Is your SL viewer using twice the amount of CPU %? GreenLife/Rainbow

The Greenlife viewer, and the Rainbow viewer (Cool viewer using SL's latest standard viewer interface) are both using double the amount of processing power they usually use.

Instead of my CPU being at 25% it is often at 48% with GreenLife and Rainbow in use.

Is this happening with anyone else? Why is it happening?

Before i upgraded to a quad core, SL ran at 50% using those viewers NORMALLY, but often at twice the CPU usage putting it at 100%. I thought this would stop with a fresh install of a new Windows OS (Windows 7, 64bit), but it has not.

Any ideas?

Bueller?

Bueller??

Have you enabled shadows?
.

Those special buggy shadows?

Nope, don't even know how.

My SL ~never~ crashes, and from what i read, Shadows would start it doing so.

Testing both viewers while standing at Bare Rose looking at the men's clothing: 13%

Green Emerald uses about 100K less Ram.

CPU Core temps according to PcWizard 2008: 32.5C

XP 32 bit.

Other active apps: realplayer playing Budgie's Homicidal Suicidal

Firefox: 4 browsers with a total of 12 tabs active

As farcas i know, Sl is a single CPU core application. And with "use multiple threads" enabled, it branches off some task to a second CPU core, if available. so if you got a 2 core CPU, yous see a load of around 50% and slightly more, if a thread uses the second core.
But heres the catch. As soon as you go and look for how much CPU power SL uses, SL becomes a background task, and other programs and tasks that were in the background before, could get a higher priority than SL itself. The result is, that it looks like SL is using less CPU power than it actually would if it would be the foreground task, like it usually is when its running. And those alternative SL clients might have a lower priority to begin with, so more of the other programs and tasks get considered to be more important han the SL client. The result is, you see even less CPU power being used by those SL clients.
Generally SL clients are designed to use as much CPU power as they can on one core. If they dont that doesnt mean "your CPU is so powerful, the SL client cant even max it out" but, SL just doesnt run as fast as it could (this might change with a forced speed limitation of the SL client that we might see in the future, but thats another story ^^;).

So, what this all means is, you cant really compare CPU loads ^^; there are too many variables and in the end you'll just use one core fully anyways (plus a little bit extra), if everything works right.

-Asriazh

Ok, all that confuses me.

This is what i know (I have a q9550 quad core):

- Standard SL client = CPU use @ 23-25% on my

- GreenLife SL client = CPU use @ 46-48%

- Rainbow Viewer = CPU use @ 46-52%
----------------

This happens even when running nothing else in the background. My machine is exclusively for Second Life, so i keep what i install on it to a minimum since LL said many years ago that other applications can have an effect on your SL crashing experience (and i never crash).

I am on a fresh Windows 7, 64bit install, and when i was running Vista 32 home premium on a different CPU and RAM configuration, i still had the problem.

This could mean that those clients are able to use more than one core.

Contact me on skype (my ID is seb21051) during any saturday evening and we can discuss and compare, and possibly look at your configuration. Those CPU Utilization numbers do look somewhat high, as do your temps, as you explained them in your other recent post.

Other members are of course also welcome to join in, skype conferencing works quite well.

I've noticed that my dual-core system now shows nearly 100% CPU usage when Snowglobe has focus. It used to be 50% or all of one core..

Various changes in the SL code have moved in the direction of more multithreading, and thus better utilization of multiple cores. The first user-accessible one is the Advanced/Rendering/Use Multiple Threads checkbox. If that is enabled the viewer spawns texture decompression as a separate thread, and you can see your CPU utilization increase significantly if you have a system with two or more CPU cores.

Snowglobe is a more radical move toward multithreading; it has a new code base that completely redoes the downloading of textures. (That's why it's sometimes radically faster at texture rendering even though HTTP downloading isn't actually being used yet; we will see an additional boost once the servers support that.) There is a thorough (and rather geeky) explanation at http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/HTTP_Texture

I can second this, I have started to use Snowglobe and with my Intel E8500 it leans against 24% CPU load but never goes above it - even on maingrid in the middle of a party.

I will add though, that I have 4gb ram and a gtx280oc gfxcard and runs everything on max settings (except particles, only at 204.

I found a way to get Cool Viewer to perform just like LL's client. (^_^)



=^-^=

SL is *supposed* to use all the CPU time it can get. The faster it finishes a cycle, the sooner it begins the next. As mentioned above, it used to be mostly single-threaded, so would consume one core almost completely. Evidently it now is more multithreaded, utilizing more cores than before. This is a *good* thing, giving you smoother operation with more features enabled (or bigger draw distance, etc).

Set the graph to display individual cores, and I bet you'll see that two cores are running nearly full tilt, and the others are barely running. Well, depending on how it's threaded -- you might see one full-tilt and the others at various levels.

I'm confused, because what you say contradicts what Shirley says. More multithreading would cause your CPU usage to go up (over 25%), which would deliver smoother operation.

So you're all the people on all the windows you showed us? ^-^; Talk about split personality o-o;; ...Just jestin' ^^;;;

- Asriazh

P.S.:
Another reason for the 3rd party viewers behaviour might be, that they have sse2 enabled (for whatever reason its off and you cant switch it on with the regular LL viewers), which allows the CPU to work more efficiently, maybe even lets the viewer use more than one CPU core.

Third party viewers may be using the openjpg JPEG decoder instead of the better KDU. Look at the about Second Life window to see which one is being used. Rainbow viewer has instructions for replacing it.

If you have a 4 core box and you do not have SL in multithreaded mode then it will not be able to use more than one core. It will consume all of that core and so your CPU monitor will report 25% usage. If you're on windows hit Ctrl-Shift-Escape to open Windows Task Manager and go to Performance tab to see this.

If you enable multithreading, which you can do in any viewer from the last 6 months at least via the Advanced menu then it will split it's usage over all the cores in whatever fashion it can.

Now, maybe you want SL to be throttled to only one core and you don't mind it being sluggish and whatever other problems this causes. Normally people would want SL to use whatever resources are available. After all, you have paid for a 4 core CPU why leave three of them doing nothing all the time?

-- cool, thanks for the shortcut! Never knew that one. I'm surprised I never hit it by accident.

What I meant was merely that its better at multithreading - I wouldnt call mass cpu load any smoother, as it would deny anything else to run on the machine.

In any case, I quoted him/her because the more effective multithreading usage, eventually my machine is just better at that

Generally, this is not true. It's true of ill-behaved programs only. Yes, SL is often ill-behaved, but generally only when it's b0rked.

Idle time does nothing. Doing something useful instead is, well, useful. Of course, if your frame rate is already well over 30, computing more frames wouldn't be very useful, and it does consume more power.