my packet loss. 

My connection to SL is about 50mbps up, from the  UK to the AWS system, and my modem can handle much more, so that part of the system has no influence (to the best of my limited knowledge).

Wiser heads than mine will give you chapter and verse on this but that is my experience, as they say, YMMV.

[bigmoe Whitfield]

@Whirly Fizzle  if I'm remembering right this issue is because of a bug in the LL code from eons ago? 

[animats]

It's really to protect the single-thread viewers from overload. Most of the viewers deal with incoming UDP updates during their spare time in each frame. If they get too much stuff in one frame time, they drop packets, which get resent later. So, when you see a new region, the sim servers dribble out object updates over about 30 seconds or so, with the most "interesting" ones sent first. Then the viewer can get busy loading the meshes, textures, etc., which is a background task.

All this gives adequate performance on low-end desktop machines. Not just the old ones. You can buy a $99 Windows laptop from Walmart. This is the era of the $1000 phone and the $100 laptop. It way under-utilizes a gamer PC on gigabit fiber.

Many people, including me, are working on speeding things up. There's progress. UDP traffic limits are not one of the biggest problems. Prioritized texture loading, which I demoed in my experimental viewer a year ago, is a bigger win, and that's going into the C++ viewers. This, when done right, fixes that seriously annoying problem where you get close to something and it still remains blurry for as long as a minute. That's really going to improve shopping; you'll be able to see all the vendors. The Lindens are converting to retained mode graphics and are looking into using Vulkan, which improves performance considerably for machines with better GPUs. Some situations where things take too long to render are interest list bugs, and those are starting to be understood.

I'm rather encouraged. For several years around the AWS conversion, there was very little progress from LL. Now, there is.

[Katherine Heartsong]

Anytime you get excited and show some optimism regarding upcoming technology improvements, @animats, that's good enough for me!

[Jackson Redstar]

sounds like the old days of web develepoment - at some point as machines and internet speeds got better, the people still left accessing the site on old turtle machines and AOL dial up were pretty much just out of luck. It just doesn't pay to cater to them after a while

[TheBenchmarker]

On 1/27/2023 at 1:08 PM, Jackson Redstar said:

I know this has been talked about alot already, but I was thinking about it again the other day. The beandwidth settings are still the same now as they were when SL first started and 1meg download speeds were then kinda blazing fast. And while there mayhave been other reasons to limit this such as processor speed, graphics cars and system memory, in 2023 , does it make anysense to use 2005 settings? 

I had been using 30000 as my max download for a long time no issues. My current internet is 300mbs down and up, and I used only wired LAN. So I now have set it to 200000 (200mbs), I set this in debug setting and I have yet to see any issues with that. I think modern computers can process all this stuff thrown at them without much a hassle at all. I mean back in the early-mid 2000s I was designing websites based on 800x600 max resolution and 1 meg download speeds to be exceptional. Times have changed. I don't know what is 'under the hood' here, maybe the code is so old it just maxes out the download speed no matter how fast your internet is anyways, dunno. But if this really is early 2000 standards - maybe it is time for an update to the standards?

SL is like a Ferrari with a diesel engine from an old tractor. Shiny on the surface, rusty underneath.