Massive Impossiable Lag Universal in SL

Anyone else experiencing Massive Lag, I got it in Sido, in Vine, in Periwinkle, in Abbots and on several Islands.

As many have said before, "lag" is kind of a supergeneric blanket term. To get to the bottom of it, the type of lag has to be known.

There's three main kinds of lag. Network lag, Server lag, and Client lag.

Network lag is unavaoidable. Until everyone has fiber-in-home lines, and all the city lines switch from copper to pure fiber networks, network lag will happen. Fact of life in SL. This is often shown in you typing simething, and it appears after a delay, or you move, and the action is delayed. The network throttle can help a little. But.. it's like death and taxes.

Server lag I know little about. Usually, it's expressed as a low time dialation, causing the framerate to be high in sim stats, but the observed framerate is atrocious. Generally, it's caused by the SIM having a heavy load, and hiccuping. It's not supposed to happen, but it does. This can be caused by a lot of really active scripts running, there being a lot of avatars in the sim, or the SIM's sserver just behaving like normal: very mysteriously. Mostly, it's caused by a lot of avatars wearing active scripts (animation overriders, usually) and a lot of listens jockying for CPU time, and the physics being heavy. Usually, a gigantic lag storm precludes a sim going down.

Client lag is usually expressed in a low framerate, both in sim stats and observed. Its causes are numerous, but all are linked to the hardware you're playing on. Not enough ram, video card's not gutsy enough, or your CPU doesn't have enough meat on its bones. SL is a very intensive program with settings turned up, even for some of the newest machines. It, too also happens. A huge source is usually avatars with lots of primmy attachments, and an overabundance of bling. Turning the settings down can really help this.

In the end, using "lag" as a blanket term really isn't too good an idea, as it's one word that points to several things with multiple causes. There may be other sources of lag, that I don't know of. But the answers on how to fix these main causes of lag can be found all over the forums. I won't answer them here, because several people before me have gone deep into how to decrease your lag in all areas.