High Sim Ping from UK

[Ayesha Askham]

For two nights now and ONLY at UK night, sim ping and Transatlantic ping is 50% greater than daytime.  It appears, from using tracert to be above.net again.

I am not blaming Linden Lab for this, it is beyond their control, but is there anything those users like me in the UK who have seen this issue a few times lately can do about it?

I usually see a sim ping at home od between 165 and 190ms, tonight and last night after 1pm PDT it is up to over 300ms, and packet-loss is spiking at several percent, averaging at about 1%.  This makes SL very laggy and difficult, since response time is so poor.

Anyone know a solution, apart from RL?

[Ayesha Askham]

For two nights now and ONLY at UK night, sim ping and Transatlantic ping is 50% greater than daytime.  It appears, from using tracert to be above.net again.

I am not blaming Linden Lab for this, it is beyond their control, but is there anything those users like me in the UK who have seen this issue a few times lately can do about it?

I usually see a sim ping at home od between 165 and 190ms, tonight and last night after 1pm PDT it is up to over 300ms, and packet-loss is spiking at several percent, averaging at about 1%.  This makes SL very laggy and difficult, since response time is so poor.

Anyone know a solution, apart from RL?

[Kwakkelde Kwak]

No solution unfortunately.

Here in the Netherlands I see the very same though, packet loss of 0.9% (normally 0.0) and a ping of 250-300 ms (normally 150-200).

I don't get a bad response though. Maybe you're doing more than standing around

[Ina Fairport]

Yes, same thing here in the Netherlands. It started yesterday after the last restarts.

Today I crashed twice because of lost connection, Yesterday just after the restarts is was worse and could not even sail, Today was a bit better but had a lot of script errors.

I have a fast 100 MB glassfibre connection but the connection with the LL servers can be very bad at times.

[Madeline Blackbart]

I'm wondering if this has something to do with the fact there are more US players utilizing the server at that time. Since night for you is in fact day time in the USA.

[Hitomi Tiponi]

Try using a US-based free VPN e.g. Hotspot.Shield - it makes LL's servers think they are talking to someone in the US - doesn't always work, but may do.

[Ayesha Askham]

Re this sim ping issue:

I am now pretty sure that it is not merely SL users that are causing this problem, the increase and decrease in sim ping and its concomitant packet loss is tied in with general, (ie business-related) internet traffic across the Transatlantic link during the US working day.

I must assume either that we have reached traffic saturation on the cables, or one or more is down at the moment.

 

@Hitomi, I have no idea what a VPN is and I doubt if I could use such a thing anyway with my VM modem.

[Monty Linden]

For what it's worth, I've been getting 100+ mS ping times from the Linden Boston office with above.net appearing to be the culprit.  I don't know the why but it is real and new.

@Hitomi, if you have been doing free VPN experiements, I would like to hear what you have found.  I have wanted to do the reverse experiment:  VPN over the oceans simulating a distant experience back to our services.

 

[WolfBaginski Bearsfoot]

Also not worth much, but UK evenings are bad here partly because because of people coming home and watching streaming video. Everything slows down, not just US sites. 6pm UK is 10am California, so it does coincide with the US business day.

In my experience, that general UK-local loading to the internet doesn't make a big difference to ping times and packet loss.

(Monty, I'm a little surprised that LL hasn't already been using VPNs for that sort of test. It's sort of obvious, but is there a problem lurking in what such a test does?)

[Drake1 Nightfire]

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Monty Linden wrote:

For what it's worth, I've been getting 100+ mS ping times from the Linden Boston office with above.net appearing to be the culprit.  I don't know the why but it is real and new.

 

@Hitomi, if you have been doing free VPN experiements, I would like to hear what you have found.  I have wanted to do the reverse experiment:  VPN over the oceans simulating a distant experience back to our services.

 

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Boston office? I thought that closed. I'm getting high pings as well from the Boston area to San fran and Dallas.

[XLR8RRICK Hudson]

Seems there are issues in the UK as seen in CloudFlare

 

https://www.cloudflare.com/system-status

[Ayesha Askham]

Rick

I don't know if the reroute was an attempt at a solution to the throttle/slow server issue, but for me at least sim ping was only about 25% up at most on the afternoon and I got no packet loss at all tonight in the UK, from 9pm BST until after midnight.

[WolfBaginski Bearsfoot]

For me, ping times, packet loss, and other indications of network problems have been much worse. Some oif it may be internal to SL.Sim crossings have been diabolical. I have been getting corrupted textures. Prims have vanished as draw distamce was increased or the camera moved closer. At one time in the last few hours I was getting bursts of 50% packet loss.

And if none of this is connected with the server rollouts, it is one hell of a coincidence of timing.

 

[Ayesha Askham]

Wolf

This is interesting.  Yuriko Nishi is suggesting that the datacentre that you are connected to is important in this mater and it seems that Maestro has passed on our concerns about this to the LL operations team (qv the Server thread).

For me tonight (UK time) ping and packet loss were back to the evening normal, ie no packet loss and sim ping anywhere from 160-200ms.  I suspect I've been luck these last two nights though because others are still bad.

Despite Cincia stating the blindingly obvious, I think LL are actually aware that something is awry with their internal comms.

[Yuriko Nishi]

it seems to have been fixed last night.

 

not sure if it´s because of the weekend or if it´s really fixed now, but my high ping and packet loss are gone, back to normal!

 

hope it will stay fixed

 

edit: nope, lag is back -.-

[Hitomi Tiponi]

@Wolfbaginski - I think the tests Monty wants doing can only effectively be done from overseas

@Monty - I am now finding worse ping speeds (about 50% worse) when using a free US-based VPN from the UK.  I will do more tests from Japan and Australia (where I did find an improvement from) later in the year.

Incidentally if you think ping speeds to a US server are bad, just try pinging an Aussie one from the UK.

[Cincia Singh]

In other late breaking news, sometimes ping times and download speeds on the internet suck. We'll have graphs, plots and traces on the 11pm news show!  :matte-motes-tongue:

[Orca Flotta]

@Wolfbaginski - I think the tests Monty wants doing can only effectively be done from overseas

Hm, depends on where this "overseas" is located exactly. From where I am sitting right now pretty much everything is overseas. And LOL, no I'm not in the UK. :smileytongue:

[Hitomi Tiponi]

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Orca Flotta wrote:

@Wolfbaginski - I think the tests Monty wants doing can only effectively be done from overseas

Hm, depends on where this "overseas" is located exactly. From where I am sitting right now pretty much everything is overseas. And LOL, no I'm not in the UK. :smileytongue:

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Wow - you can use SL on a submarine! :matte-motes-big-grin-wink:

[Ayesha Askham]

OK an update.

The weekend seemed to suggest all was back to normal, no packet loss and sim ping back to c.170ms.  Of course there was little or no commercial net traffic.

Last UK evening the gremlins were back: sim ping climbed to 270ms and packet loss 1%, not prohibitive but useless if you do anything that requires a fast response time.

I tried contacting Abovenet support a couple of days ago, but so far I have had no response whatsoever.

ETA at 4:30pm BST Tuesday:  Sim ping is rising again, 250ms and counting.  Packet loss has begun again.  Looks like we are in for a rough patch.  Having observed some anomalous behaviour within SL after today's restarts I am not sanguine about the prospects.

ETA 2 at midnight BST:  Sure enough, sim ping and packet loss climbed to a peak of 300ms and 1.5% respectively about 12noon PDT and remained high until about 3:30pm PDT, when it began to return to "normal". By 4:15pm PDT sim pings were back under 200ms and packet loss had ceased.  When will this trouble abate?  Is SL to be handicapped for Western Europe's evening hours now?

ETA 3: Wednesday 4:15pm BST: Sim ping is up above 200ms and rising again so it seems no-one is doing or no-one CAN do anything about this.  Looks like SL will soon be losing another tranche of European users. oh, and still no response from Above.

ETA 4: Wednesday, at about 6:30pm BST, 10:30am Pacific the sim ping dropped back to its "normal" value of around 160ms and packet loss vanished.  This only lasted for about 10 minutes, then packet loss resumed and sim ping shot back up to 270+ms.  So what caused this?

[Yuriko Nishi]

i did a few more tests (tracerts to different sims)

 

i was pretty sure that it´s above.net´s fault, but i now found some confusing results.

 

some sims that seem to be in the same physical location (exact same route till the last adress) have different ping times.

 

one has 323 ms, and the other 186.

 

i am beginning to wonder if it´s something within that datacenter, bad routers/network hardware or whatever (i am no expert ^^) that screws up for some servers.

 

because english isn´t my first language i will try to explain it again differently to make sure it´s clear

 

the trace route is the same for the sims i tested, just the last adress (the sim) is different.

 

i did the tests multiple times to make sure the results are accurate

 

this is np, if you just stand around, but we do car racing

[Monty Linden]

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Yuriko Nishi wrote:

 

one has 323 ms, and the other 186.

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Which sim hosts are these?

 

[Ayesha Askham]

Please see the ETA 4 on my previous post.  Perhaps someone could explain how this could occur?

[Yuriko Nishi]

sim10090.agni.lindenlab.com 216.82.48.156  (sarafina) runs fast

and sim10308.agni.lindenlab.com 216.82.50.30  (blanc) runs slow

 

these are just examples. i picked them because the trace route suggests that they are at the same location.

 

there are many slow sims, and many fast sims though, from my subjective pov it seems like 50:50

 

lemme know if you need tracerts

 

 

[Monty Linden]

Pings are consistent at the moment with the usual high moment-to-moment variance.  I did notice that my NYC route was going through level3.