small public service announcement

i figured i’d write this up incase someone else has this problem since it seems to be affecting only a very small group of users.

recently for a couple of weeks i’ve been having random moments of internet problems. they all seemed to stem from using second life, which was weird, because i’ve been using second life for 3 years now, 2 of those years on a wireless connection to a cable modem in my living room. when ever i would turn on the second life client (and i mean any client, gemini, the stable LL release, etc) my internet speed would flux wildly and i would have insane amounts of lag. it was affecting other computers in my home as well. my father mentioned his net slowing down (he’s connected directly to the router via cat 5 cable), and my laptop, which i keep gtalk running on, was not doing well either. when ever i was on a voice convo with lucas, it was very noticeable that the internet was fluxing, as our conversation’s signal dropped horribly low, and audible voice chat lag could be detected.

so at first i thought it was my router. we tried recycling things, turning things off, changing channels, anything we could think of. after that didn’t fix it, we thought perhaps my laptop was interfering with my pc’s wireless signal, so we turned that off (much to my multi-tasking dismay) and found that it stopped for a little bit, but then got bad again, so that wasn’t the case.

then there was a full night of googling, both by me and by lucas. and finally we found this jira entry titled “voice client chokes some routers”. a couple of people described similar situations to mine and to remedy it, they turned disabled voice chat! so i tried that, and it worked! everything is back to normal. no internet speed flux, no sl lag, no other computers affected!

i have no clue why this happened in the first place, but it seems to be fixed by this. unfortunately it means i can’t hear people on voice anymore but that’s only a minor loss compared to not being able to move around freely.

if you ask the lindens for help, they’ll just tell you that they don’t support wireless, but to be honest i really think they should look into this. like i said before, i’ve used second life with wireless for about 2 years, and it seems odd to me that this just occurred within the last few weeks, which to me says something about the new server update they rolled out this month.

so if you’re having odd problems with connecting and you’re on wireless, try turning off your voice chat! and please do go vote for that jira entry because it really needs to be looked into.