SecondLife's list of DOs & DON'Ts reguarding 'lag'

I've always been wondering if there is some compatibility issue with SL and a common hardware type, brand, or feature that hasent been worked out yet.

I notice a lot of computer that meet even the recommended requirements and still have the terrible time with lag.

I have a funny feeling we need to find a common denominator of all the slow people. It could be something random like 3DNOW (as an example) and the bad piece of code.


This is the general spec of my PC. I'll get more detail later to add. But as an example of a PC that should not be getting 5-15fps.

AMD Duron 1.8Ghz <--(Probably the culprit in this case - Old Socket A which has a max of 266FSB *vomits*)
1.2 GB Ram
128 MB Geforce FX 5200 GFX Card
Ubuntu Linux

You are probably right about your processor, Durons are crippled full blow processors, produced mainly to the corporate machines, lower onchip and secondary caches etc.. Your FSB is 'playable' but you are never going to compete with those with much higher speed data pathways to the memory and PCI slots.
The graphics card is also considered quite low, but indicative of the sort of FPS you are getting unless you turn off all the eyecandy and run the client in a basic mode.
You don't mention your HD, this is another important part of the system as it stores its cache on there. Keeping it defragmented regularly helps even with a relatively slow system.
Connection speeds and quality/stability of that connection, all combined with your system are relevant. As very few systems are identical in combinations of MB, Ram, GC, HD, FSB, CPU, connection.. when a large proportion of users are experiencing similar problems, the finger would point towards what is a common source, LL.
Memory leaks effect some greater than others. I run with 2gb 533mhz matched pair RAM. If I do exactly the same things as someone with lower ram specs, I can expect to suffer less, in general.

Hi Nicholaz, you have done some excellent work fixing the memory leaks, and with the post on your blog.... I would say you deserve a LL medal, but I don't want to devalue your work LOL.. They should at least pay you in real money for your efforts.

I looked in detail your blog and agree with most of what you say. I did make a detailed list of all the things the average user should do to improve performance (leaks aside), much along the same lines, earlier in this thread.

The one part I would advise anyone to do, is set their network bandwidth (real speed not quoted, which can be checked) to 2/3rds of that actual speed (subject to reaching the maximum 1500kbps allowed), as this will allow the streams of music and video (if required), and of course the future voice 'feature' to use some of the available bandwidth, as this is seperate to that used directly by SL's client.
If the user has say a T1 connection (1.5mb) actual connection speed, then set the network bandwidth to 1000kbps, which is more than enough to run SL, given that the client overrides this setting when needed, but will leave enough for the system DL streams for other features.
Hope that helps some.

ADDED[ Turn OS updates and Virus updates etc to manual, as auto updates kick in and steal bandwidth, just when you don't want them to]

Thanks

They didn't offer me any yet, and actually I'm not even sure if I would take it ... I like my independence



The idea about leaving some room for audio streams makes sense, but I saw in the sl logs that if the viewer encounters packet loss and stuff it will throttle down the bandwidth anyway, so I didn't bother with that detail.


Nick

It is true the client does throttle the bandwidth, but at best it's slow to respond and can casue stalling of the client, when the surge of the stream tries to take bandwidth from the client.

Having read most of this thread, I think it would be a nice feature to have different "setting sets" that could be changend with a hotkey instead changing 10 single settings when I stop building/scripting and want to relax in an overloaded club or a life concert.

Heh, I asked for this in 2004. Maybe one of the Open Source community can add something like that to the viewer.

Just upgrades my CPU to a Athlon XP 2500+ which I overclocked for a little bit as a test to 3200+. Whats the ONLY program that didn't seem to improve at all...? Thats right! The Secondlife Viewer! lol 9FPS!

Oh well.

Is it better to use the linden trees (with the swaying) than to use trees drawn with transparencies and non-flexible prims?

Is there a better place to ask this question?

The Linden trees would be significantly better compared with a highly detailed textured plant you buy but a simple, low rez textured one with just a couple of prims would probably be better. It depends, most bought plant use large textures on numerous prims which can be a lot worse than a swaying linden tree.

Its great that you now have a spanking new CPU, however overclocking that, will do little for your fps, as most of the work is handled by the CG CPU/Ram buffers. FSB speeds, what are they? etc.. updating a single element will show little gain, if it shifts the bottle neck else where. Are you running a IDE master HD with a CDRom as a slave on the same channel?, how much system ram and what speed? What is the GC you use? etc.....

the differance between 30 people standing and 30 people sitting in one area is quite a bit.

a person becomes a part of the object it sits on(saves on physics calcs)
less network traffic
easier for the client to handle.

All I know is I can't actually access the place and do anything. I'm not technical, don't understand all the terms used... I just want to wander in and have a giggle...

I can't so I want to know why I can't so perhaps I can adjust whatever I need to so I can get in and move without stopping and looking like a woman lol

I got severel kinds of lag on different systems maybe here someone knows a answere to them.

1. Sometimes it happens that the inventory is fetching the parts in it normaly that runs fast but in that case it runs total slow maybe 5 items in a couple of seconds or less and the framerates go down to 0,5 - 3fps until it finished fetching all the stuff. It even doesn't matter if i close the inventory it fetches in the background and i can wait till its done. What causes this?? It seems to be more often in the last time.
2. A lag wich has something to do with the cache settings. I got a lag on different systems wich is the most anoying one, that happens when the cache is full or something SL does to the cache. In that time the harddisc is working hard and i got the sandclock in SL nothing works till its done. The duration the harddisc works and i got that sandclock depens on the cache setting. if i turn it to 1000mb that time is much longer then when i turn it to 10mb. But on the other hand if i turn it to 10mb it will f.e. do that 10 times in an hour and on 1000mb only 1 time. So it has something todo with the cache. What did i make wrong?
3. Suddenly the sandclock appears and the secondlife window says that it doesn't react. Then i have to wait some seconds to minutes till it starts working again.

On all 3 lags it doesn't make any difference wether i adjust all grafic settings to maximum or to minimum the lags are there without any difference. Or i don't see the difference i don't know.

I can run SL in a window and pan around or render stuff with my nVidia card, but my system chokes when I bring up a browser window to look up something about LSL. I suspect I don't have enough RAM. This system is several years old now and it's probably time to upgrade. It's not 2005 any more.

So here's my question.

What kind of system do you need to have going forward for 2008 to eliminate client-side lag problems? How fast a CPU? Do you need dual core? How much RAM, 2GB? 3? Obviously you need a high-end graphics card. How much does the hard drive play into it, and what should you look for?

What about the OS? I can't stand VISTA. Can I get away with XP? Ubuntu?

This system will have to last me a couple good years before I can buy a new one, so I need to take that into account too.

Advice greatly appreciated.

Erik,



I suspect you'll get a ton of different answers here, but let me just state what I have.

Core2Duo 2.1GHz with 2GB Ram. This is sufficient to run SL and the compiler/debugger (which are both quite memory hungry). This should give you a great experience and today's computers, adding more RAM later is not a problem at all.

My video board is a NVIDIA 7600GS. It's well equipped for the job, quite inexpensive (I have the 512MB version). Video boards can also easily be upgraded later (in two years, getting a board that today costs $500 will be around $150)

I'm running it on XP which is tried and trusted and works well. Upgrading or crossgrading later is also no problem, and if you want to try Linux, you can just install Ubuntu on a 2nd partition and switch between the two.

Depending on what you have now, upgrading to 1GB or 2GB plus a NVIDIA 7600GS might even give you a way better SL experience for US$120 without having to buy a new computer.


Nick

Future proofing a computer is nearly impossible. You can, however, make sure you get a computer that does what you need it to do and will do it for years to come. Second Life is in a state of flux right now as far as what you will need to get the full experience for years to come. When and if they update the avatar mesh there is a distinct possibility that what low end computers work today likely won't when that happens. If you are able to spend the money, get the best you can afford.

Minimum for a good experience in SL is at least a gig of memory, I'd recommend going ahead and getting a 2 gig set now rather than later as they need to be a matched set to work best. I also recommend getting an Intel Quad core 6600 as their prices have dropped significantly and they are powerhouse CPUs. I can easily have 5 instances of SL open at the same time and still have reasonable frame rates. Important! Get a quality motherboard, don't skimp.

Video card is the make or break part of a SL system. SL is happiest with an Nvidia video card and you will need a 7600 or better for a reasonable experience but if you can afford an 8800gt or even a 8800gtx, the difference is awe inspiring in Windlight. The 8600 is a good compromise between cost and performance.

Hard drive isn't that big a factor, a SATA II is plenty fast enough if your motherboard accepts it. It will make your computer perform snappier and load faster. Windows XP SP-2 is the OS of choice for SL as it offers the most functionality currently. Ubuntu and other shades of Linux suffers from low end driver support so even though SL may work reasonably well, Nvidia drivers are very basic so SL will run very basically as well. Although you may have a $500 video card, it will only be able to run like a $100 video card. Macs suffer from a lack of video card selection and tend to be several years lagging. Right now you can only order an Mac Pro with an Nvidia 7300, ATI 1900xt or a workstation card that isn't recommended for SL. The 7300 is a suck card and isn't even good for a fishing weight, the ATI1900XT was high end 3 years ago and is ATI (ATI's have a long history of problems with SL although less in recent years) The Imacs come with ATI 2600XT Pro which is about the same as an Nvidia 8600 which is good for SL.

That's what I have:

-Dual core 3.2 downclocked to 2.6.
-2GB dual channel DDR2 at 667 Mhz.
-A "you can plug every type of device here" Asus motherboard.
-4 years old IDE UDMA 80 GB Hard disk.
-KUbuntu 7.10 with kde 3.5.8.
-An old and cheap 128mb nVidia Fx 4500 AGP.
-3000/300 cable conection, with a very low latency (I usually have very low ping in online games)

I'm usually in second life with 3 - 4 avatars at same time (one for fun, the others for camp) runing every avatar in separate users. I have the usual app runing in the background, mail, msn, music player, video player sometimes and often Gimp (similar to Photoshop), Qavimator or Wings 3D.

Sl runs fine with a 128 draw distance, I only set up lower when I go to shop or live music events with lot of people. My CPU ussage is usually at 50%, rarely bigger, and now, with 3 avatars, gimp, firefox, amarok etc, I'm using 1.5 gb of ram and 300 mb of virtual memory.

I rarely crash, rarely have lag, and I can see how my friends, with 300€ graphics cards, much more expensive hardware and faster adsl conections, hangs, crash, lag and, anytime, have worse FPS.

What I noticed than downgrade dramatically the perfomance is:

-The abuse of particles: a moderated use of particles (jewerly blinks, the smoke of a cigarr) doesn't impact my perfomance, but rain, smog and whide area high intensity particle efects slows down my system to 1-2 fps.
-The big amount of dancing people in draw distance, with multiprims clothing and hair.
-The combination of high contrast big size texture, big amount of prims and rich light efects (there is a hair shop with a gotic ambient where i have to set the light efects to "only sun and moon" or I can hardly move, but once changed I have no lag).
-The abuse of megaprims... but i'm not completly sure of this.
-Microsoft Windows (TM).

What i don't have:

-Spyware
-Adware
-Virus
-Trojans
-Backdoors
-Software to remove Spyware
-Softwre to remove Adware
-Software to remove Trojans
-Software to remove Backdoors
-Firewall (if i don't want a port open, just don't open)
-All this app, the windows itself, and other common stuff (msn, office, etc) trying to update, check if your licence is up to date, download ads, send spam, telling you the wonders of to have a big penis, etc.
-Disk fragmentation (it's an exclusive Microsoft problem, the rest of the operating systems solved in the 70' of the last century).
-A file system that is a "we need something to include in the new version", mainly a patch of a hack of provisional evolution of a filesystem than "we buy because we dont know how to make one" trying to manage 1 GB of textures in a fragmented file system.
-A memory management that his primary objective is to show you a 98% free resources when click on about,

I hate this.
I bought a brand new computer. Intel 1.66 Ghz centrino coreduo processor, 3G Ram Nvidia 8600M GS with 256MB one of the latest model from Acer but unfortunately with Vista. I have all latest drivers for my equipment. I keep crashing 3 to 4 times/day.

A don't appreciate my system at all and thinking of going back to ActiveWorlds wich is more stable and less expensive. I know Vista doesn't help me but machines come with it now. it's a fact of life. I keep sending reports every time I crash but nothing can be done. I just bought a small world. i'm thinkng of giving it away and leave! SL never even gave me any sign of life.

SL will crash even the best computers on occasion. Unfortunately, I wish I could tell you a new computer would mean a better computer but a 1.66 Centrino falls below what is recommended to use with Vista and SL. You might try turning off all the visual goodies by setting setting visuals to Best Performance (Control Panel -> Performance Information and Tools then on the right side select Adjust Visual Effects -> Adjust for Best Performance)

You can also try running SL in XP Compatibility Mode (Right click Second Life Icon -> Properties -> Compatibility -> Run this program in compatibility mode for Windows XP (Service Pack 2)

Ello!
I am a *devoted* Second Life player (every IT guy's nightmare programme) and I am getting my drive rebuilt (woot woot) and idk what kind of drivers I should get, what recommended, and what I can do to improve my game preformance on my system. Did I mention I'm pulling this all off on a laptop????

Model: Acer Aspire 3680
CPU: Intel Core 2 Series Processor (1600 MHz)
Memory: 503 MB
OS Version: Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2 (Build 2600)
Graphics Card Vendor: Intel
Graphics Card: Intel 945GM
Browser: Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.14
Current Game Client(s):
Second Life Release Canidate 1:20:4 (currently unused...i've got the fact it's out-of-date noted)
realXtend v0.2 (the one i *actually* use...I like Open Source Technology LOL.....also slightly outdated)

Reading all of this with extreme interest I am going to try a few things to see if it improves my evening performance inworld. I have no issues whatsoever during the day but between the hours of 20:30 and 22:00 (UK), I grind to a halt. I can get inworld but I am either a cloud with an inventory and friend's list or I am ruth(yes really;p) with a 'waiting' friend's list, no inventory (albeit I try to chase it in by typing random letters into its search bar) and I cannot change anything as my shape is still loading.

I am running what I believe to be a good system and had no issues like this until the recent upgrade (may be a coincidence). I try with both the main client and the release candidate. I've also performed all the usuals such as draw distance, using quiet areas to load etc.
My laptop:
Rock Xtreme SLPro
AMD Turion64 X 2 Mobile
2.01 GHz, 2.00 GB RAM
2 X Nvidia Geforce Go 7950 GTX

Any other help gratefully accepted

I am running a 64 bit Vista box with 2 x 8800GT cards and an Agiea, however it is spelled, and dyslexic and can't tell, PhysX card. The 8800s are in SLI mode, Force alternate frame rendering 1. I run SL fairly well and the only crashes I have are when I quit after a long session (6+ hours) and select to clear the cache before I quit. That crash is not until I have selected quit and clicked yes in the confirmation pop-up. When I start again it clears the cache too but somehow the quit is seen as a crash by Vista.

I still take a while to rez in a newly entered area and if I travel at the speed of a motorcycle I outrun my rendering and get really choppy. I am curious about other people's experiences with SLI settings and the advanced graphics settings in SL. I am particularly curious about the render sub menu ans the toggle items such as use multiple threads. Stupid question to wrap this up, are the toggle settings on or off with an X next to them?

Actually one last thing, perhaps already stated in the thread but too many posts a couple years old. The human eye perceives greater than 24 fps, 24 was the frame rate set on motion pictures that the human eye did not see as choppy. The eye has gotten faster over a short time in terms of evolution. A CRT monitor at 60 Hz has a refresh rate close to 32 fps but the human eye can now see the gaps in the CRT frame rate and it appears to flicker, 72 Hz no longer seems to flicker but to a very few people. LCD monitors can run at 60 Hz and do not appear to flicker but that is because of a constant back light instead of phosphor scanning created light. The light and color are separate functions in an LCD whereas in a CRT they are both a function of the phosphor scan.