WHEN IS the LAG going to be fixed.

Is there a way to actually gauge one's OWN contribution to lag?
I ask, because i noticed the references to lag in Janus. I own around 12k m in Janus, and as its a porter, I'd hate to think that I was responsible.
i don't THINK I am.....but it's quite possible that not being the most comp literate person in SL, I may be doing something with my build that is contributing.
Perhaps what would be helpful, would be a sticky or some such that explained just what everything that a person put into their build DID in terms of slowdown. Whilst accepting that certain people will not give two hoots....it would still help those who are marginally more thoughtful.

Vixen I live next door in Enceladus and fly into Janus often. Usually by what I call *lag warping* because when I get near that sim border, near that telehub my screen usually freezes and I will find my self somewhere in Janus, Epimetheus or EVEN Atlas when all those textures and particles have loaded that a few folks have seen fit to surround the hub with. I really wish there were a building height restriction for parcels adjoining a hub. The skyscrapers immediately next to Janus' hub make it very difficult to negotiate the area, after all the textures and particles have loaded of course.

I think it's about time someone got technical on this thread
Most of the time, lag happens strictly on the client side.
Major causes of lag include:
- Network problems beyond your control and that of LL. Somewhere between your place and LL's colo, a few routers went haywire and started looping packets between themselves, or some new virus showed up and flooded the internet, or there was a Coronal Mass Ejection that fucked up the wires and sattelites and shit.
- Too many textures or sounds streaming. Ever tried downloading 300 files at once? They will all fail and then your computer will try to re-download them all, and fail again, and so on and so forth. This is what usually causes the infamous packet loss IIRC.
- Too many textures or sounds, period! I mean, come on, there's only SO much that your computer will be able to handle. Commercial zones like Aqua are infamous for this. If you're selling 500 products, thats 500 textures. Your graphics card can only handle so many textures at once. When its memory fills up, it has to swap textures with the main memory which is very slow.
- Physics. This is probably the only way you can accidentally lag the SERVER. When a server contains a lot of avatars or other complex physical objects, it will be hard to move around.
- Malicious / overly complex / too many scripts. Turn on the "Show Updates" feature by pressing Alt - U. You will see objects puffing blue and red plumes of smoke. These objects are constantly updating their status, forcing your client to re-sync with the server, resulting in massive amounts of lag.

Aqua lagging surrounding servers is very much a possibility. Anything within draw distance will lag you. Specifically, just being near a sim border will lag you a little independently of the content being presented. Being near a lot of sim borders (4 corner intersection) will lag you even more.
I've been to Aqua, and I'd say its a blatant case of WAAAY too many textures.
You people should simply stop building mega-malls where 50 people can present 5000 products, or learn how to do it right.
Specifically:
- DONT use llSetTexture in vendors, which is a major, major cause of lag. llSetText and llSetColor can also lag the crap out of you, and so do sensors and scripts that autorez crap.
- DO bake multiple downsized textures onto a single 512x512 image, and then use llScaleTexture and llOffsetTexture to scroll the appropriate part of the texture into view.
- DONT use llPlaySound or llTriggerSound gratuitously. Use llTriggerSoundLimited to limit how far your sound spreads, so as not to spam other people with needless sound streams.
- DONT use physics or complex prim shapes (Tubes and toruses, expecially when holowed or cut).
- DONT USE GIANT ANIMATED TEXTURES LIKE THE ONES SL MEDIA MAKES! Realize that you will be forcing people to download megs and megs of crap they could very well do without.

Also see the Lag section of the LSL Wiki for tips on how to reduce lag coming from scripted objects...

http://www.badgeometry.com/wiki/lag

I know some sims are laggier then others and I am not gonna get involved in any of that...

just a thought I have been having for a while....ever since the enormous growth explosion of SL lag has increased.
I remeber when I started it wasn't as bad, but since more people and sims are around is has definitely turned into a major problem.

And my internet connection has nothing to do with it...not my comp...I actually upgraded my comp after a HD crash...
(just so we avoid the 'it is your stuff: 3,2 Ghz P4, 2 gig ram, ati 9800, T1 connex on Cisco router)
The thought is a fairly simple one....adding on sims and having more people in SL increases the amount of data that needs to be transferred. I have no clue what LL uses in form of routers, lines or equipment....in case thay are using 100Mbps Network cards...there might be the problem right there. Even if I run a nice Gig Router..it isn't gonna do a thing if the actual servers don't have high end Network cards...same with hubs and switches.
Since I don't exactly have any specs on the LL eauipment..its a guess....but it does look a lot like a Network bottleneck problem.

I know what u mean Nolan...I get bounced a fair amount too.....
There seems to be a penchant in janus at present for red barring areas that we fly into by accident...grrrr

I can't speak for the galleria merchants since it's not my store, but all my box textures are 256x256. There's absolutely no need to use 512x512 textures for clothing boxes. It's complete overkill. In general I recommend not using 512x512 textures unless they're going to be used on prims larger than 3 meters or so. You'll sacrifice a bit of sharpness for a huge reduction in texture load lag. a 256x256 jpeg2000 image is probably around 10kb or less (guessing). On a broadband connection that equates to about a nanosecond of download time. I think the problem has as much (if not more) to do with SL's ability to deliver a large number of assets in a timely fashion with good prioritizing.

I personally keep my draw distance at 64 and only turn it up in sparsely populated sims. It's not difficult to stay 64 meters away from places you don't wish to load textures for. If you're going into a shopping mall with eleventy thousand textures, navigate in mouselook and just hang out a few minutes til some of the load lag subsides before running around. I've never found that to be a big issue if I'm going someplace specifically to shop. I prefer to see the choices laid out in front of me rather than hiding in vendors, but it seems everyone will have to find a happy medium. It's easy to get annoyed with lag and get pissed off about it, but it's important to remember that people don't set out to create lag. It isn't personal. It's something we all deal with.

Sound file load lag should be a non-issue in 1.4 since sounds can be restricted to or blocked from a parcel. People who have issues with texture load lag should keep their draw distance at the minimum setting and consider upgrading to a video card with more ram. If you're using a card with only 64mb that's likely a big part of your problem.

Chip,

Actually Eggy's suggestion is a good one. He doesn't mean to use a 512X512 texture for individual pictures. It is using a techique of having the picture as a giant grid containing all of the images on one image, and then adjusting the visible portion of the texture on the box. This dramatically reduces the lag of switching textures versus using individual textures for each item in the vending machine. I do know Green Fate was doing something along these lines for awhile, I saw a demo of it once but found the process of creating a giant image a bit cumbersome.

Eggy did not address the fact that there is a server FPS problem. Yes a lot of lag can be mitigated in the client, but when a sim is running at 20 or 40 fps that normally runs at 400, no amount of tweaking your client is going to help. That is what is so frustrating - Linden Lab can see these servers are crawling, but they seem to ignore it.

Ouch. I've never seen a sim go that low before, unless I was rezzing giant physical towers in the sandbox.

Go take a look at Leda it averages at about 60

This thread reminds me when certain people use to bitch about 200 prim bookshelves and stuff.

When one thing is killed, another complaint will be created in its place.

If textures are a high source of lag, I dare say some the 'dwellopers' sim should be avoided then? I've been to 'heaven' and seen very little in the line of lag even though its texture and object heavy. Course I also been there only when its a few people.

Another thing to consider is sound bites, people, events, scripts. All that good stuff.

As Chip is saying, a lot should be obsolete (we hope) with 1.4

but again.. when one complaint is killed, another complaint is created in its place..

This has been a very educational thread for me. I had no idea some of the things listed were lag factories. I've gone in world and changed the roof texture on my store, since it was done with an alpha texture before.

Is anyone in-world who's educated about this sort of thing offering their services to take a look at plots/builds and give advice on how to reduce lag that might be created there?

ahhhhh, I get it I wonder if that would help any with individual boxes. Is one 512x512 image preferable to four 256x256 images for non-vendor textures? Interesting idea.

I have to agree this thread is very educational I went through my store in Leda and did away with all the texture flipping items, and our WONDERFUL builder Rick even got rid of the light and the most coolest escavator I have ever seen!
but still we are full of lag =/

*EDIT - Just looked back and noticed all my typos... how embarrassing!*

OMG! I can't believe you did all that. Expecially when half the people are like vending machines cause lag and the other half are like, no boxes cause lag.

Well I know in a way it "contributed" to lag so....

I didn't ask Rick to take down the lighting nor the escavators, I am actually sad he did... but I think he is going to try and make a better, less laggier version of it... not sure, but I HOPE hehe

You have huge builds, I am sure they contribute to lag too. Gonna delete them and replace with an untextured cube? Okay, I will stop teasing you for trying. But until a Linden hands me a lag list I ain't touchin' nuttin'.

Yeah I gave up on trying to fix it.. considering Leda has aboout 45% of its land with nothing on it, I am now convinced we as residence of Leda, can do nothing else to make it better, this is an SL issue =/

Maybe it would help a little since for each texture there is a certain amount of info that you need to download, so patching multiple textures together means you only need to get that information once.
But my original point was that people just use the default texture size on tiny boxes. Which is actually 512x256 for snapshots I think, not 512x512.
If you save your snapshots to disk and reduce their size a bit, you will get less lag.
If you have a vendor or something that's constantly changing textures, it would be VERY advantageous to use llSetTextureOffset instead of llSetTexture, because changing the texture offset is something that happens strictly inside your graphics card, which is as fast as it gets with LSL... sort of like llTargetOmega.
Plus, since you've already downloaded the texture, you dont need to wait for the new one to load again.
Somebody get Christopher or Catherine, I'm not a graphics expert

Plain old prims (non-physical and not scripted) dont really contribute that much to lag, unless you have many thousands of prims concentrated in a small area, or you have a sucky graphics card.
Prims are fully described by a few integers and floats, so a texture or sound will be a lot heavier on your connection than a primitive.

It would be nice if more people knew the difference between lag and low FPS.

Low FPS is pretty much a client-side thing. When I was running around on a 1.5GHz P4, I would go to events with 30 people and everyone would be gray and I'd get maybe 1FPS. Now I have a 3GHz P4 and I easily get 10FPS in situations that are worse than that. Local lighting and large draw distance are the primary contributors to low FPS, as far as I can tell. People using huge numbers of textures will also do it - it's easy to have thousands of textures in a scene, but modern video cards are only designed with maybe a few hundred in mind at most. Turning down bandwidth may improve your FPS while you are flying around, as this will throttle the number of new objects sent to you per second. Hit Alt+1 and watch the "Total Objects" indicator to get an idea of how fast objects are streamed to you (and how quickly the client dumps them when they are out of range.)

Crimson is talking about lag, i.e. hiccups and other slowdowns either in communication between viewer and simulator or with the physics engine that runs server-side. I believe that a lot of the recent problems with lag are due to the influx of newbies after the latest CNN/Slashdot/etc articles. What I have noticed is that the lag seems to be localized to groups of simulators - you can get lagged when you are within a few sims of a large concentration, even if you're the only avatar within half a kilometer, but the lag is low or nonexistent elsewhere. Since sims that are close to each other are likely to share ports on the same switches, it seems likely to me that they are running into capacity issues with the switches the simulators plug into directly.

lol, ya, come on LL!! get with the program! Quad CPU & gig network cards! ooh ooh, or fiber right to the box! hehe, what, does that cost money or something? (sorry, been in the situation their in, is sadly funny)

Most sims lately no matter where LAG with server loads and population increasing..its not just textures and sounds. (then again lots of different textures saved in different formats doesn't help like .BMP which are usually fairly large)

I have had more lag in Periwinkle with 2 people in it than when i was hanging in Federal with 20.

SL is unstable lately...how many times has it crashed.. how many sims have gone down in a day? (sure mostly due to that big influx a week ago)

Good Resource About SL Lag...

http://www.badgeometry.com/wiki/Lag

Actually you really only need to worry about pixel dimensions and whether or not it has an alpha channel. The only difference between jpg and bmp is how long it takes you to upload. SL converts them to jpg 2000.