Why does the router matter?

[Samm Florian]

Hi everyone.  I have a question: recently I've been having a lot of trouble with Viewer 2.8: my groups wouldn't show up, music wouldn't play, and the little "Buy this Land" tag showed up in the location bar no matter where I was.  (No, it didn't work; I tried! :)  

Now in the lists of troubleshooting steps I saw around on the web, I saw the suggestion to reboot one's modem and router, but I skipped that step because (a) my modem and router were upstairs at the time (lazy!) and (b) I couldn't see why it would matter.  But nothing else I was doing worked.

So today I'm using the internet away from home, and I decided to try out 2.8 here, and voila! Everything's fine.  Which suggests that I really *do* need to reboot my modem and router when I get home.

So my question: why the heck would that make any difference?  It seems like total voodoo to me.

Thanks! :)

[Vladi Hazelnut]

By rebooting your modem and router it resets your connection. You may be experiencing a slow down in your connection. By resetting these it might fix it.

[Chelsea Malibu]

For all games, they need to resolve DNS to a server.  Often that route is congested or inefficient due to traffic, peering and other network issues and by re-setting your Router and Modem, you usually resets your DHCP which in turn gets you a new IP address and new route.

I suggest one does this as a regular part of their PC maintenance anyways but especially if you are gaming.

[leliel Mirihi]

A router is itself just a computer running software that can have bugs or memory leaks that cause it to slow down over time. Resetting it is the same as rebooting your PC. You should also check the manufactures' web site for updated firmware that may fix some of those bugs.

[Void Singer]

it could also be that you have a crappy connection at home (which could have various causes), or assuming you weren't using the same computer in both locations, there's something conflicting or slowing down your home computer.

but as other have said, resetting the connection can sometimes force you onto a better connection, refresh DNS cache, or even give an overheated modem or router time to cool down.

[Oz Linden]

The real answer is that while we have some theories about that, we're not yet sure.

There are a number of things that might be going on in the equipment between the system that you're running the viewer on and our servers - your home router and/or modem included.  Some of what we are doing may be putting more load on them than they can handle, or otherwise tickling bugs in them.

We're researching these problems.

 

[Baloo Uriza]

Router lacks the memory to route that much UDP traffic?

[Baloo Uriza]

---

Chelsea Malibu wrote:

For all games, they need to resolve DNS to a server.

---

With home routers, that's often cached on the router itself.

---

Chelsea Malibu wrote:

Often that route is congested or inefficient due to traffic, peering and other network issues and by re-setting your Router and Modem, you usually resets your DHCP which in turn gets you a new IP address and new route.

---

Rarely.  Usually, with home routers, the stupid thing just ran out of RAM; resetting it temporarily fixes the problem.  A longer term fix would be to get a router with more memory or get software for the router that doesn't suck.

 

 

[Samm Florian]

But why would the router allow me to go online in SL, but then block certain parts of the viewer's functionality?  I could understand if the router stopped me from logging on at all…

[Baloo Uriza]

---

Samm Florian wrote:

But why would the router allow me to go online in SL, but then block certain parts of the viewer's functionality?  I could understand if the router stopped me from logging on at all…

---

Where's the quote that gives what you're saying some context in relation to what you're replying to?

[Void Singer]

I don't know what ports (think radio channels) that SL uses for various tasks, but if specific ports are blocked, then those actions would be blocked as well.... for instance some ISP's block incomming connections on port 80 (the default port for running an HTTP server).

another would be the type of data... for example UDP has less error correction than TCP, both of which SL uses for various tasks, if the connetion is less than stable udp messages are more prone to failure and breakage. this is most notable with wireless connections that suffer from interference.