Cool VL Viewer forum

I have noticed when HTTP Fetching is turned on I get a lot of packet loss. Apparently this is due to the viewer not paying attention to the bandwidth setting and saturating my connection with textures etc by retrieving them as fast as it can. Teleports among other actions have been much slower as a result. Sometimes even trying to get a location to rez due to all of the packet loss has been impossible. When I shut off all HTTP features (in preferences and in advanced menu) it has dramatically improved (occasional little blips of packet loss but nothing like before with 110% packet loss) and the viewer is once again obeying the bandwidth setting.

Anyone else seeing this? Probably those with great connections and always had their bandwidth set at max never noticed anything but a large improvement. I know HTTP is better in many respects, but not when it is downloading out of control maxing out my connection. :/ As far as I can tell this affects all viewers. Or at least it does with me.

Note that the "bandwidth" limit of the viewer only deals with UDP packets (TCP packets, such as those exchanged with the HTTP protocol, are not limited in bandwidth): this is explained in the tooltip for the bandwidth setting in the "Preferences" floater, "Network & Web" tab...

Check your MTU (search this forum for "MTU"). The "packets loss" rate only deals with UDP packets (not TCP ones, which HTTP uses). Too large a MTU results in UDP packets loss and stalling TCP circuits.

Also, some low quality routers (especially Wifi ones) are incapable of sustaining enough simultaneous HTTP circuits and drop them like crazy (or even drop the whole connection, which in turn results in UDP packets loss); see this interesting chart. Any router not capable to handle at least 200 simultaneous circuits is unsuitable for any SL viewer !
If this is the case of your router (check the specifications for your router !), try reducing the maximum number of simultaneous HTTP connections the viewer will use (reduce CurlMaximumNumberOfHandles from 256 to 128, for example). Also prefer the new HTTP core for texture fetching ("Advanced" -> "Network" -> "Use new HTTP core") and (*after* having restarted the viewer to actually enable the new HTTP core), reduce its maximum number of simultaneous fetches to 8 or less ("Preferences" -> "Network & Web" -> "Max HTTP requests").