Viewer to Region Ping Times

[WhiteStar Magic]

Good Day folks,

I just popped in to check out Ener Hax' tireless efforts on Hax Nuit and hit an odd bit of a snag.
I'm not sure that this is a Kitely Issue as such or even an OpenSim issue (unless the Kitely version has a quirk) but possibly a cloud hosting issue, possible tweaking needed ? or something else... but here is the info.


All my viewers are set as follows: 1000 kbps max network speed. Graphic running in Ultra with Ambient Occlusion & Depth of Field are OFF. Particles @ 2048, otherwise fully maxed. Note that Anistropic Filtering is OFF as well.

I first logged in with Zen Viewer (latest) but the movement was extremely choppy. I popped up the stats panel and was surprised to see "Sim Ping times" exceeding 500ms, all the way up to 900ms resulting in a frame rate of < 2.0fps. In the "Legacy Grid" Ping Sim times 70ms -> 150ms with FPS averaging 18-27 fps depending on activity. In OSgrid LBSA Plaza ping times averaging 80ms and 20-25fps consistently.

Next I tried with Cool VL Viewer (Latest). Slightly choppy but the sim ping times were floating between 60ms to 180ms and the FPS was hitting up to 35 depending on view. This was certainly better. In the "Legacy Grid" Ping Sim times 90ms -> 200ms with FPS averaging 10-25 fps depending on activity.

Next, I installed the latest FireStorm for OpenSim and adjusted my setting according to my normal defaults. Ping times in-world were reaching 600ms at times but mostly stayed below 250ms. The frame rates were obviously affected and bouncing between 2fps (@ high ping time) to 19/20 fps on fast ping times. In the "Legacy Grid" Ping Sim times 90ms -> 150ms with FPS averaging 15-32 fps depending on activity.

OpenSim Note:
I also run Stand Alones & Servers with OpenSim and ping times vary tremendously but I have not seen ping times in excess of 250ms with the exception of the initial login load for a moment only. Only other times I have noted excessive Ping Times is when attempting to login to a grid / region which is @ distance in RL with many hops, such as Eastern EU from my location. One thing that will 100% affect Sim Ping times is that if Anistropic Filtering is turned on, which will double the ping times and half the FPS rates. Comparing to other OpenSim installations (OSgrid Plaza's for example as they are dedi servers in North America) and the ping times are also very respectable, if not on a 'foreign (many hops away)' region.

As for my Physical Location, it's Ontario Canada and fairly close (as the crow flies) to the Amazon Server's. So distance (# of hops) is actually quite minimal and not a cause.

System Specs from the system I used for testing:
* All Drivers are fully up to date as of this date.
CPU: AMD Phenom(tm) II X4 970 Processor (3511.96 MHz)
Memory: 16302 MB
OS Version: Microsoft Windows 8 64-bit (Build 9200)
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: GeForce GTX 550 Ti/PCIe/SSE2

Have a Terrific Day !
WhiteStar

[Ilan Tochner]

Hi WhiteStar,

Reported ping times from various places in the United States where much better than you mentioned so I'd like to ask you a few technical questions to help us pinpoint the issues you encountered:

1) Kitely has proprietary cloud-based systems that provide improved performance when viewer HTTP capabilities are enabled. Do you have HTTP textures and HTTP inventory enabled in the viewer?

2) The first time you enter a world your viewer needs to download everything the world includes and can't take advantage of its cache. In addition, there are several processes that increase server load when a world is just started from storage which can effect ping times for a few minutes until they complete. Measuring ping times about 5 minutes after you enter a world will most likely ensure that your viewer will finish downloading everything it needs to and the server will complete its startup sequence computations. How long after you entered the world did you look at ping time?

3) Ping times can fluctuate depending on network congestion between your location and the data center where our servers are located (Amazon's West California data center). Have you tested this at different times and/or from different locations?

[WhiteStar Magic]

Hi Ilan

HTTP Textures & Inventory = ON

Ping Times tested for MANY minutes and multiple logins, inventory was fully loaded. As it's a new account, Inventory is Minimum as provided by Kitely Default.

My location is static and my general ping times are always very good.
Have not tested at different times as yet, will report back when done.

Something of note though, C# HTTP services are a 'tad' (being polite) underpowered for real duty but so far OpenSim is not that severe duty till it's forced to use HTTP Inventory which will be a nasty mis-adventure when that is started implementation. Not a factor currently.

[Ilan Tochner]

Hi WhiteStar,

We're aware of OpenSim's limitations when it comes to HTTP-based networking. That is part of the reason why we replaced the assets and inventory services with our own proprietary Java-based systems and moved static content delivery to Apache.

People from other locations are getting better ping times than those you reported so I suggest you retest your ping times later today. When you do so, please try to eliminate any external software that may effect your network congestion, e.g. file sharing software that tends to open many concurrent connections.

[WhiteStar Magic]

Yeah, I knew you guys switched to Apache for delivery. A very good move for the obvious reasons.

No Filesharing software, Dropbox, Skydrive or the like.
No IRC, Skype or any other comms software in use.
1 Viewer in use at any given time (I don't run multi on single machine, I have many machines so no need)
Had these been loaded with the other previous tests, they would have uniformly affected any viewer going to any grid but as I do not use such, they are not a part of the equation.
Network here is optimized, 1 gigabit ether-switch to web-modem.
ASUS Network AI is Uninstalled (I use an Asus Mobo) which adds 10% latency if installed.


Testing again with Zen:
* Logged in with "Fetch Inventory on Login" disabled. Fast Login, No Change to Sim Ping Time as previously noted.
* Logged in with "Fetch Inventory on Login" enabled. Much Slower initial Login, Sim Ping Time worse initially then settles to 200-250ms without movement. (static avatar just standing) When moving in any direction Ping times can go from 90ms to 700 ms ! affecting the FPS of course.

Testing with Cool VL Viewer: (Best Results with CV)
Fetch Inventory @ Login OFF, login fast, still best ping times & FPS.
Fetch Inventory @ Login ON, login slower, ping times & FPS recover after initial load.
Both Modes are Consistently with 100ms (+/- 25) ping times and FPS averaging 28-32.

Testing FireStorm: (Firestorm 4.3.1 (31155) Dec 2 2012 01:57:04 (Firestorm-Release) with OpenSimulator support)
Fetch Inventory on or off = no difference.
Sim Ping times still float between 120ms to 600ms (if moving) and the FPS floats between 2.0 & 15.0

Something Noted on ALL viewers. Again just using Ener's Region as the testing spot. If you take the viewer and walk to edge of sim & look out over the ocean, FPS Climbs up to 50 and sim ping drops to < 90ms or lower if static. In FS ! If you do that & then turn to look at the Region, Ping will hit 700ms and fps drops to 2.

With all my viewers, my minimum cache is 1GB, FS I have allowed 2GB.
My HDD's are not a part of the issue either (someone suggested that somewhere else during discussions) I run my Operating System & Apps on a Chronos SATA-3 SSD drive with 60mbit transfer rate, in other words zero delay HDD.

Bottom Line, the best experience I see with the different viewers is using Cool VL Viewer from Henri Beauchamps. That being said, I have not installed other viewers besides those mentioned above such as the old Imprudence, or Singularity or others so I cannot speak to their results.

Hope that helps somewhat. It has been a couple of hours since the first set of tests with this issue.
WS

EDIT:
I just decided to look in the Viewer Cache Structures as FS Statistics panel is reporting the Object Cache Hit Rate as ZERO! Yet I see the cache being populated properly in the directory structures. Cool Viewer reports the Cache actively being used. Will test with Zen soon but I use Zen's cache data for other reasons and I know that is retrieved properly when in use.

[Ohn Lang]

Just for recording purposes.

I went into Ener's world while WhiteStar and Ilan were logged in. My FPS were 38/39 - 50/51+ depending on where i looked. ping times were about 44-50ms depending also. This is with graphics set to ultra, and draw distance to 256.

oops. Forgot viewer info. I'm using Firestorm 4.2.2.29837 (latest version had buggs so backed off to previous version).