What's the lag problem?

Has anyone posted an explaination of why there has been such incredible lag the past week or so? It's crippling in some regions, in my home estate, it just makes movements choppy.

But what's going on?

The more people/bots who are logged onto SL at any given time, the worse it performs for everyone involved. We've been experiencing some pretty heavy loads lately (over the weekend we hit 67K online), and when it gets over 55K things pretty much suck for everyone.

On top of that, there have been some other networking issues plaguing the infrastructure. Just hold tight and hope no one else signs up for a new account any time soon.

Ugh! I love that a lot of people are signing up. I've been meeting the coolest noobs lately! But by this time, hasn't LL worked out a growth plan?

I think there's something else going on too. Don't know if it's the Havok4 testing--but there have been malfunctions that cripple the grid.

"Lag" is a symptom that can be caused by any one (or more) of a large number of things. If you posted the name of your home region, somebody might go by, take a look at it and offer some reasons why it's hurting.

Though I usually agree (or at least don't disagree too much) with Wildefire, I'm not sure the number of people online is the cause of many problems. If you're in a place and have rezzed, you should just be talking to the sim - the total number of people online on all sims shouldn't (I think) have too much impact on this..

No. There's something wrong all over. You haven't noticed this???

Not really...

Perhaps a silly question, but if everywhere you go is lagging badly, maybe the problem is at your end? Try resetting your router, clearing your cache, rebooting your cable modem or dsl modem, as appropriate?

-Atashi

No because it's other people too, and most of the time it's worse for them than me... like people have trouble following me... then we all walk off into the ground, or it's as if we're walking through jello.

No it's not me. I have a very good processor and connection.

I've been experiencing extreme lag, lately, also. Even in my skybox where I rarely had any prior to 2 weeks ago. Wallboxes in stores take forever to rez, they just stay gray for a long period of time. My avie starts walking and then can't stop until suddently she'll "snap" back into place where she first began walking. I'm pretty sure it's not my connection, and I clear cache regularly.

Are you deliberately not providing any details or trying suggestions, Teejay?

I'm not seeing worse lag than usual so it's _not_ everybody everywhere.

No, you're not the only one. See thread from last night...

/327/12/242213/1.html

As to a solution/explanation, your guess is as good as mine.

Ditto - I've noticed it's been worse lately and I agree it seems to be all over. Maybe some people are not noticing it as much as others, but there does appear to be something the matter, even though we don't know exactly what.

Like she said, to her (and me) it appears to be all over the place....



Fair comment - lucky you.

A reproducible test case is usually half the battle. If you know of a sim where you always lag, post the sim name so somebody can look at it.

Just saying "I'm lagging and everybody else is" is like calling a doctor to complain about a cough but not letting yourself be examined or providing any other details.

Yes, I agree, the overall feel of SL has been sluggish as of late. However it appears to be higher ping than normal, not really what could traditionally be associated with Grid Lag. It *could* be on LL's end, but it just as easily could be some router somewhere out there on the internet. That might explain why one group is experiencing it, and another isn't.

My average ping is usually 80ms, lately it's been around 120 ms.

It's all over the grid.
Friends from different parts of the world say the same.
I've been having a string of stealth crashes. Sometimes I relog and I'm frozen (like after a double-TP)

I've not had a double-TP in months, but I've had 2 recently.
I've not had hair-and-boots-in-butt for months, but it happened the other night.
It happened on a sim crossing in the new totally empty Corsica. That's pure network lag.


It does get noticeably worse then concurrency gets toward the new record levels. This is perfectly logical. The grid connections to the asset servers and the servers themselves are swamping overall bandwidth. THe sims might not be laggy, but they are being lagged by other system servers.
It's getting like the 'old days' ('old' for me) People freaked when they saw the numbers online heading for 20,000. Sky falling, don't even try to build, try TPing naked so that the attachment load won't endanger safe arrival - whatever about safety after arrival

I think we've hit a cycle where peak times will be hell for a while.

OMG... angry much, meade?

My home is in Starax. I've also noticed HUGE problems in Laurel Arts Isle.

Jeez--I notice it all over--hard to tell you the name of the sims I go to.

Now that you mention it, I've been getting the old hair-and-boots-in-butt recently as well...

And last night after I crashed, when I came back, friends were IMing me and they did not hear my replies. I was able to public chat, but not seen in IM. Weirdness that never happenned to me before.

It really depends on the issue. Group chat and IMs definitely suffer under severe infrastructure load, and rezzing, editing prims/objects always hits the asset servers, which are shared by all.

Just walking around in your own sim or using scripted objects (that don't rely on communications) is not affected by network saturation, but many other things are.

Well don't forget, the ping is just between you and the sim you're on. It says nothing about the overall health of the back-end operations, or the link between your sim and the asset servers or other facilities, like search. It's the services that everybody uses (communications, assets, search, the map) that produce grid-wide problems, to say nothing of occasional network hardware failures, that have happened a number of times in the past few months.

Not at all. Just saying that if you don't provide any details, you're probably not going to get a good answer.


If you're having problems moving around, which you mention in the OP, it's probably not a concurrancy issue. Things like that are usually either low sim fps - something that people around here can sometimes spot the cause of - or a problem between you an SL.

Unless somebody beats me to it, I'd be happy to look at the Starax sim later (after work) and see what the sim says..

Has your draw distance increased? If it's more than 128m you're gonna get more lag. Try shortening it to 64 and see if that helps or not.

Also, what do you get when you try the test at:

http://www.bandwidthplace.com/

I think I was more taken-back by the fact that you haven't been experiencing lag and wanted to reply to that, because I'm pretty sure it's not just me or the sims. But I would absolutely welcome your analysis of Starax later on (I'm not in-world ATM either). I've recently made some tree parts flexi on Starax and was a bit concerned that that was exaserbating the problem.

Yes we've have chat lag problems on Starax this week as well as motion lag. But the motion lag isn't just the kind that seems like your hitting a wall or walking into the ground. Sometimes it's choppy movement--like a strobe light effect, rather than the smooth swagger that I normally have.

Thanks Jopsey! I'll test that when I'm on my home computer later on. What's a good range to look for?

This sounds more like a problem on your system rather than a network or SL problem...

If (when you get back in-world) you open the Lag Meter under the Help menu, what does it say?