What's the lag problem?

/me looks at the Starax sim for Meade, who won't be on until late, if at all.

Few things I've noticed here..

This is one of the nicest sims I've seen in SL.

The physics time, even with just me on the sim, averages 3.5-4.5ms, which seems a lot higher than it should be. I can't find any actual physical objects via beacons, even flying up to 768m, but there's a big chunk of land here with one of those damn security systems so there's parts of the sim I can't look too closely at. You should (nicely) ask the estate manager/owner to look at Top Colliders and see if they can spot the problem.

Nyla's store uses some pretty high-resolution textures for very small things. The color swatches, little .5m square objects, are using 512x512 textures. This is way-overkill but, IMO, not a huge problem. If there were a lot of people in and out of the store, it would be more of a factor.

Daruis' fireplace is slightly evil, doing many full updates/second. I suspect there's a particle script in there that's rapidly turning on/off. Again, not nice but not a huge factor.

In the little dance area, there's ~10 objects doing partial updates very quickly. Also not horrible but I can't help but wonder why all the static-texture dance floor tiles and disco lights are doing a ton of updates/second.

Just to the east of the dance area, something in the middle of the waterfall, like Darius' fireplace, is doing tons of full updates/second. Again, this looks like a particle system that's turning on/off rapidly and, while not totally evil, isn't very nice.

By far, the biggest problem that I can find is your dive tower. It's a 100-prim temp-on-rez object that's being deleted and recreated every minute. Every time this happens, with just me here on the sim, the sim fps drops from a happy 45 to a not-so-happy 30 or lower (and time dilation drops from .99 to .75). This _is_ evil. If there were more people here, I don't doubt at all that this would be causing a lot of problems.

If you clean up the dive tower and still have problems, post again and I'll take another look.

edit: also, you should look at your PC - if you're seeing movement like you say, you're probably getting low client-side FPS. Drop your settings down and see what happens.

Any luck with turning down your viewer settings to help that stuttering lag, Teejay? Or with the Starax sim??

Actually last night was pretty bad all over SL. I have never experienced it like that before. I am most of the time lag free also, so I can understand what you are stating. I think its just something we have to deal with from SL as they work on fixing that.

The only difference I've noticed lately is slow hair rez...not bald, but with 3 or 4 prims sticking randomly off Ann's head. VERY attractive.

Teejay reported a couple specific problems...

One was that he was seeing a strobe light-like lag. This is almost definitely caused by a low viewer FPS. Jopsy suggested he cut his draw distance, which is a great first step in tracking down the problem.

The other was that his home sim of Starax has been having problems, which Sindy investigated on and posted about above. Since she thought the biggest problem on the sim was something that Teejay himself owned, it seems like this is also something he can do something about - if nothing else, he can take back the thing temp-rezzing a 100-prim object every minute and see if the sim starts to feel better.

Both of these can be looked at more, if he's interested in making his lag less...

But you're cute when you're almost bald.

A few points below:

Wow! Thanks for taking such a detailed look at Starax!

Maybe that dive platform DOESN'T need to bee temp rezzed. I'll likely just use a perment object to replace it. The problem is that it is on the border of my land and my neighbors' -- who needed the prims, but donated actual use of land itself to Mt. Trumboji park and allowed me to terraform it into my mountain and use a few prims for trees and such. My question is... if the root prim is on my land, will all the prims of the object be associated with my land? I don't want to burden my neighbor with the 100 prims. I CAN NOT, actually.

THAT SAID:

Starax is now the most comfortable place for me (lag-wise). I have been in two other sims (one of them being Selene) where I have had the most horrible lag-freeze-crash problems. Other people on the sim appeared to have no problem at all so this must be my system. Although I have never had problems like this before in SL.

The lagging and freezing is followed by an eerie trip to an isolated blue void where I am folded in half. I have clearly crashed at this point.

Again, this is so frustrating because this is a recent problem. SL has always been relatively smooth for me. It was nearly a year ago that my cable company (my ISP) doubled their equipment on my block. I literally have had this trouble for only the past 2 weeks.

Are you wearing a new HUD? Some time ago, I was experiencing a very slight and weird jumpy view(almost stroboscopic), made me kind of queasy. I finally figured out it was a Hud I had been wearing. Threw it out and got a new one. It did sort of look like lag although it didn't make me crash. (Jab in the dark)

Absolutely. The parcel located under the center of the root prim is charged for the entire object. When you edit the object, look for the blue Z-axis line - the ground that this touches is the one that gets charged for the objects prims.

I can take a look at Selene later. Or maybe talk Sindy into looking again...


You mentioned earlier that you were seeing sortofa strobe effect when you tried to move. I would bet money that this is due to your FPS dropping really low. Open up the stats bar, ctrl-shift-1 and look at the top of that for what FPS you're getting. Then take Jopsy's advice, always a good idea anyway, and lower your draw distance (in Preferences, under the Graphics tab, IIRC) do to 64 and see what, if anything, that does to your FPS.

Thanks for the reply, but no. I am not wearing any new HUDs. From a related thread that started around the same time as this one, I take it that many other people are having the same experience. I just find it odd that many people are having no trouble at all. Weird.

THANKS!
Not on my home computer ATM, but I definately will look at these stats. Jopsey also gave me a ste that tests your connection. Will do that again this week.

Are you using a new viewer or did you totally reinstall?

If you start SL after doing one of these things and notice that all the old pop-ups are back, the "you're now flying" and such ones we all got when we were brand-new, all of your Preferences have been reset.

If that happened _and_ SL went all crappy about the same time, now would be a good time to go thru your preferences again and turn stuff off that you're not using (like voice, etc).

\
As a matter of fact. Yes. This happenned after I removed SL entirely from my system. I re-installed the normal viewer. That's when I originally posted. This weekend, I reinstalled Windlight, because that always ran smoother for me (for some reason)--but I had the same problems.

I keep a lot of stuff pushed up high. Yes--including draw disdance. But like I said, I never had problems before. So I think that re-install is just a coincidence, although not ruling anything out.

But Meade, did you notice the similar thread on this board? It's like there is a group of us that all have the same problem in the same time period.

There are always people in these forums talking about lag, constant crashing, etc...

If there is really a problem that recently started happening for some set of people, it'd be good to look for what they have in common and report it to LL.

You and I think alike

I had just posted the question and my specs on the other thread. I hope we can get to the bottom of this.

It's not just lag. There are a bizarre set of experiences that we have all had in an isolated time period (the past two weeks). You might get a kick out of the thread: "Having a nightmare with lag.... everywhere!"

Wow, didn't see one reply yet that was the usual, "Oh well, your PC obviously isnt as Uber as mine with Quntiple-Cores running at 10.6Ghz, 50GB of RAM, and a GeForce Warp 10 9600, etc."

Been in SL for I guess 3 years now and lag always is bad, just sometimes it's worse than others.

I had very little time in world over the past few days .. RL's fault ! .

However I did notice on the blog that certain regions are changing IP Address' and some subnet changes .. maybe a reason .

LOL
I don't know what that means, but it sounds impressive!

/me wandered around Selene last night.. Another nice looking sim. Really nice people there, too.

There does seem to be something wrong with this region but I couldn't spot the problem. With just me there, it sat around 43-44 sim fps which while not bad, isn't as good as an empty sim should be - my old class 4 mainland sim home does 45 sim fps when there's 10 or less people there, as long as they're not rezzing stuff. There were sometimes lag spikes down to 10 sim fps or so but I didn't notice any pattern to their timing or any change to objects on the sim that matched the spikes - on the starax sim, the lag spikes were more consistant so it was easier to spot the problem.

There's a fair number of objects there doing a lot of updates but nothing looked really, really bad - nothing with tons of prims doing tons of updates.

There is a tree that rezzes temp/physical fruit but I watched this and the sim stats for a while and it didn't seem to have much impact. The fruit is 1-prim spheres and they do roll around a bit but I never saw the physics time on this sim go over 1.0ms, even when there were 4-5 of them on the ground.

One really annoying thing I found on Selene was that I crashed about 10 times while I was there. The _really_ annoying stealth crashes where chat/IM still sorta works for a bit but you can't move and the minimap goes red. A few people I talked to there said they were also crashing a lot there but I had to leave before getting details on how often/what kind of crash/if it was only happening on Selene.

I suggested to one of the locals that they ask the estate owner or a manager to add a support ticket if it looks like a lot of people in that sim are having the stealth crashes. This sim is on a Texas server and LL recently had some scary problems (https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Useroppy_Linden/Network_Errors_and_Data_Loss_2008-01) with a router down there - it could be that the crashes/lag is related to some other networking problem with Texan sims...

Thanks again Meade for taking the time! You'll have to show me how you find all this specific info some time!