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

What is your framerate? I tried SLI with 2 8800GTXs and found I dropped performance with SLI engaged no matter what rendering method I used. Seriously not worth the trouble or expense for SL although other applications may benefit. I would recommend turning SLI off for SL and see if your performance improves. Turning on "multithreading" (little x means it is on) gives me a few FPS more, nothing to write home about but it does help. Turning off the rendered clouds (old style clouds) will probably gain you more FPS.

As far as framerate in SL, it is designed to looks reasonably good at 15 FPS which is typical for the majority of computers made in the last few years. Once you get above 30 FPS you really can't see much difference in my opinion. You are limited by the fact the server doesn't update faster that 45 FPS so when my FPS runs up in the 70+ range consistently, I turn up AA filtering and other eye candy so it stays in the mid 30's. I'd rather have smooth rendering edges rather than super fast FPS but that is me.

Hi,

I’m new to SL, but I’ve run the client on several different hardware platforms and different OS’s, to find out if it’s something in my network, PC’s or OS configurations. And after banging my head against the wall for a couple of days I decided to run wireshark and take a look at the network traffic flow between the servers and my PC’s.

Note: most of my PC’s aren’t the typical SoHo box. Several are multiple core/processor and very heavy duty video cards. My home LAN is all gig (full duplex) and internet connection is a business broadband tier and I get adequate upload and download speeds.

After studying a couple of different packet captures, I noticed that the average packet coming from the sim server was approximately 350 bytes. Not much, when considering the max size…

I’ve seen problems like this before (in my grown up, rl job), but they were usually caused by crappy code in Oracle applications…

I haven't had time to do a thorough hop-by-hop performance analysis between my machine and the servers, but I am curious if there are other people seeing the same symptoms?

Peace,

2 things I have noticed over the past few months..

I'm in the UK, the Eastern USA servers showing high ping times and packet loss..

The Agent update time, has grown from 1-2sec to 40+ seconds at certain times of the day.

You are flying on the edge of no where with that setup for such a OpenGL graphics platform such as sl.
Mobile CPU rated at 1.66ghz, Mobile GC... laptops need to be somewhat special to run SL...

If you do leave, can I have your stuff? j/k.

... must be special then. It's a Dell Inspiron E1505

CPU: Intel Core 2 Series Processor (1662 MHz)
Memory: 2047 MB
OS Version: Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 3 (Build 2600)
Graphics Card Vendor: ATI Technologies Inc.
Graphics Card: ATI Mobility Radeon X1400 x86/SSE2
OpenGL Version: 2.0.5883 WinXP Release

^ Is what i roll with, and I have a pretty good overall experience with SL. (Outages notwithstanding however) I just go into my preferences and under the graphics tab, I turn certain stuff down. Draw distance is set to 88-96m. Maximum particle count is set at 768. Post process quality is at its lowest setting. Under the Mesh Detail, I have Objects set to high, Flexiprims to med. Trees to low, Avatars to med. Terrain to low. Lighting detail is set to nearby local lights. And terrain detail is low.

All the shader buttons are turned off, reflection detail is set to terrain and trees. Something important: under the hardware options, Uncheck the "Enable OpenGL Vertex buffer Objects. This was a real problem for me a while back.

I mainly use SL to roleplay in. And the real roleplay, not like slexing or anything. I can usually stay in a sim with 30+ main agents and 15-30 child agents for about 3 hours before ultimately crashing. I find the more text my chat history holds, the more likely I am to crash. I haven't had memory errors in a while, which is good (ty LL).

So, overall, I'd recommend to anyone using a laptop for SL. I just recently got a desktop (also Dell) and it's basically got all the same stuff, but with more memory, and a NVIDIA GeForce 6200. It also has a 21" monitor, so I am hoping it is going to be better for SL than the lappy.

I'm new (well, I try to) on SL. I download the little engine, I run it, and every single time I try to open it, in the middle of loading it says "logger crashed". It's frustrating. I know my PC meets the requirements. What could it be? Any idea? Thanks alot!

Not the right place to ask really, you may not get the response you need on this thread. Off the top of my head I'd say you likely have a driver issue, make sure you have the latest drivers for your video card and the rest of your computer as well.

Hi All, I am hoping someone can help me. I've scanned over the last 8 pages of threads and i haven't found an answer to my question - or if I have, there's been too much computer jargon to be able to understand it.

I used second life on my current computer, but at a different home address. I was on an ADSL connection. I was able to set the settings to show the graphics quite well - high graphics settings - and the bandwidth up to 1000. I never had any issues with lag at all.

I have moved to a new address (new house in real life), and am using second life on the same computer. I am also using the same kind of connection - an ADSL plan, the same type as before. However, second life is VERY laggy. I have tried everything i can think of and would really appreciate some help as I can go no further.

Here are the facts / questions you will need to know answers to in order to help me:

1. The lag is showing up as network lag. The network lag circle goes red and says the network connection is bad when I go view ---> lag meter.

2. I have uninstalled and reinstalled virus software, done a complete scan, and a complete defrag. I have also uninstalled, redownloaded and reinstalled second life. Finally, I tried making a new second life account (an alt). None of these made any difference.

3. When I change my bandwidth from 1000 to 250, and my graphics settings from high to low, there is SOME SMALL improvement in performance. Usually though the improvement is that the network circle goes green for all of 30 seconds, and then back to red. However before I was able to use SL with a bandwidth of 1000 and a graphics settings of high - and it worked great.

4. I have contacted my ISP and had them do all sorts of tests at their end. My ADSL connection is working fine, at about 27 KB/sec. Before it was closer to 30 KB/sec so it's only a little slower than my previous address. When I load other webpages, the speed is fine - it's just second life.

5. Although the ADSL plan I am on is the same KIND of plan, it IS a different account (same provider, different account). I don't know if setting up the new ADSL account changed anything in my windows settings that means SL runs slowly.

I have a friend who was investigating a similar problem a while ago with his SL. He said he found out that my computer will connect to SL through a server somewhere in the world. With his SL, even though it was supposed to connect in Australia (where we live), it was rerouting through America for some reason.

I don't know if this is the same problem I have.

Anyway, if anyone could PLEASE PLEASE help I would appreciate it SO much. I love SL and I am part of communities there that I gotta get back to! I've been trying to fix this for 2 - 3 weeks now and that's too long. So please help And thankyou.

By the way, I only have basic computer literacy, so please explain your answer in easy to understand terms. Thankyou!

All the servers reside in America and from my understanding right now there have been a few plans for place other servers world wide but that has not happened yet. So everytime you connect to SL as of now is connecting through an american server.

Ok, I want to make sure I am totally understanding this.

SL is a world, built by its residents, for it residents (to some variant of that) and is basically built on a building program with vending programs, chat and so on woven in. I understand there are hundreds of thousands of configurations of computers all over the world and to make one viewer that works on all of them is a huge undertaking, however, that all said... why is it that "my" client has the problem? I ran the lag meter (under the help menu) and it tells me that the client is running less than "10"fps! Less than "10"fps?

I find it amazing that this all happend within the last few months. I had just purchased a new PC running windows Vista to ugrade from my TiBook G4 867 (that worked, but not great), with faster processors, 3 gigs of ram and a faster more compatable video card and things were night and day back in May. A few updates later my almost year old computer runs sl like my 7 year old TiBook. Dont tell me it is my client! Something is wrong with SL. For christ sake, I am even running Fios Fiber Optic!

I understand the concept that the system is framed out of polygons underneath all the pretty textuers, but are the textures and environment what we came to SL for? To be able to build what our hearts desired (what was promoted) and do things that we were told we can and not worry about how many polygons are in my Flaming Red prim hair?

Other than cashing out and leaving SL, anyone have a suggestion?

I'm having trouble getting into second life, i have before, but it keeps telling me now every single time that i attempt to log-in i have been disconnected from the region i was in. I really need help. i haven't been banned or whatever for any reason.

Changing the video drivers you're using for your graphic card will often resolve issues.

Some very good graphic cards are known to perform worst than other cheaper cards. Generally, Nvidia cards work better than ATI ones with SL. If you're using an ATI card, consider the idea of using a Nvidia one (you could probably swap your ATI one with a good Nvidia one - or sell it). I will agree with you that this is disappointing...

If you properly choose the components in your computer, you can build one that runs SL very good and spend few hundreds US$. At the same time, you can buy a super-gaming computer and still have medium -or bad- performances.

I may be wrong, but generally speaking I think that money spent on light-speed internet connections, quad-core processors, super-high-end video cards won't improve your SL experience in a valuable way.

My experience with SL:
My main computer is:
2.6Ghz AMD dual core (throttled back to 1Ghz)
On board Nvidia video / audio / etc.
2G Ram
Ubuntu 8.4 (KDE desktop now)
Separate / and /home drives. (SL binarys are on the /home, swap is on the /)
802.11G connection

Standard load level running SL (Also running X. firefox and torrent downloads in the background) is about 1.0 to 1.5 (I get it up to 18 at other times most). Total CPU use is around 40% (about 80% on one cpu for SL, and the rest is on the other cpu). and the CPU temp can be kept below 40c.

On this machine I got ~15 fps before tweaking in a club with dancing. Pretty smooth but a lot of packet loss looking at the stats.
After tweaking the settings (Bandwidth setting, Render distance, and detail levels down to low, av rendering medium) I get ~20 fps with the dancing, and 30-40 in a conversational setting (all with streaming music.)

Looking at the Ctrl-Shift-1 window will tell you a lot about what is going on, in particular, look at the packet loss %. One suggestion is to watch the second band at the top of the screen, and set that speed as your bandwidth, maybe knock 10% off of it.

The "Lag-meter" is an easy way to isolate the error between Server/Client, but it will blame downloading when it has a long ping (Actually a bandwidth setting error) and when the fps is low (usually a rendering problem on the client, likely trying to do too much)

Your best results will be with a balance of lowering rendering requirements and setting the bandwidth appropriate to your actual connection.

If you are trying to render everything, you will be forever waiting for the downloads to complete. If your bandwidth setting is too high, you drop packets and it has to wait around for the next send, If it is too low, you won't get the data fast enough for the rendering machine.

The secret is balance. Do you need 30fps? (Probably not) Do you need 128meter rendering? (Not in a club) Do you need terrain detail? (Not really, we are here for the people right?) Do you need 1620x1050 real time rendering? (Maybe for screenshots)

We live with 680x400 for TV. I render the Avatars with medium resolution, it gives me something to complement them on. I turn local lighting on when it is dark in the club, off other times.

i am haveing trouble loggin why cant i log in i rebooted puter i clean caches ....I NEED HELP PLEASE ANY ONE THANK YOU ..;0(