Several Questions

Ok. I have lots of questions and might check back in a week or 5 to find if anyone has the answers



1. Why is SL still not multi core supported? People often say yes it is.. But I go in and check manually what all my cores are doing and it seems to me its all running on one processor instead of the 4 I have.


2. Who decided that it would be a good idea to run each sim on its own server instead of dedicating servers to actual user #'s... It is my understanding that SL has its server architecture to where each sim has its own server (or rather each region) and so far has about 2300 servers... Yet God forbid you log on during Sunday between 10am and 8pm SLT...


3. Is the previous post the reason for sometimes the unbearable lag. I mean Good god.. I know some people that have wireless connections lag badly.. Im directly connected to a cable modem and I get 10 Mbps (yes BIG M) down... and .7 Mbps up... however there are times i can barely move..


My specs

9850 Black x4 2.5Ghz
Nvidia 1 GB 128bit 9500 GT (could probably stand to be upgraded to crossfire ATI 5 series but what would be the point I doubt SL supports 4x crossfire [yes i have 4 pcie x16 slots])


It seems to me these specs should run SL with no problems.. and that the problem really isnt my hard ware but their servers.. I have seen sims that literally have 1 traffic per month.. you are telling me that has a dedicated server?! I think that LL should reconsider their server architecture.. It might be good for profits but the gaming experience is no fun when you cant move.. Any suggestions or comments?

It's not a game. Don't expect a gaming experience. (^_^)y

The work load seems pretty evenly divided over all four of my cores. If you really want to nitpick, CPU0 is a little high, CPU1 is a little low, and CPU's 2 and 3 are just about dead even in the middle. But on average, they're each at roughly 25% of the full work load.

If things are different on your system, there could be any number of reasons. But the application itself does support multiple cores, and has for the past several years.




You're speaking as if the sim servers are the only servers involved. That's simply not true. Yes, each full region is run by an individual server, or at least by one core on a multi-core server, but that's hardly all there is to it. There are humongous clusters of servers, each of which are collectively responsible for various functions of the grid as a whole. For example, the login server cluster is responsible for logging people in and out. The asset server cluster is responsible for delivering assets (inventory, objects, etc.) to avatars and to sims. The presence server cluster is what notifies you of the online/offline status of your friends. Etc., etc., etc. The sizes of these clusters are continually expanded as the SL population grows.

As for that number 2300, I'm not sure where you got that. There are currently around 30,000 regions in SL. Approximately 2/3 of those are full regions (1 per core), and almost all of the remaining third are homesteads (3 per core). Last I read, openspaces (4 per core) comprise only 0.7% of the grid, so they're not really statistically significant. If my math is right, we're looking at something on the order of 23,000 server cores to run all the land on the grid. Divide that by 4 cores per server, and we're probably talking around 6000 actual machines, almost 3 times the number you cited. And that's just for the land. I have no idea how many machines are responsible for all the other things the grid does besides just simulate land.


All that said, you're certainly right to be frustrated that the grid is often brought to its knees by high concurrency. But the fact that each region is run by a dedicated server core has absolutely nothing to do with that. Let's make sure we're complaining about the right things.




There are lots of different forms of "lag". As SL users, we tend to define anything that slows us down as "lag", but all we're really talking about is a symptom, not a cause. There are any number of causes.

Here are just a few common ones, but there are infinitely more. It's a chaotic system.

The single biggest reason SL runs as slowly as it does is the fact that all the assets in it are user-created. Most SL users, bless their hearts, have absolutely no idea what the hell they're doing. They make boneheaded decisions all the time, like putting a 1024x1024 texture on a little 2-inch object that nobody's ever going to zoom in on, or covering their avatar in facelights and hoochie hair and sparkly blingy attachments of all sorts, or building a giant tree out of hundreds of pillow-shaped sculpties for a poly count numbered in the millions. These things are all extremely taxing on your computer's rendering capability.

Here's an interesting statistic to consider. The average mall in SL has several gigabytes worth of textures on display. Yet the average video card can only process a few hundred megabytes at a time. Ever wonder why your FPS drops like a stone when you teleport to a mall? Now you know.

Games don't suffer from this problem. You buy a game, and you're paying for professionally developed content, all of which has been painstakingly optimized for maximum performance. Textures are kept small and repetitive, geometry is kept light and efficient. Nothing is wasted in games, so they run like lightning.

If lag really bothers you as much as it seems to, I'd encourage you to educate yourself to the point where you're not a contributor to the problem. Learn how to make small textures that look just as good as, or better than, large ones. Start thinking in terms of poly counts instead of just prim counts when you build. Make sure your avatar isn't a bling-tard. If you're not doing all of those things, you' have absolutely no right to complain about lag.


Everything I mentioned in the last few paragraphs was with regard to client-side lag. But as I said, there are many other forms.

Server-side lag is often caused by users' poor decision making as well. A few badly written scripts, abuse of the physics engine, or just simply trying to do too much with too many avatars, can bring a sim to its knees very quickly.

Then there's network lag, which is likely what you've noticed when there's high concurrency. When 80,000 people are all generating network traffic at the same time, things are going to get congested. LL does their best to make sure their hardware is up to task, but not every component is under their direct control. If Level 3 or some other large Internet provider is having a bad day, so will SL.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg. While it's really easy for any of us on the sidelines to point fingers, and just assume there are easy fixes for what seem like simple problems, the truth of the situation is usually that these things are far more complicated than we realize. The fact is there are literally thousands upon thousands of factors that all come into play to determine the speed at which SL appears to operate for any individual end user.

All any of us can really do is concentrate on what few things we can control in order not to contribute to the problem.




I wouldn't recommend going with ATI if SL is your main concern. SL is an OpenGL application, and ATI stubbornly refuses to follow OpenGL standards. ATI hardware never has, and likely never will, run SL as well as nVidia hardware does. If you're gonna go all out, and throw four video cards in your machine, go with a quad SLI setup. You'll be much happier with the results.

Also, just so you know, mileage seems to vary considerably with SLI/Crossfire and SL, from system to system. I see about a 30% increase in FPS in SL on my desktop with SLI enabled (dual Geforce 8800 GTX), and about a 10% increase on my laptop (dual GeForce 8700M GT). Other people report no change, though, and still others actually report a decrease in performance. The only real way to know if SLI or Crossfire would benefit SL on your machine is simply to try it and see.

In the mean time, your 1GB 9500 should give you pretty decent performance.




In fairness, you left out a few key things, like how much RAM you've got and what type, what OS you're using, what drivers, how healthy your hard drives are, etc. Your system is only as good as its weakest component. I'll take your word for it that your machine is good enough to run the SL client software well enough. But whether it is or it isn't, whatever experience you're having with SL does not directly speak to anything that might be right or wrong with LL's servers. As I said, there are a million factors to consider.




Yes, of course. Every region has the same technical capabilities. The person who's paying for that sim has just as much right to the full resources of a sim server as every other paying customer. The fact that he might keep choose to keep his doors closed and get no traffic to speak of doesn't in any way negate the fact that he's paying good money for certain set of features.

You seem to be trying to make associations where none exist. The fact that a low traffic sim has the same resources at its disposal as another that happens to get higher traffic has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that SL doesn't run as fast on your computer as you might wish it did. It's apples and oranges.



I suppose you've got a better model in mind? Well, by all means, head on over to San Francisco and give 'em what for. Straighten their asses out.

Look, you might want to ask yourself this. If the solutions to SL's problems are really as obvious as you think they are, why is that seven years after SL's launch, there's still not a single other virtual world out there that works better than SL?

I don't mean to sound harsh in any of this. I've been in exactly your position many times. There have been lots of instances where I've said to Lindens that I know, "It seems so obvious that if you just did _______, then this problem would go away." And then they respond with, "I suppose it might seem like that, but when you consider ________, ________, and ________, you can see that your suggestion couldn't really work." And then I say to myself, "Oh, yeah. That's why they run this thing, and I just use it. They know every aspect of it, while I only have a small portion of the information about it at any given time."



As has already been said, SL is not a "gaming experience". If you came into it expecting to slay demons, rescue princesses, liberate small countries with your mad commando skills, or save the galaxy from alien robots, you're in the wrong place.

As for profits, I hate to break it to you, but if LL's main concern were to be as profitable as possible, there are much better ways to do that than to spend what they spend on hardware every year. Again, you appear to be trying to link things that are simply unlinkable.

In any case, you're right that the experience, whatever you want to call it, is not enjoyable when it slows to a crawl. But again, let's make sure we're addressing the right issue. Your premise that having a server per region is somehow the cause of all your woes is faulty. There are lots of things worth complaining about in SL, but that's not one of them.

/me sits down and waits a week or 5 for the OP to come back and find out he got biatch-slapped.

Yup, pretty much.

In addition to what Chosen said, I'd just like to point out that...

...the b is actually more important than the m - nobody's gonna confuse mega and milli in this context. You've got a little b. A big B would be 8x better.



I think we heard Lil recently say it was 7000+. 7600 sounds right.

Next time there's a rolling restart, poke into her thread and ask. She's pretty cool.

SInce they dont list actual amounts of servers I looked into a research article.. It is from December 2007 and it lists the server amount at 2279


Where did you get the # 6000


the driver for my Nvidia 9500GT is this 6.14.11.8618

which is probably the most stable of the recent drivers ive found... As you probably well know.. updating drivers to the newest version is usually a critical mistake when it comes to running any sort of gaming.

health of hard drives is simple... I have a raid 0+1 setup with 4 500 GB sata's .. I dual boot 2 os's I have 1 SATA partitioned to run Linux ubuntu 9.10 and the other 3 running windows XP professional 6 GB of DDR 3 1333mhz Ram (only 3 are available in XP pro because of OS limitations) When I load XP .. I have 31 processes running most of them are the base system processes along with spybot search and destroy teatimer and avast's most current version... the state of the hard drive is healthy and clean.. I rarely have any lag running online applications that are much more cumbersome and resource heavy than this. Examples Empire:total war, Crysis, Fallout 3 and others.. all with FPS above 40 except empire during 8 player in which the FPS usually drops to around 20 (still higher than SL on a sim with more than 10 people)

When i first load SL ... I see this on my cpu usage bar... core 1 2% core 2 2% core 3 2% core 4 48%... that doesnt seem multicore functional to me. I looked to see if the program was assigned to only run on a single core using the tool and it is not assigned in fact I have no programs assigned to run on a specific core.. Maybe you can help me see where the setting is to make sure its running on all 4 cores.

internet connection is MEGABYTES not BITS...


again I wasnt comparing apples and oranges... I go to the local computer geek hangout where we all discuss these sorts of things .. Most of us have been building or operating computers for 15 plus years... I personally have been building them them for 10 years... and my first computer was the 386SX with Dos and windows 3.11 in 1992. I asked the guy with the most envied system about his experience with it. Last month I told him about the issue and asked him to download second life and see how it ran for him.. his connection is 20 MBPS the best you can get around here... His specs I believe are something close to this Intel i7 2.3 16 GB ram Windows 7 pro 64bit Dual 280 GTX nvidia ... unsure what his hard drive count or "health" is but im sure its something sickening... He said he experienced the same issue.. any region with over 10 people and the FPS went to under 15.. and moving on the sims I mentioned (the bay city airport , moosehead, and gor hub) and he said moving was unbearable. So im unsure what this has to do with system specs.. I could understand it having something to do with internet connection or possible router interference...especially if its wireless but those simple arent issues with us.


You seem pretty "in the know" about the second life grid clusters but im unsure where you got the information.. I've been searching since before christmas and the only #s or data I could find was on a Second life blog where a man (or i assume a man by the name) said that the server count was at 2279..

Sources?


and for the "biatch slap comment" unless you are going to productively add to the conversation.. please dont bother.

Chosen explained where the number came from in the post. It's a really long post but you should probably read it.

I did read it... this is what she said

"ere are currently around 30,000 regions in SL. Approximately 2/3 of those are full regions (1 per core), and almost all of the remaining third are homesteads (3 per core). Last I read, openspaces (4 per core) comprise only 0.7% of the grid, so they're not really statistically significant. If my math is right, we're looking at something on the order of 23,000 server cores to run all the land on the grid. Divide that by 4 cores per server, and we're probably talking around 6000 actual machines, almost 3 times the number you cited. And that's just for the land. I have no idea how many machines are responsible for all the other things the grid does besides just simulate land." that isnt sourced... that is a guesstimate.

as far as the ATI question goes... well here is the thing.. my MSI k9 platnium motherboard doesnt support SLI

I had originally bought 2 9500GT... they were electronic bridge so no hard ware had to be installed to make it SLI.. should boot up and assign automatically.. thats when i learned after i bought the item... From MSI themselves since they didnt list it on newegg.. that the damn motherboard is only Crossfire compatible... Very nice of them to mention that... The reason I went with Nvidia was the open GL question... Its been pretty well known for the past 5 or so years that the open GL applications just seem to run better on Nvidia.... ATI does support open GL but certainly not as well as the nvidia drivers do...


So if i want to go multiple graphics.. its going to have to be ATI unless I want to basically rebuild the system.. Which.. Is only about 18 months old.. But I may do that... And of course since the k9a2 platnium has 4 pcie slots i figure what the hell might as well get 4 ATI 5750 and crossfire them.... however... The problem with that is.. HEAT... all those fans... I have been an AVID fanless graphics card user since 2004 ... After burning out graphics card after graphics card I only will buy fanless ... I dont know what it is but the fans on the graphics card only seem to be rated for about 10000 hours.. Just for the record i seem to find that the bearings in the fans go out after about a year (or 8000 hours) so thats when I decided to start going fanless and have no moving parts to worry about.. the heat was never a problem.. but when you start running 4 of them.. heats going to be a major issue



Chosen I really appreciate and have a deep amount of gratitude for your lengthy and timely response... I'll await your response and ill re respond when I return home after spending time with the family... in the meantime you can always contact me in world at this name.

/me reads it again too.

Which part did you see as a guess?

Sorry Chosen Here is where the article came from and its actually from 2006 .. so you in all fairness are probably right the # probably is closer to 6000


they rated it at 2579 servers

http://brokentoys.org/2006/06/06/second-life-has-too-many-servers-in-danger-of-eating-internet/



As for the lag issues I see where you are coming from... I can see how it is mostly user faulted due to rendering costs and textured items that makes a lot of sense.. But I had to read it from a techie and not just some in world person that had no idea whats going on behind the pixels.

That's the date when they removed the restriction that EVERYBODY joining SL had to provide credit card details. SL is considerably bigger now.

It is sort of, but it's not enabled by default. Go to the Advanced menu in SL (if you don't see it, press CTRL-ALT-D to bring it up). Go to the Rendering section, and check "Run Multiple Threads".

thats awesome.. thankyou so much.. yeah so the answer to my question was IT DOES BUT IT DOESNT BY DEFAULT (and btw i already know where the advanced menu is) thanks so much!

Multi-core and multi-thread are two different animals. The most logical use of multi-core CPU's is for multi-tasking......running two or more different programs on the same machine at the same time. Assign individual programs to individual cores (or processors). Multi-threading is dividing up the processes of a single program to run in parallel to increase efficiency........you can multi-thread on a single core CPU.

editing to add:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multithreading

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-core_processor

It splits pretty evenly between two cores on both Windows and Mac for me.

That would be Philip, I think, and I agree with him. It means every region has persistent and consistent physics and scripting.

I strongly suspect that has nothing to do with your bandwidth.

As has been mentioned, SL has grown considerably since then.




When you calculate ~30,000 sims, 2/3 of which are full regions, and almost the entire remaining third of which are homesteads, a number somewhere around 6000 is what makes the math work. That's all. I don't know for a fact that it really is 6000. Meade's figure of 7000 or 7600 could well be correct. Whatever it is, it's a lot more than 2300.




That number is the Device Manager designation. What does your nVidia Control Panel say? I'm guessing it's 186.18? Usually, nVidia's number is the last five digits of whatever Windows says.

Assuming it is the 186 series, that's pretty old. I'd recommend you update to the latest version, 195.62. There have been a lot of improvements in the last nine release generations. It works well with Win 7 and Vista, anyway. I can't be certain for XP, since the only XP machine I've got currently running has a Quadro in it, not a GeForce. But I'd be willing to bet it will work better than the old one you're using.




Depends on the game, and the driver version. Very often when nVidia releases new drivers, they include specific to fixes for issues with games that are popular at the time.

Generally speaking, with SL, the newer the driver, the better. There have been some notable exceptions over the years, but on the whole, newer drivers have always worked better than older ones.

Give 195.62 a whirl. If it makes things worse, you can always revert.




Sounds good.

I'd suggest getting Diskeeper. Let it do its thing in the background at all times. SL will frag a hard drive pretty quickly, as it's constantly writing and rewriting files all the time. It helps if you put the cache on a separate physical drive (or at least a separate partition), if you can. But either way, Diskeeper is one of the best investments you can make.




Ah, you've hit upon the critical issue. "I get mad FPS in games, so how come my FPS in SL is so low?" is an incredibly common question. The answer is manifold. A huge part of it is what I mentioned earlier. Game content is created by professionals who optimize it for performance, while SL content is created by amateurs who, for the most part, have no idea the should be doing that, and wouldn't know how to even if they did.

Another gigantic factor is that no game in the world has to do the things SL has to do. In a game, even an online game, the entire world, and all the assets, exist locally on your own hard drive. Everything can load right away. There's barely any bottleneck in the pipleline. But with SL, almost nothing exists locally. Since everything is user-created, you have to download it all before you can see it. There's far more going on in SL between the frames than there is in any game.

And all that is before you consider all the other things SL does besides just render artwork. Typically, games are not streaming audio and video, dealing with a communication system as complex as SL's, allowing users to upload new content all day long, etc.

There's barely any comparison to be made. SL and games are different animals. Saying, "I can run games really fast, so I should be able to run SL really fast as well," is like saying, "I can ride a horse, so I should also be able to ride a tiger." In both cases, the former is only peripherally similar to the latter. The actual nuts and bolts of each situation are quite different.





Not sure what's going on there, sorry. All I know is that's not what it's doing on my system. I wish I knew what to tell you to correct the problem.





I haven't been to those sims, but I'm guessing they're probably pretty well overloaded with inefficient content. Better system specs will help your machine process it all faster, of course, but there does come a point where even the most powerful systems currently in use today will get overwhelmed by the shear amount of stuff people pack into sims. This is especially true on the mainland, where you have to contend not only with what's in the sim you're standing in, but also with everything in the neighboring sims as well.

That giant tree that I mentioned before, the one made out of hundreds of pillow-shaped sculpties, is a rather infamous case in the history of what not to do in SL. It lagged the hell out of everyone within a 2-sim radius around it. And it was almost all client-side lag. When you've got millions of unnecessary polygons to contend with, your computer is going to slow down.




I don't know of any available reference material that would fully explain how the grid works, sorry. Most of what I know about it is just stuff I've picked up simply from having been around as long as I have. Information trickles out through the Linden blog, through conversations with various Lindens over the years, through various beta tests and consultations like SL Views that I've been involved with, etc. Add that all up over six years, and you end up knowing just enough to know that there's a ton more you don't know.




Ah. That makes sense, then.

If you do go ATI, here's one helpful tip. Disable Vertex Buffer Objects in Preferences -> Graphics -> Hardware Options. ATI doesn't implement VBO's properly under OpenGL, so having them enabled tends to cause problems. Why the viewer doesn't automatically disable them as soon as ATI hardware is detected, I have no idea.

186.18 is correct... I dont run 192 because apparently there is a major glitch with 192 drivers and Empire Total War... I dont play it much but i like it to run when i play.. Ill update ot 192 and see whats going on..



You've been damned helpful... and insightful to say the least.



fyi the current driver version is 195.62

Chosen is usually pretty good at doing that.

Chosen Rocks!!!!

Thanks for the kind words, guys.

/me spies Lil in the forums tonight and asks how many servers make up SL.

And, hot off the presses, the answer is...

/me superglues a gold star to Chosen's forehead.

Wow, Sindy, thanks for the followup on this.

Math actually works! Whoada thunkit?

Seriously, I'm kind of surprised I was right.

It's only true if you are running Windows. On Linux, SL runs perfectly well with ATI.

http://img197.imageshack.us/img197/2586/snapshot001u.png

Vertex excepted of course.

When you say "vertex excepted", do you mean "vertex buffer objects excepted"? In other words, is ATI hardware equally unable to handle VBO's properly on Linux as well as on Windows?

If so, then I'd submit that the descriptor "perfectly well" cannot apply. If not every feature is working flawlessly, then it's running imperfectly, by definition.

Now, if you want to say it runs better under Linux than under Windows, fine; I won't argue. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't; I have no way of knowing, since I don't use Linux (except on my cell phone). I just ask that we don't throw around the word "perfect" too lightly is all.

If that's not what you meant, please explain.