Frequent Client Pauses

Second Life freeze for me too, but mostly on big places where there are tons of stuff to load.

here's my computer's main components:

-AMD Athlon 64 3700+ 2.2Ghz
-1Gb DDRAM400
-ATI Radeon X1300Pro 256mb
-On-board sound chip

i've set SL with 1gb of cache.

as i said, it mostly happen on huge detailled places with tons of stuff to load (it happened once at GURL 6 store, also a bit at the Hair Fair 2006, freezing for seconds, then i tried to turn my view somewhere else during that time and it ran fine then...until i turned my view again back where it "froze". Very annoying, i tell you...

it seem like there's some kind of bug in the rendering process, or maybe it's the objects or textures used in that store

Wow... very interesting.

I'm on a brand new Mac Pro, under MacOS X (totally different OS!) and am using an Nvidia GeForce 7300GT and I'm also having this problem, exactly as described!

I'm starting to wonder if this is a bug in the Nvidia graphics driver. Why? In the system console, I see this message:

Graphics chip error! Restarted.

According to various web searches, this means the GPU locked up and reset itself... GPU lockups are typically caused by faulty driver code.

On my Macbook Pro with a Radeon graphics chipset, this problem does not manifest at all. So I'm thinking it's a graphics driver specific problem. The question is:

- How to find out WHAT the problem is, and
- Getting NVidia/Apple (in my case) to fix it.

Any thoughts?

-Z

right now, on the latest versions, it's a lot less frequent, almost disappeared. It still freeze sometimes, but for maybe 1 or 2 seconds. It seems like they added something in the latest updates that "unfreeze" the client, like a "security measure". But i still think they need to improve on that problem.

The length of the pauses drops considerably for me when I turn off Rippling Water. Whenever I turn it on I get the symptoms described by the OP.