terrible performance - all SL or just macs??

In the last day or so (Tues Feb 20) I've been experiencing some of the worst performance I've ever known in SL. I can't do anything and it's completley unplayable. Movement is so lagged you can't move. Can't open up inventory, take objects etc etc. And I crash every few minutes. Fairly certain it's not my system (no significant changes and was working fine).

It's probably becasue of the load on the servers / database. But with performance so bad - how come so many people are online?

What do you think? Is it a mac client thing? Or just general?

(iMac 24" 2GB Ram, 2.16ghz, 256GB graphics).

1. Delete your Second Life cache.
2. Reduce the memory being used by your graphics card from 256 to 128k (there's a long forum thread on this...) I believe this is done in the Systems Preferences panel...

You have a good Mac, but maybe there is also a Mac problem? I have two year old iMac with only 64 Mb memory videocard, 768 Mb RAM, and it does get that graphic lag at times, but strangely usually only when there are over 20-25k people logged in (even if I am at an empty sim). Before I rarely got it, especially during days I could build and explore lag free when there used to be only about 9000 people online.

I have a friend who uses quite old laptop PC, and she gets less lag than I do when we are at the same place together. Even if we both have all graphic options turned as down as they can go.

I know my iMac is not optional for SL, but I am stuck with it, but it does run good enough when there are less than 20k people in. Of course, I am also in Europe, which probably affects how fast the information gets to my Mac from LL servers...

I just hope my iMac will run SL after the new viewer is launched officially.

Sterling - thanks for the advice, but I've already done both those things - and many others recommended on this forum in various places.

The name of the problem, my fellow civilized-computer-users, is Mac Marginalization.

In the eyes of many software companies, we are a second-tier platform, and release of the SL software for our machines is the product of a development process where optimizations and structures designed to work best in Microsoft Windows are shoehorned into Mac binaries and compiled into something that sort-of-works enough for Linden Lab to say they have a Mac version. But, the truth of the matter is that we're eating Microsoft table scraps wrapped in an .app container.

I am actually rather impressed with the development skills of the Mac Team at Linden, to be able to pull this off. It's a daunting task, I'm sure, getting all of the bad habits programming for Windows probably demands, and making them run AT ALL on our beloved machines.

The proper way to do a Mac release would be to do a build of the viewer from the ground up, using the Apple-sanctioned graphics, networking, math, interface, etc. system calls instead of running it all in a proprietary format within a single thread of execution. (I always love to watch just one of my four CPU cores spike out when I run the Mac SL client!)

I suppose the need for all of this inconvenient work is a small part of the reason behind the SL viewer open-source release. I have high hopes that somebody out there in the big world is busily taking the viewer code and patiently linking it up to all the nice, high-performance, stable Apple OSX system libraries. Once this development crawls out of the woodwork, I expect we won't have these problems anymore.

That is very unlikely to happen. And as someone who codes on both the Mac and on Windows on a daily basis, I can tell you there are as many "bad habits" (as you say) in the Mac OS libraries as there are in Windows.

-peekay

I have to agree with Sigil on this one. The SL Mac client is a dodgy port of the Win client. Just go to the download page and compare the sizes of the downloads; the OS X dl is twice the size as its Win counterpart. I'm no programmer to be sure, but I do work with Macs for a living and deal with software issues on a daily basis and from what I can tell SL for Mac is pretty messy.

I use a 17" MacBook Pro and just for grins downloaded BootCamp, installed XP and SL for Win and played on "the dark side" to see if there were any major differences.

Playing SL under XP was noticeably faster and smoother, the graphics slightly better and (gasp) not a single crash in the 3 plus hours of my test session. (In my experience lately on the Mac side I'd have had at least 2 crashes in the same period) We can rule out any hardware differences as the test was conducted on the same computer.

To LL's credit at least they do think of us Mac folk and grace us with a way to access SL (unlike There, Active Worlds, etc) and they do come out with specific Mac bug fixes, but until we have a native OS X version, we'll always be at a disadvantage compared with the Win version. (To be fair there are LOTS of performance/stability issues with the Win client as well)

Ever heard of "universal binary" The OSX download contains both the PPC and Intel-Mac versions of the Second Life, hence the size difference. Unfortunately huge downloads (and correspondingly increased disk space requirement) is a fact of life for Macs, and will be for some time to come.

-peekay

Ever heard of "universal binary"? The OSX download contains both the PPC and Intel-Mac versions of the Second Life, hence the size difference. Unfortunately huge downloads (and correspondingly increased disk space requirement) is a fact of life for Macs, and will be for some time to come.

-peekay

has it gotten any better? that system should not be running that bad... I've been running SL on my Macbook Pro since before it was even a universal binary... I have had about 4 or 5 crashes total over the year.. and i often stay connected many many hours, including some sessions over 20 hours... i hit an occasion lag spike but nothing as bad as you are describing.

Yes, it is only the mac version beeing so slow!

I tested SL on a much weaker old PC with an old Geforce 2MX 32MB and it was really playable.
On my mac it just looks like a slide-show. On a Radeon 9200 128MB

The next thing what I plan to do is to compile SL for linux on the same mac and compare the performance.

I still hope that there is one small mean bug which results to the Mac version beein unplayable.

I have been having such problems, which got to the unbearable point today. When reading a thread on lag and rezzing problems someone said wrote, "isn't rezzing more to do with the PC than the server." I suddenly realised that I had not run a system cleaner in a while, so I ran Yasu and the problems have gone. The crashing of first look every other time I log off probably was messing up the innards of my system. The problem with Macs is that as a unix is needs cron scripts run, but these are scheduled for about 3am local time and if your Mac is in sleep mode it will not run. Download a free cron runner like Yasu and run monthly. SL should then run a lot more smoothly.

Best wishes.

I must say now, that if you could have the newest Duo Core Intel Mac with 3 GB RAM and 256 graphic card, you'd have no problems with SL. I tested such Mac yesterday, and it was like a dream come true. No lag, not even on a very growded sim, prims and textures loaded really fast, fps was over 30 most of the time, and sometimes went over 45. I could have all graphics on full, aos on, I kept the memory of the graphic card at 256, had everything that could make lag chosen from preferences, draw distance at 128, fog at 4, and nothing hindered me. I just wish I'd be able to play with such Mac all the time. *sighs*

I don't know, I just got a Mac Pro Desktop, Dual Core, the works.... and my performance REALLY stinks. I've installed Vista on it so maybe I'll give that a try.. but in any case I am crashing every 5-10 minutes without fail. It's awful.
Stacy

Hi all

I just joined SL last weekend. Since then I've had at least half a dozen crashes and the performance on my 17-inch iMac (Core Duo) isn't that great, either. I'm aware that the iMac isn't a high-end gaming computer but it's should run games that don't require the fastest hardware available reasonably well. BTW I'm on a fast (10 MBit) internet connection (I'm in Europe, though) so connection speed shouldn't be an issue, either.

Last night I finally tried the first look client. Fortunately, it seems to be more stable than the official viewer but it's still rather buggy.

I only hope the latest OS X Upgrade (10.4.9) - which was only released yesterday -doesn't cause any additional problems with the SL viewer.

Despite all the problems some mac users seem to have with the viewer, many thanks to Linden Labs for developing a Mac client! Like others have said before me, the sad truth is that we live in a Windows-centric world, so we shouldn't take Linden Labs' efforts for granted!

Abigail, that sounds strange, since I have two years old iMac with only 768 Mb RAM with 64 Mb graphic card, Panther as system, and it mostly runs fine (or as fine as I imagine it even can run). Lag is sometimes bad, especially at peak times, but that is probably just the connection we have (only 1 Mb atm, going to get it to 2 Mb soon). I didn't crash that often even with the official viewer, and with First Look I have crashed only twice (been using it now for few weeks).

Performance is much much better with First Look, fps is much higher and lag conciderable less.

Oh, and I am also in Europe.

Have you done anything to the preferences? Maybe it would help? As a basic rule, I keep everything as low as I can when there are over 25k people inworld, and even at slower hours I usually don't have anything at the highest value (except when I am taking snapshots). And I can't even imagine listening at music at peak hours, and if I want to do that, I have to turn everything else down, and take away particles, clouds, grass and maybe other things as well. But that is again the connection problem, which you shouldn't have.

And I really didn't have any problems at all with the forementioned powerhouse Mac I tested out. Even when I had every graphic turned as high as possible, with 2 Mb connection speed. Used also the official viewer with it, not First Look. It was a computer used for professional use though, and so its performance was overall made the best possible. I don't know if it has any meaning, that the computer is installed and taken care of by those who do it for work, though. maybe they know tweaks to make them run faster and smoother? I wouldn't know, I am just good at using them, not in the tech side.

Btw, I have heard that Vista stinks in performance... from people who use PCs and know about things. Again, wouldn't know myself, haven't really touched a PC in over ten - erm, more like fifteen years.

As a PC user I will say "Vista Sucks". Never had a problem with XP Pro. Give Vista a year, maybe two, by then it should be 'ok' but only if you know what you're doing to the system (tweaks, etc). Just tried OS X (emmulated). Was nice. Not quite what I'm used to, but not that bad.

@Tam: Thanks for your tips!

No problem, always happy to help.

i also do not get it. i have 2gb, fast processor, and decent graphics card, yet my system crashes 90 percent of the time! i am frustrated with SL, and am about to end my short membership. my system should have no issues handling this program. i have tried the tips posted, to no avail. any tips.....oh, and i am running a pc, win 2000.
thanks