Too too too slow

free month till this is fixed. this is really bad. no fun at all. and a waste of money,RL and SL

I'm glad it's not just me.

I've been trying just to get off the newbie tutorial island. I finally signed up a few days ago and the game is just too damned slow to do anything. The worst of it is that the game itself seems to be running okay, but all interaction is severely lagged and half the time the system doesn't respond to mouse clicks, etc.

Worse still, while I have plenty of free space on my computer it's complaining that I don't have enough to save my new clothing designs -- even though it saves them in my inventory anyway -- and it's crashed 6 times now while I was trying to edit my pants. Strangely enough, the crash reporter also crashes (well, locks up).

I'm just glad I'm not alone. I may be on a Powerbook (512 meg of ram, 1.33 GHz processor, geForce2Go w/64meg of ram), but if it can run Blender and Maya PLE without any issue I figured SecondLife would be okay too. And hell, I've got a 50mbps connection. And I turned EVERYTHING I could off or as low as it would go.

Anyway, thanks for starting this thread. At least I know it's not my machine.

Things aren't usually this bad.

But new players - put your draw distance down to 64!

If you haven't already.

coco

I set my draw distance to 64, turned off EVERYTHING (even the nice shinies), and even set my model detail to low. Then I tried running in a window at 320x240.

No love man, no love. Hopefully today's patch will fix things.

Well after today's patch, 14 day 2 weeks after the update, I can for the FIRST TIME manage to half play the game. My posts in Hotline to LInden went completely UNANSWERED while all around it got Linden responses, even if vague. I GOT NO REPLY

FINALLY today I can see some of the world although still ONLY if i run with Local Lightin OFF no matter what the patch says, and even so things are slow and textures take up to 5 minutes to completely rezz in my sims. Still at least afetr TWO WEEKS I can finally see and walk and chat

ITS HARD TO SAY HOW DISGUSTED I AM BY THE TOTAL LACK OF LINDEN RESPONSE FROM SUPPORT, CONCIERGE OR FORUM POSTNGS.

oh well

Well, lets see what we know.

1. Adjusting video settings, other than known high-demand ones, does nothing. That takes the responsibility off the GPU.

2. People with all sorts of builds are having the same exact issue. That takes the responsibility off the CPU.

3. We know that LL's renderer forces the computer to calculate unseen portions of sims. Ex: say you're sitting on the ground in front of a cube. You can only see two sides. Most games would only graphically render those two sides, and your CPU would process the unseen wireframe and physics. SL doesn't do that. It forces a graphic render of all 6 sides, which it then drops into the HDD cache. It goes so far as to load the textures on all sides and store them as well. There's Lag#1: your 350-450mhz GPU is doing the work that your 2200mhz CPU is made to do, and storing it all in 64-256mb of VRAM instead of your 512-2GB system memory. The cache quickly fills, truncating on the back end and loading new textures to keep the limit of 1GB. That might be keeping your HDD in a constant read-write status, which would make Lag#2. So now your system is bottlenecked at two ends, and your CPU is getting next to nothing done. All that's left to do is what the southbridge on the motherboard does: run the network card. The executed code is all handled by the server, with load tossed to the client to reference certain customizations. Since the server isn't taking advantage of the client at all, that's Lag#3.

So lets have a gander at our lag possibilities and how to test them.

#1. Open up your video card advanced settings. Write down your temperatures idle, then run SL at EXTREMELY RELAXED GRAPHICS SETTINGS. Read "Turn your shit all the way down". Sit in a horrifically laggy area, then take a look at your temps after an hour. If they're WAY up, #1 is correct. However, dependant on cooling for your case and card, they may go up anyway. We're looking for temps in the 70c range.

#2. Watch your HDD light. If it's constantly accessing after all textures have loaded, #2 may be right. There's load monitors you can use to see what's going on on your HDD. I'd encourage using that; extremely high load confirms cache lag.

#3. CTRL-ALT-DEL and bring up your processor usage graph(s). Multi-core users, set affinity to only one core. Run SL with graphics at a nominal setting, and watch your load balance. You can combine this with #1 to confirm #1. If your CPU is barely doing anything, but your video card is working it's little etched ass off, #1 and #3 are both true. No matter what, an inactive CPU is a sign of #3.

Now one other thing has arisen with dually users. A couple people said they experienced a performance HIT on systems with more than one CPU by setting affinity. If this is the case....

I think SL got it backwards. I think our CPUs are handling what should be the smaller size, higher speed GPU load, and that our computers are ALL technically underspec because SL is using our GPU and its tiny, DDR2 or 3 memory to process large, multifaceted CPU tasks. Even SLI users will only have the load on one GPU if this is the case. The result would be that LL would have a network that seemed trouble-free, and be totally lost as to why every client that goes in is gimped to none other.

The more I think on it, the more I'm convinced this is a resource and packet allocation issue.

Edit: this is just a place to start the diagnosis. If my theory is correct, however, LL will never figure it out unless we diagnose it on the client end a little.

Snakekiss,

I'm sorry you didn't get the private message I sent last week. I have been out of the office over the last week and a half helping a family member, while being housebound in a remote spot with very limited internet access. I'm also sorry you got the impression that we do not care about the problems you've been having and have been ignoring you. I have tried to do the opposite from this island in the sea. Unfortunately, apparently, without success in your case. But I have contacted concierge and you should be hearing from Cyn Linden and get the assistance you've requested. We are listening and trying to help and we will continue to even after your immediate problem is solved. My best wishes and hope that you are running at full speed again very, very soon.