Cool VL Viewer forum

View unanswered posts | View active topics It is currently 2024-03-19 09:25:05



Reply to topic  [ 6 posts ] 
question for the wise (i.e. people who know the SL source) 
Author Message

Joined: 2009-03-18 09:32:02
Posts: 246
Reply with quote
Does the bandwith setting number mean kiloBIT or kiloBYTE?

when i treat that number as kilobit (as in, i set it to the same that i actually "buy" from my ISP) i get lost packets like crazy. when i treat the number as kilobyte (set it to 1/8 of what i buy from my ISP) i don't, and my bandwith monitoring on my router tells me i'm using almost all my bandwidth.

Looks like that number is actually kilobyte, not kilobit as the text in the settings dialogbox suggests.

Would be nice if that could be fixed somehow, so that the number is either actually kilobits or labeled accordingly....


from what i see in the skins xml files it should be simple enough to fix anyways ;)


2009-03-18 09:49:39
Profile YIM WWW

Joined: 2009-03-17 18:42:51
Posts: 5523
Reply with quote
No, it's actually a number of kilo bits per second (Kbps). To get the number of kilo Bytes per second (KBps) you need to divide by 8 or 9 (9, is closer to the true figure, because beside useful data there is a non negligible number of protocol bytes per packet).


2009-03-18 09:59:18
Profile WWW

Joined: 2009-03-18 00:38:02
Posts: 37
Reply with quote
@Lance

You may check the actual speed you can achieve from your provider with a test at http://www.speedtest.net. SL will still be slower as there are additional bottlenecks on the way but thats a good indication to what to set your bandwidth limits.


2009-03-18 13:56:37
Profile YIM WWW

Joined: 2009-03-18 09:32:02
Posts: 246
Reply with quote
Henri Beauchamp wrote:
No, it's actually a number of kilo bits per second (Kbps).



if that was the case i would be able to set my bandwidth to 8000 since i have a 16 megabit connection.
but anything higher than 1/9 of my result at speedtest.net gets me lost packets like crazy.

hence my assumption that that number in the preferences window actually means kilobytes per second.


edit: running my AND my wifes login at 8000 right now and no lost packets 0.o


2009-03-18 17:29:27
Profile YIM WWW

Joined: 2009-03-17 18:42:51
Posts: 5523
Reply with quote
Lance Corrimal wrote:
Henri Beauchamp wrote:
No, it's actually a number of kilo bits per second (Kbps).



if that was the case i would be able to set my bandwidth to 8000 since i have a 16 megabit connection.
but anything higher than 1/9 of my result at speedtest.net gets me lost packets like crazy.

hence my assumption that that number in the preferences window actually means kilobytes per second.


edit: running my AND my wifes login at 8000 right now and no lost packets 0.o

I confirm these are kilo bits per second.

The setting is however a MAXIMUM bandwidth. SL will hardly ever use more than 2Mbps, and this only just after logging in or teleporting. The v1.19.0.5 viewer will also use more bandwidth than v1.2x (which got new, more efficient messages to communicate with the sim server.

Also, the actual used bandwidth will depend on may things, such as the bandwidth available for the sim server itself, the number of avatars in the sim, etc.

Finally, the packets lost is not directly correlated to the bandwidth in use, but rather to the network load on the path between the sim server and your computer. SL uses UDP packets, which are not repeated when lost between two routers, unlike TCP packets. That's why there is a packet loss at all.


2009-03-18 18:41:37
Profile WWW

Joined: 2009-03-18 09:32:02
Posts: 246
Reply with quote
well, i kind of remember that that number used to be kilobyte per second, and pretty much any number of people would be telling you to set it to 1/8 of your connection speed instead of the full number that you'd think you should put in... seems it got fixed at some point in the past. good to know.


2009-03-18 19:36:21
Profile YIM WWW
Display posts from previous:  Sort by  
Reply to topic   [ 6 posts ] 

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 1 guest


You cannot post new topics in this forum
You cannot reply to topics in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum
You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot post attachments in this forum

Search for:
Jump to:  
Powered by phpBB® Forum Software © phpBB Group
Designed by ST Software.