What causes Lag?

I've noticed that my sim seems a lot slower lately and I wonder what things cause a sim to lag and slow down?

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#6

Here's a quick executive summary:

1. Client side lag. Your poor system is being asked to do too much.
   
2. Server side lag. The poor box that is handling the sim is being asked to do too much. Possibly also backlogged requests at the asset server.
   
3. Network lag. One of the network links between you and the SL server farm is being asked to do too much.
   

The first cause affects just you. The second affects everyone in the same sim, or possibly on the whole grid, depending on the exact kind of overload involved. The third cause may affect just you, or any number of other residents whose network traffic is passing through that portion of the public internet, leaving others (whose traffic takes a different path) unscathed.

There are quite a number of different factors that contribute to each cause.

I was downed with 'type 3' lag last night, as were quite a few other people. Long freezes in overall response. Virtually unusable. Probably more than half the population weren't suffering from it, of course. Their network traffic didn't include the problem portion. Only a third of the people in that particular sim were suffering, and the rest were just fine.

Golly willickers... I HAD THAT!!!


I kept asking a people who didn't have the problem. My download rates were cut to like 100 kbps, I had high pingsim things, and more. What was going on?

It was some chokage on a transit link. Something not at my ISP, nor at LL's network either. Just something in between. Might have been a flaky router, or someone doing some heavy maintenance somewhere.

The internet has it's own 'weather', storms of packets applying load here, then there. Not very predictable and operating under rules that most of us just don't understand, or do understand but cannot predict the effects of (emergent complexity).

You could mention the sim name in case anyone wants to see if they can discern a cause on site for themselves.

The specific post Misnomer Jones referred to was by Lee Linden and bears repeating with with a link to that specific post instead of to the start of the thread: Lee Linden Lag Summary

There are people who insist in a most unpleasant manner that "lag" can only mean network lag and that the term cannot properly used for anything but network lag. These people seem unable to grasp that the word lag was around before electronics existed. "Lag" and its variants have uses related to slowness, delay, the amount of delay, and have for hundreds of years.

To say the word has no meaning at all just because it is used unclearly in SL, as Lee Linden says in that post, is somewhat of an overstatement.

Absolutely! There are many things that cause or contribute to lag, often in combination.

I do..




















But seriously most of the time its pose balls with show/hide in them, light prims, twisty small torii or other very active scripts.. In my experience anyway..