Second Life Viewer Freezes for a few seconds

Pretty much since I got this game, it freezes up for a few seconds about every 30 seconds or so. Just randomly. I've tried adjusting my graphics settings to as minimum as possible, and turned off everything else going on with my PC like virus software etc, yet it continues to do it.

I'm on Win 7 64bit
Core 2 Duo E8400 @ 3ghz
8gb Ram
Nvidia Geforce 8800 GT

I really have no idea why it does this. It'll freeze for up to 5 seconds sometimes, making most tasks pretty much impossible. I tried a different viewer(Emerald) to see if that would help, but it hasn't. I reinstalled the whole game once, and I'm not sure if it helped but it seemed to be a little bit better at first, then got worse. Could be my imagination though. I might try taking a log of how often they happen and how long they last.

Any help is appreciated

Do you run by any chance Microsoft defender, security essentials or similar malware "protection tools" on your machine? I had a similar bug report that could be traced to M$. Try to disable your antivirus/firewall/whatsoever and see if this makes a difference. Also check your memory usage, when it's getting too low (can be caused by other programs in the background) it will slow down your machine due to excessive swapping to the harddisk.

It could also be the servers. When they run out of script memory and another avatar wearing scripted items teleports in, the region will stall as you're describing.

Bring up the statistics display (CTRL-SHIFT-1) and watch the bandwidth when it freezes. If that drops to 0 (or close to it) the problem is probably on the server side, not your computer.

If that's the case, the only thing you can do is wait for Linden Lab to impose script limits, and make everyone stop wearing shoes and hair with hundreds of resize scripts in them.

The servers have been struggling for the last few weeks with intermittant bouts of what you are discribing. While you have that statistics bar up take a look at the Time Dialation when your hesitations occur. The statistics are about one or two seconds behind the event so it won't show anything exactly at the time of your stalls. The time dialation should be a solid .99 (or 1.00)......if it drops below that it's the servers. The server frames per second will also drop when that happens...........they should be a solid 45 FPS.

I don't think you can blame everything on scripts though. Poorly written and inefficient scripts do cause problems but with my monitoring I just don't see an avatar tping into the sim I'm in as being the source of the event.........my sim (and all neighboring sims) are seldom populated with more than 4 or 5 avatars at any given time and I see no changes in the avatar population when I see the hesitation. There is a scheduled maintenance outage tomorrow morning at 5 am SLT. Wait and see if that improves the problem. Waiting for any script limiting is going to be a very long wait.........it's not even in the testing stage yet (though maybe tomorrows maintenance may have something to do with it).

I'm experiencing very similar issues as the original poster .... Second Life runs fine at a decent FPS then drops the framerate almost freezing every 30 secs or so. Second Life is running on Windows 7 64bit edition with an Nvidia 8600M graphics adapter in an HP Laptop.

This is totally independent of screen resolution, same issue occurs at 1920x1680 down to 800x600 with graphics set from Low through to High in Second Life, have tested with Emerald, Snowglobe & the official LL SL client.

Nvidia display drivers are up to date 195.62 WHQL driver.
Broadband connects at approx 2MB ADSL.

It sounds like a latency issue or something to do with Windows 7 processor priority or something. Would be interested if anyone else is experiencing this issue.

Any one have any advise