As far as I recall the map always eventually goes red. (within 6 minutes I think)

I've seen the client survive some heinous virtual memory swapping lag without forcing a disconnect.

And yes, chatting with people about a recent crash without relogging is a hoot.

ps. i never had problems like these before i've been in sl for 6 month now and everyday allmost.

Sometimes it's the increasing bouts of red bar packet loss we are seeing, and again, after maybe 20 seconds, that will reduce, and lock up stops.

Mostly though, there's no warning. Anims being local continue, sound continues of course, and chat and IM may work for a few lines, and sometimes just your replies show, but aren't sent.

I have found though, various warnings of impending crash, where you can exit and relog and avoid a crash. Certainly on Mac OS X, last couple of sub OS updates and last few versions of SL.

First is general flakiness and bad movement in a sim, which may indicate a sim crash or restart, which often crashes you too. Not to be confused with the bug where it looks like that, but when you relog you get the region relogging message, but the region isn't (everyone else is still there and no sim crash confirmed by others). In that case, it's obligatory to clear the cache, quit and restart SL, otherwise you get the wait 5 minutes message.

Second, if you get drop outs in an audio stream several times before the sound cuts off. You can get sound back by pressing play again, but usually means a crash is imminent within 30 seconds.

Thirdly, I keep mini-map open all the time. Up through 1.17, prim areas turned chocolate brown. If you see this early enough, you can relog and avoid a crash. From 1.18, it seens parts of it go rosy pink instead, but same effect. When this happens, you may get 5 minutes or more before a crash, but a crash is inevitable if you don't relog.

Sometimes of course, you have the minimap obscured, so yes, a pop up window saying connection lost would be nice, maybe waiting for a bit so you can not do anything and see if the connection re-establishes. In any case, the viewer should perform a graceful exit.

As an aside, I have an iMac on wireless in a very hot environment. In the summer, during the day, sometimes the graphics card gets too hot, and the comp will sleep. If I wake it, my useless D-Link external USB wireless key will lose connection. I then have about ten seconds to open up the system prefs and restablish the connection, in which case SL is usually fine. Any longer than 10-15 seconds between sleeping and reconnecting will crash the viewer. Since I am not doing anything during that time, I don't mind if it takes a few secs to redraw and jumps things around, better than a crash and relog, especially when things take 30 secs or longer to rez after a tp lol.

So we need a pop up if you are doing something and connection is lost, and a mechanism to prevent crash for longer than 15 ses if you are not doing anything when connection is lost, and in both cases the exit should be graceful if it must exit the viewer.

It is hard to tell what precedes the infinite flood of unknown circuit messages without scrolling through a long log file. But it seems to be correlated with spates of packet-received-out-of-order messages as well as bandwidth being throttled and expanded. And I also frequently sees messgwe complaining that anims and/or textures are being updated for avis or objects which are no longer there.

Although my computer is not really powerful enough to support two SL clients at once with acceptable performance... I did manage to get both OnRez and a standard client going about a week ago with me on one session and my alt on the other. One client (I forget which one) went into the infinite-unknown-circuit condition. My alt saw me disappear a few seconds after the infinite-unknown-circuit messages began scrolling past. Her client did not crash.

It seems to me if this was a line fault, both clients should have crashed. Although OnRez does experience this malfunction too, in this case it was the official Linden client which went down in flames.

Keyboard/mouse click processing slows down tremendously when this problem is going on.. as does the creation of new windows and dialog boxes. Other programs run a little faster if SL is minimized or even just hidden behind other windows. However, SL tries very hard to prevent the other programs from running.

As others have noted, streaming audio (usually) works just fine through all this. And I might also add that if I happen to be logged in when the sim crashes, I usually (about 95% of the time) get this error instead of the expected greyed-out screen.

Hardware Overview:

Machine Name: Mac mini
Machine Model: PowerMac10,1
CPU Type: PowerPC G4 (1.1)
Number Of CPUs: 1
CPU Speed: 1.42 GHz
L2 Cache (per CPU): 512 KB
Memory: 512 MB
Bus Speed: 167 MHz
Boot ROM Version: 4.8.9f1
Serial Number: YM5113VSRHU