Monday, March 15, 2010

Loosing packages

When travelling, one allways wonders if the suitcase really went on the same plane. If the airliner manages to loose my bag, I'd say that they had a baggage loss of 100%. If I had two trunks and they lost one of them, the loss would be 50%. But it could never be more than 100%, could it? How could they loose more than they had? (OK, if it was a bank I guess it could be possible; for them it seems posible not only to loose ones savings, but a lot more:-) ).

Whenever you connect to a server on the internet, all communications between your PC and the server is gathered in "packets" of data that is transmitted together on the net. Each package may be routed on different paths, and the basic transport of the Internet does not guarantee that a package will ever reach its destination. Or if it does, the order of the packets received may be different than the order in which they are sent. (The internet does have protocols that can take care of both of these issues, but SL does not use them. That's why you sometimes see chat lines coming in the wrong order when you type.)

But SL does notice when it looses packages, and just like any airliner it faithfully reports this fact. If you ever get a high number of package loss in the statistics bar, you know you've got trouble:-) But I have never before seen SL reporting MORE packages than it was expecting. I guess that's what a package loss of 144.4% means.

Must be the London fog:-)

2 comments:

iliveisl said...

that is some serious loss! in fact, i am at a loss to how you can lose more than 100%

perhaps sl actually runs off of rl and was sucking some of your rl in to help the machine creak along?

hmm . . .

Cristopher Lefavre said...

LOL perhaps:-) I have to admit to have been "sucked into SL" a bit too much at times, but I never thought it was because I was being used as a Matrix-kind-battery to power my computer:-)