Second Life taking up 100% CPU

Just downloaded the new versin of the SL client and now everything on my system is very slow while SL is running -- and SL is taking up nearly 100% of the CPU nearly 100% of the time. And why is the SL process called "newview.exe"?? Could we name it something a little more meaningful please, so I don't think it is some sort of trojan when I see it eating up my CPU time?

SL uses all the available resources, which is not altogether a bad thing, so long as other tasks get some CPU time as well. It's my understanding that SL was designed with this in mind.

I don't know anything about it suddenly being really slow. What else is running on your system?

I disagree that it's not a bad thing. It should use the CPU it needs only. Otherwise it is running up my electric bill for no good reason and keeping other apps from running effeciently. Outlook is now completely unusuble while SL is running.

SL needs more CPU than you have available. If you run it, you will always be in the 99-100% CPU usage range.

The fact that you can't use Outlook at the same time is kind of puzzling, though. Is this the same of all apps? How much RAM do you have?

I assume that you're not just speaking of the latest client, but that you haven't noticed it before? Or does rolling back to 1.4.8 help?

I have a friend that has a problem with SL running very slowly since she downloaded the new version.

Well now I can't seem to reproduce the Outlook problem anymore, so I guess I'll have to back off of that complaint.

I have 512MB RAM, Windows 2K, AMD Athlon XP 2500+. perfmon shows memory usage at about 25%. SL itself doesn't seem sluggish, so it's hard for me to believe it really needs all the CPU it is using. I also have all of the performance settings under SL's Display options set for best performance (first five checkboxes are off, rendering is "Normal", Terrain is "None".

It's true I hadn't ever checked the CPU usage prior to this version, so I don't know if that's new or not. It was the problem with Outlook, which happened the first time I ran SL after upgrading, that prompted me to start looking into it.

Not sure how to roll back to an older version -- wouldn't I be forced to upgrade as soon as I try to connect?

The latest update is optional. I've just been ignoring it.

SL needs the 100% CPU. Unless you've got a really bad graphics card, the thing limiting your framerate is the CPU.

Yeah, SL is CPU bound, I play with two computers; an FX51, and a P4 2.8Ghz Laptop, both of them always take my system to a 1.0+ load average; but this is normal.

For windows users; just open your task manager, and lower the processes priority, (low / below-normal works well I hear.).

-Adam

When I first started SL all i knew was the on button.

Here is what I do...............

Go to Task manager, Processes Tab, highlight newview.exc, right click and lower to below normal.

Cheers, hope that helps.
Sky

Here's the deal.

Almost all real-time graphics engines use 100% of your Processor.

Why is that? Well, these programs try to give you the best frame rates possible, and the only way to do that is to not let Windows idle. I've writen a few programs that do real-time 3D graphics, and I've also run lots of video games and simulation engines.

They always suck up all the available CPU power. It doesn't matter whether it's a Pentium 133 or a Xeon 3GHz....

All this means is that Windows is not "relaxing". Instead of SL doing its thing and waiting for Windows to tell SL that there's something waiting to be done, SL is constantly re-drawing the screen with new data.

This is normal. This is expected. This is what every video game and real-time simulation does.

The best way around this is a multi-processor system or a hyper-threaded system. Even with simulator programs maxing out my system, I can still get acceptable performance out of other apps while SL is running, simply because SL is confined to a single processor.

Thanks Wraith, that's an excellent explanation!

Just curious, what OS are you running on your multi-proc system? I've been thinking about getting a dual-processor motherboard. Right now I'm running SL on a Win2K box.

I found a great program, that I love.

It is called Priority Master and it lets me control who gets what part of my cpu. I so I can give a program I wan to run a higher priority and stuff I don't need a lower one, so everything runs perfect.

So even if things like SL want to take 100% Cpu cycle, depending on what program I give priority too, then will run before SL...

So take a look and see if it does what you need, it does for me, I love it.

If I recall, Windows 2000 and XP Pro both limit you to 2 CPU's. XP knows about hyperthreading, so it will recognize two xeon processors as 2 physical CPU's and 4 virtual CPU's.

I'm not actually running a multi-CPU system at the moment. I just have a hyperthreaded Pentium IV running windows XP Pro. It works well enough for my needs. When I don't want to bog it down too much, I fire up the Athlon that's sitting right next to it. With 2 monitors on the main PC and a monitor on the secondary system, I got room for three desktops on my desktop.. it's pretty cool. I get a lot of amazed "wow"s when people see my setup.

I need a new KVM, though. Mine died when the cable got caught in the desk roller.

This is normal for games true, but it's not the only way. It's the lazy way. It's fully possible to make a realtime 3d application with limited cpu usage by using time and thread priority management. But frankly it's a bitch to code. So for tight budget projects like games, the 100% cpu solution is the norm.