[sldev] Client bandwidth and server lag

[Soft]

On Tue, Jun 23, 2009 at 11:24 AM, Colin Kern<colin.kern at gmail.com> wrote:
> I think the logic that people are following is that since you're not
> downloading the textures as fast from the server, it puts a lower load
> on it.  But you still have to download the same amount of data, and
> does it really make that much of a difference if you do it in 5
> seconds instead of 20?  I could maybe understand lag being more
> "bursty" with higher bandwidths, but it seems like if you have a
> fairly busy sim where avatars are teleporting in or moving around
> frequently, having lower bandwidth settings increases the chances of
> your download overlapping with someone else's, so the overall load on
> the server evens out.

It shouldn't matter.

Resident connections are all traveling over the same handful of exit
interfaces. With tens of thousands of residents' connections blended
together, it's not going to make a difference whether individual
connections are spiky or sustained if they're pushing the same amount
of data over time.

That said, an awful lot of people crank the bandwidth up to 1.5mbps
because they figure they have a 1.5mbit connection or better. That's
often a mistake. Most ISPs overstate the capacity their networks by a
good margin, and it's very unlikely that even a 3 mbit DSL connection
provides highly reliable 1.5mbit downstream.