MaxTut Wonder has created a rather interesting Jira:
ISP Traffic Shaping can be a pain, I’ve experienced woes before when World of Warcraft traffic wasn’t being identified correctly. My ISP is supposed to give priority to games and live video streaming, but during the WoW woes, WoW traffic wasn’t getting a priority.
However with regards to Second Life, I’ve never noticed anything untoward that would make me think traffic shaping was an issue and as I’m on a better package these days, I wouldn’t expect it to be an issue but MaxTut Wonder is claiming there is an issue for him when it comes to Mesh items rezzing and he’s convinced it’s due to traffic shaping, as he states within the Jira comments.
“Update, i found the reason:
This problem is caused by traffic shaping by internet provider.
If your provider apply traffic shaping on your internet connection (streaming traffic shaping), some meshes will not rez at the Highest LOD.
Why?
Depens on how big is the data streaming of the mesh + the limits of data streaming applyed by your provider in the traffic shaping.
If the limit of data streaming is 200kbs and the mesh LOD is 201kb the mesh will not rez!
Work around: use second life in hours when traffic shaping is not applyed to your internet.”
Now whether this is the reason or not, I don’t know, I don’t know what sort of traffic shaping policy his ISP employs, but if it is true, it’s another groaning moment over traffic shaping policies, I’m sure there will be more in the future.
Linden Lab of course can do nothing at all about this, however it would be interesting to get more information on how Mesh is being streamed and whether or not we can get information regarding the streaming costs, can we get them already?
There is a Wiki document about Mesh streaming costs, which you can read here. However I don’t see anything there that tells me how I can get this information…. I’m not sure if I do actually want this information thinking about it, it may be horrifying!!! Just kidding, I’d like to know what the costs are and whether I can do anything to make my own builds less costly on other users.
The whole cost issue is something Linden Lab have been too quiet about, really they should have some sort of go green section on their forum or wiki where they offer some hints and tips on building efficiently, losing smaller textures and how to evaluate costs, taking into consideration that this is a shared virtual world.
The only attempt I can really recall was avatar rendering cost, that wasn’t explained that well, too many people didn’t seem to understand that the results were relevant to their own computer. However costs such as this are something we should be aware of, I’ve generally done my part by going bald, but I don’t want to encourage everyone to do that or I’ll have a posse of hair designers chasing me with pitchforks!