Performance Tuning

Mr. and Mrs. Linden,
Is there any chance you can provide some performance tweaking tips for all of us players? I've noticed as of the last few patches, my performance in game is going down the drain. While I can blame this upon myself, I'm not aware of anything that i've done to cause it. So perhaps you can point out a few areas which are easy to tweak to help SL.

Basically, as of about a month ago my performance in SL was very nice, 20-30fps consistent, all is happy, all is well.

Gradually, my performance has fallen, and is now just horrid. I'm getting 9-10fps on average, even in fairly empty areas. I'm absolutely befuddled, as i've tried numerous things to improve performance, including turning options off, and it just doesn't seem to go up, even in horrible quality states.

System Specs:

3.06ghz P4, 533mhz FSB w/ HT
1GB of PC3200 DDR
ATA/133 HD, single no raiding, decent caching setup
nVidia GeForce FX 5600 w/ 256mb of RAM

Can go into more details if it's helpful, however the one thing I have noticed is this:

Sim FPS used to be around the 500-600 mark.

I've never seen it over 45 lately. Usually it's down in the 20s or lower, in all sims. Is this normal?

Time dilation is also usually hovering around 0.85, rather than 1.0, also a bad sign?

As I write this in Teal, I have all graphics options off, the nVidia drivers in "performance" mode rather than quality, no AA, no Anistropic, and i'm getting 9.9fps, Sim FPS 33, Physics FPS 37.3, Time Dilation 0.83, Agent Updates/sec 8.1, Packets out 152pps, Packets In 133pps, and Sim CPU at 1.00 steady.

Help? I can't imagine my system is *this* slow.

Grr, I think I've found this is also attributed to the memory leaks. As memory usage goes up, frame rates go way way down, until i'm left with a 1+GB resident newview.exe process and 4fps.

Yay for being able to restart and fixing it though O_o

si, what sort of memory usage are you seeing right now? Using the default settings, we don't have any known major memory leaks.

Also, what display options are you running right now? Local lighting and shadows are fairly buggy right now (which is why they're off by default), and could certainly result in some of the performance issues that you're seeing...

- Doug

newview.exe when freshly started uses about 280MB resident, after 2-3 hours it's anywhere from 850MB to 1.2GB resident. I don't have shadows on, and I think i'll turn local lighting off.

I have had the newview.exe process go as high now as 1.6GB resident at peak, after ~4 1/2 hours of running. It leaks fast, you'd think it were an odometer for how many feet your av has travelled in game if you watch it's memory usage.

As far as graphics options, I use a draw distance of 256m, all options except anistropic filtering, glows around lights, and shadows are on. I run Windowed mode maximized at 1280x1024.

Did more testing, indeed still a signifigant memory leak, though setting graphics options back to default helped quite a bit.

After setting graphics options back to default and playing for ~3 hours I was only at 780MB resident. This, howevre, is still quite a jump from the ~270MB it allocates at startup.

What kind of memory consumption do you expect to see? And is there any more information I can provide for you?

si, we've identified and are chasing down a single large memory leak somewhere in the Windows API code (go figure). We can reliably reproduce it, and it's big enough that it'll eat up hundreds of megabytes over a long session. Hopefully we'll get this fixed soon but for the time being you'll just have to relog when things get choppy.

The resources patch that went in with 1.0.8 made an amazing difference all around. SL even uses almost 1/2 of what it used to at startup? Seems like it fixed more than just a leak. Anyhow, the performance change is night and day, it feels like I just went from a 486 to a P4.