A "bucolic" question...

[valerie Inshan]

OK so it's holiday season and I am off at the country. Even though I use a regular DSL connection with a modem duly connected with an Ethernet cable, I'm having a strange issue: while graphics are awesome and running smooth, there is no way I can have sound, either ambient or media. I can receive IMs (and reply to them) but cannot start one. All my friends list keeps frozen as "loading" forever. Friends'names are question marks (so it's hard to know who IMs me, lol). I cleaned cache of course inside and outside SL, tried several viewers. Same. I suspect a lousy Internet connection. Ideas anybody on how to fix that or should I just be patient and wait to be back in town by the end of the week and go for a walk to contemplate the RL winter's beauty in the meantime? :smileywink: Thanks for any tip.

Btw, happy holidays to all! :smileyhappy:

Edited: Thanks!  Using 1.23 AND lower bandwith fixed it. Laggy but not death anymore! :D (now I can go make a snowman with the kids, lol)

[Cinnamon Lohner]

When I was traveling a lot earlier this year, I would end up in hotels with poor wifi connections.  I always kept a version of V1.23 with low settings on my laptop because it seemed to function better on crappy networks.   Of course that was pre-mesh and I haven't been on the road in over 6 months so not sure that will still work for you.

I vote for mulled wine by a hot fire! :smileytongue:

--Cinn

[valerie Inshan]

I really like your suggestion Cinn (the wine and the hot fire I mean! ). I'll give a try to 1.23, thank you!

[Rolig Loon]

My guess is that your Internet connection offers you a much lower bandwidth than you are accustomed to in the city and that your Maximum Bandwidth is set too high for your connection in the country.  Let me make up some numbers to illustrate why this can be a problem......

Suppose that you have 1,800 Kbps of available bandwidth in the city.  The Maximum Bandwidth setting tells your viewer how much of the available bandwidth it may use for transmitting information about shapes, textures, and positions, plus communications.  Suppose that you set your Maximum Bandwidth at 1,800 but SL only needs 1,000 Kbps to handle those basic functions.  That would leave you normally with 800Kbps to handle streaming media and Voice, which is much more than you will need. 

Now you move to the country.  Your new Internet connection is much more limited.  It only offers you 1,000 Kbps of bandwidth.  But your Maximum Bandwidth setting is still 1,800!  Your viewer therefore assumes that it is allowed to use as much bandwidth as it can find for basic functions -- up to 1,800 --- so it uses the entire 1,000 that's available.  Nothing is left for Voice and streaming media.  You have no music.

The solution is to decrease the Maximum Bandwidth setting, so that you are always reserving some of it for non-basic functions.  The standard recommendation is to set it at 80% of the available upload bandwidth.  Using my made-up numbers, your new Maximum Bandwidth setting in the country should be 800.  That will leave 200 Kbps for media and Voice.  The downside is that it will also decrease your frame rate and give you more lag, but at least you'll hear the music.  When you move to the country, you can't expect service to be as great as it was in the city, after all.

[LoveAngeL Lyre]

Hello Valerie. You can check out also the following link:

http://wiki.phoenixviewer.com/doku.php?id=fs_empty_friends_list

[valerie Inshan]

Thanks for the link Love. It seems indeed this issue only affects Mesh enable viewers on Mac. Running 1.23 fixed it. (Who said life was better at the countryside? )

 

[LoveAngeL Lyre]

Glad to hear that you fixed the problem Valerie. Enjoy your holidays. : )

[valerie Inshan]

tks