Lag still a major problem

At the test today (8-9-2006) there were 39 people in Ahern. Lag was over the top. Trying to fly anywhere resulted in "limbo flight" that took the av off the edge of the sim. If there is any one primary area that LL needs to focus on at this time, it's killing the lag monster.

A similar problem was faced about a year ago with the Ghosting monster. Freezing and Ghosting was so constant that it required people to relog several times a day. That problem had existed for months and months without resolution until users started making a big stink about it... then 30 days later it was gone. (ghosting is very rare these days).

Same hard-nose attitude needs to be taken toward the Lag Monster. It needs to die. We need to be able to move around a sim smoothly and without going into limbo. Chat should not be delayed. Avs should not freeze in place. Inventory searches should not take 3 minutes of absolute frozen-in-spot lag.

These are things that should have been addressed long ago. We can add all the "features" we want to SL... but unless a user can move, they're not of much value.

you do know it is 4 sims to a server in preview grid right...

It's 4 sims to a server in the primary grid too. (That is, if you are discussing a "box" that contains a quad processor, a single hard drive, single motherboard and single network card). That's how all of SL operates now from what I've been told.

ummmm well I will have to agree with Wayfinder... you can choke on the technical issues.
It doesn't matter... you can split hairs... it doesn't matter.... they can try my suggestion about the Static Cache.
dicussed here:
/13/c6/85940/1.html
Or someone else advice to kill the Lag Monster. IT CAN BE FIXED
But the Problem is real.
And it realy urks me when some Linden joc sniffer says " I don't feel a thing" cause they are lieing. or dead to the world.

The true Problem is That The Lindens take a Pole on what people complain about the most and focus on that... so it seems not enough people are complaining... or just have given up on being heard.
I threw up my hands when I wasn't getting enough Votes on my proposition 989 and that the Votes I did get I had to campaign for.. that means when people complained at a party about Lag I would post that URL above into the Chat window and a few of them acually took time to read it. And I may get a Vote.
I am afraid I would have to say the Majority of the People just complain.. and not to the Lindens obviously.. nor do half of them read the forums...
Sad.. this may Doom us all to Lag.
Shjak Monde

Well, I have seen a LOT of people complain about lag, both in-world and in these forums. I've seen votes, propositions, suggestions. But the lag not only continues... it's far worse than it used to be. I know that LL is well aware of the issue and concerned about the issue... but it still remains an issue.

My guess: two things.. 1) they know part of what is causing the lag but it would be so expensive to correct it, it's out of the budget at this time or 2) they have no idea and no one is willing to do the deep-core digging or re-programming that would be necessary to correct the problem.

Solution: pull a team off of toys and features and give them the exclusive duty of diving in and killing the lag monster. Look in 3 areas:

1) What is causing the inventory system to lag so badly that it can root a user in his/her spot for 3 minutes doing a simple inventory search
2) Find out why it's taking so durn long for textures to load (it didn't always take that long... I mean, 10-30 MINUTES??? To load sim textures?)
3) Dig into deep core programming and data handling routines and find the bottleneck

People have been making those 3 suggestions for months. Time for something to be done.

I think the Major problem in correcting these problems is the LLs attitude about it...
They have built SL on the Idea of a Dynamic System and they will be Damned if they are not going to force it to work.

To Linden Labs.... The way to catch a Monkey....
Drop a Peanut in a Coke Bottle and tie the Bottle to a tree...
The Monkey comes along... reaches into the Bottle and grabs the Peanut...
However the Monkey can not get its peanut filled fist out of the bottle and refuses to let go of it.....
STOP BEING A MONKEY!!!

Let go of the dead idea and do something that works.

That's a very good point Shjak. I made a similar comment months ago: When something doesn't work... try something different. I will have to say this, in all fairness: Linden Lab has been much more responsive to user feedback than a year ago. I'm seeing things implemented that I suggested months ago.. and others are noticing the same things.

Two primary problems remain however: implementing things halfway... or without full foresight. The new snapshot system is an example. The resolution improvement is nice... but at the cost of verstility of use (freezing a user in place and blocking his entire screen with a photo while the rest of the world continues to move around him? Can you imagine such a thing in RL? What a mess!) I've seen many things implemented here that I (and others) could have stated right off the bat "oh, here's a problem with that". I think Linden Lab needs someone to examine new ideas and say, "Good basic idea, but here's a major flaw in the planning. How about this instead?".

Of course, my bad on that, because I don't examine the preview grid as much as I should. I just don't have enough time. If I had on 1.11.. I could have told them about all sorts of user problems that would result. So it is important that users help on the preview grid.

I do think that after this group change thing is in place (which we're all just waiting to see.. WOOT!... more group functions! Been needed for a long time)... SL should focus their primary attention on digging into deep core code and fixing it. Forget feature updates for a while and find the core problems. Have several programming teams working on the issue at one time... the more heads, the better. Get it found, get it fixed, THEN bring in new toys. At least the system will then be able to handle them.

Need to be able to Walk from from one sim to the next without disappearing into the ground... and this is without ban lines even.

I agree Wayfinder... some things are starting to show up... however I can never figure why they want to implment them the hard way or even broken... but to tell you the truth i see lots more new things being brought in that no one has requested or desired.
Seems they realy don't care.... they tend to do as they please regaurdless of our desires.

But I realy realy want to see EVERYONE get involved... complain to the Lindens... call them on the phone everyday and continue to raise Heck until they have to get an unlisted number ha ha ha... get the Lindens to have to run and hide... until they go to phillip and complain that we are complaining ha ha ha... force them to fix things just to shut us up.

and yes Norman synchronizing the servers so you don't fall through the floor when you step across that sim line would be VERY nice.

Hey Shjak, I thought you were lagging cus you were still on dial up

Well, just so it's said, I'm not really slamming LL. I do however take-- and have always taken-- a position of trying to prod them into an agressively proactive position. When they took a hard-core attitude toward killing the Ghosting Monster-- they succeeded. I'm pretty much of the opinion that Linden Lab can accomplish just about anything programming-wise they set out to accomplish. It's just a matter of pointing the engine in the right direction.

Lag has been a serious issue for ages. Lag causes people to leave Second Life. It causes newbies to visit a time or two, then go do something more fun. It causes people to crash and get frustrated and curse LL and SL. Lag is undeniably one of the greatest enemies of SL-- and if I hear one more person use the cop-out question "What is lag anyway?"... I'm gonna tell him what he can do with that attitude.

Greatness is achieved by refusing to make excuses. It's achieved by recognizing a problem and then pulling out all the stops to identify and fix that problem. Lag is a problem. So the whole purpose of this thread boils down to one thing: I'm challenging LL to go for the throat of the Lag Monster and kill it-- just as you did the Ghosting Monster-- and don't come in for dinner until it's dead.

ha ha ha Winter? could you imagine me being on Dail up in SL ha ha ha
Now that would be cool if I could be.

I second that Challenge Wayfinder.

While the physics calculations for 39 avatars must be quite high (were there many child-avatars as well in neighbouring sims?) I do think that if the machines have a single hard-drive for four simulators as you say that it is going to be a MAJOR bottle-neck, especially with how little RAM the simulators get (only 512mb a piece which isn't much given the number of textures being passed around).
I'm surprised each chip doesn't have its own hard-drive, you can get perfectly good 20gb hard-drives at very little cost, and having their own HD would stop the thrashing drive syndrome is likely killing performance once RAM fills up (four processors trying to get files in different locations all at once! That's hard-drive cruelty!).
More RAM and separate, smaller HDs (if need be) would significantly boost sim capacity.

The netcode I'm unsure of, but it can probably be optimised too.

You make very valid points Haravikk. I'm not sure just how much HD space a sim requires, but as you stated, likely a 20 or 40 gig would handle a sim easily (I can't imagine it taking more than 40).

Considering that the amount of customer investment in setting up 4 sims is over $5,000... that should leave a little wiggle room to improve hardware. So like you said, separate hard drives, boost the ram another 512, eliminate hardware bottlenecks. That still of course, won't eliminate the deep-core coding/database bottlenecks, but as LL often says, every bit helps.

Of course, if they really wanted SL to rock, they could have a separate dual-core server for each sim. Bare-bones dual-core boxes are pretty cheap these days. As for space requried etc, considering the minimal needs of a server box, they could even use a small-footprint micro-box system with good airflow (or leaving the cases open in a dust-free environment). All sorts of alternatives to 4 cores sharing common assets.

Of course, they're also considering electricity / space / heat... but you know, that's all part of business. If one is going to run a virtual environment, ya don't cut corners where it's likely to significantly affect performance.

Still, I can't help but think that if they did solve the deep core issues, the hardware issues might become negligible. That would imo, be the way to go. If they solve deep core and find the hardware is causing problems, then attack the hardware issue. The idea is to make SL the best it can be. As it is now, it's just limping along.

Well how severe do you think the deep core software issues are? I know the physics engine could really use overhauling, a more efficient one (not sure on the comparisions between Havok 1 and 2) would reduce physics related lag which is helpful.
Then it's really down to network code, the more avatars, the more info one server has to handle and then send back to everyone which can get quite hefty. I'm wondering if there's a way to offload some onto the client in a peer-to-peer fashion, e.g if I press forward then the server is told, it tells my client what I just did (e.g how far I went, if I hit a wall or whatever) then my client tells all others this. But that could be slow.

There's maybe some redundant data that can be cut-out, but I'm uncertain how much there is?

Well, it's difficult to tell. From what I've observed over the past 1 3/4 years... lag problems are likely divided between software and hardware. But I believe the problems are primarily in 2 areas (mind you, without solid data, this is semi-speculation based on observation):

1. It's likely the single hard drive and single network card being shared by 4 sims could present a significant bottleneck (not so sure about the network card actually. Too many variables).

2. There are definitely sofware issues. Two of the greatest examples of this is a) doing an inventory search and being absolutely frozen in place for up to 3 minutes... and even having SL crash as a result, and b) Textures taking up to 10-30 minutes to load.

Both of these indicate some serious database handling issues. Why is it when I put on a new avatar,it freezes me in my spot while the new av is forming? Mind you, that's not a significant problem... except that it can take up to a minute or more for me to put on new clothing. Why is that? Putting on a few items of clothing should be almost instantaneous with today's network speeds. That tells me that possibly the inventory system is a real mess, and that likely users are not being provided enough bandwidth to load textures at a reasonable rate.

Consider: even if it takes a while to load textures, how long should it take for the system to access a shirt, pants, shoes and three or four objects? Sure, they might be gray... but why does it take so long for the basic items to form? That indicates deep-core database/software problems which likely need to be totally re-thought. Why? Because inventory access used to be lightning fast. Now it's not. The super-lag came when they added a search function to the inventory. This indicates that the search function was not designed well and needs to be rewritten.

Fact of searching: any database can be searched and found in only 13 moves. Whether it's 100 items long or 100 billion items long, any item within that database can be instantly located in only 13 search steps (a microsecond for a computer). If a proper and viable search key is established, inventory access should be so blinding fast there would be hardly any delay between user trigger and fulfillment. The fact that it isn't... isn't good.

I know that the SL inventory system is very complex. But I remember one time I was tired and wrote a computer routine that spanned 20 lines of code. After a night's sleep, I woke up refreshed, went to my computer, laughed at myself for that coding monstrosity, and re-wrote the entire section in 2 lines. That may be what needs to be done here: go back and check out the code and see if it could be done more simply and much faster.

OK, good suggestion - now, how, under the 'Tao of Linden Lab' system of development management can that be arranged?

<shrugs>

I have no problem with the lag or anything because I don't have any lag.

I hear this claim from time to time. Usually it doesn't pan out (nothing personal). To be honest, and nothing personal, when someone tells me they never experience lag, I find that really, really hard to believe.

Since the vast majority of people online do have lag, since the forums are full of complaints about lag and LL has admitted that lag is an issue they are very much involved in solving... my immediate question would be: how is it you're different?

Several questions involved:
What kind of computer system do you have?
What kind of internet connection?
What part of the world/country are you in?
Do you move around SL quite a bit or do you mainly stand around and chat?
Do you build or script?
How many items are in your inventory?
When you say you don't have any lag... are you saying that you never have times when you freeze in place, your avatar never slows down, you never have slow periods accessing inventory and that textures load for you very rapidly? These are all factors to consider.

If you review the above lag questions and find that there are times you slow down, freeze, have textures load slowly, have difficulty searching inventory-- then you experience lag. If you truly do not ever experience lag, answers to these questions may help us trace down why you don't... and most other people do. As with any debugging situation, if someone is not experiencing the problem, they may serve as a positive to try to find out why there are so many negatives.

I never said never, and if I did I wrong for it but I mean most of the time about 95% of the time I don't expierence lag on the preview grid.
This is on the preview grid...

The main grid is so laggy I can't even log on anymore...



Velocity laptop, 3GB Ram, the most powerful video card (well it says so on the internet and in magizienes [not spelled right lol]), and some other stuff.

comcast, cable, highspeed

USA

I move around the whole preview & main grids

I build and script on both grids

I have about 50K items in my inventory... really need to clean it out.

I do have those but rarley on the preview grid, but I can't take one step without crashing or worse... on the main grid.

Considered.

This is about the preview grid correct..... its in the preview grid thing....

Sorry, I'm not clear. Do you not lag on the main grid or not lag on the preview grid?

Last couple of days my friends have all been complaing about more and more lag in the current version. What's causing the current lag and why is LL not doing anything about it?
J.

This makes it sound like they may already be working on this, after doing various tests myself I'm seeing you're right. The asset system in particular is killing things for me especially and appears to be causing sims grief as I try to download stuff that's not on hand for the simulator. This is partly the hardware issue that I mentioned (more RAM and dedicated hard-drives would allow for MUCH bigger/better simulator caches of content) and also the interaction with the asset server(s), which do seem to be a bottleneck a lot of the time (more of them needed?)

I don't think the network bandwidth is the issue here, it's seems more like a data gathering/database bottleneck. This really should be their top priority.

From what I've seen I'd have to agree. But only because I can see the data bottleneck... and can't really see what's going on bandwidth-wise at LL.

However, I've heard more than one person state that as SL has increased in members, it's become slower and slower. And I know on nights that are high in user numbers, the entire system slows down considerably. That of course could be database issues... for more people are accessing data. Could also be more people sharing bandwidth. No way to tell from our end.

But as you say, there for sure is a data flow issue. Lately, I've been lagging to a standstill and then crashing every time I've accessed my inventory. That is becoming really, really irritating.