Second Life Bandwidth Usage

[pacifika]

My fiancee has discovered Second Life. As she stays at home at the moment for health reasons this is great as she can socialize without leaving the house.. However Second Life has pushed up last month's bandwidth usage to 57GB! Help! What can I do?

The way SL works is you download a viewer, all the content is then streamed to you (as it is created by users), this means SL is constantly downloading textures and occasionaly other media made by others. For her typical daily usage this amounts to 2GB a day! It does cache data but only 1GB so this is not much help.

Is there anything except for the common sense answers like limiting the hours etc that I can do, to minimize the bandwidth? I would probably be looking at caching more data or some kind of compression or something totally off the wall. Many thanks.

[Rik]

I start from a position of knowing nothing about SL, so bear with me.

I assume you are using a router? If so, you can probably limit the hours of access to SL.

There are apps out there which are supposed to speed up the net by compressing images etc, whether one of them would help you I don't know, but take a look here.

The only other thing I can think of is to talk to IDNet and see whether there is a better package for your needs.

I'll post a link in the Gaming board, in the hope that members there may be able to help you.

[Dolph146]

well i have an idea. see here http://secure-web7.secondlife.com/knowledgebase/article.php?id=088

even though the article is about reducing lag etc it may apply to you. Seeing as SL downloads a constant stream of data if you (politely ask the wife) turn down the graphics settings then you will download less data. Id suggest decreasing everything you can like fog distance. Try the settings for a day and measure the bandwidth usage, it should be reduced i would have thought?

[Supanova]

stupid system for a game to run off. they should create a small core program then use a Blizzard like system rather than streaming information directly with no assembly required at the user computer.