The rezzing delays caused by Windlight are now beyond a joke

Sigh. It has been a NIGHTMARE of a week. Each evening I login to a sim to find myself at co-ordinates 10,10,10 - underwater, invisible, apparently Sitting (the Stand button does nothing), Search no good, IM only works in fits and starts...

Then when I finally manage to log Ruth into an actual sim so she can look out over her watery empire, NOTHING REZZES FOR AGES. And when it does it's a long slow and hellish wait as bit by horrible bit the sim and maybe (if I'm lucky) my avatar rezzes so I can start using SL.

Strangely, weekday daytimes (UK time) is not a problem , its evenings and weekends. I guess because the US isn't online yet at those times. But if this is what we can expect from the Windlight "experience", forget it. What is the point of super whizzo skies and lighting if we cannot enjoy SL? And this is from someone who has yet to use Windlight - I'm talking about the effect on the regular viewer.

Lindens, just give us back SL as it was a week or so ago, even with all its bugs and hissy fits. Don't give us a new toy to play with if your servers can't cope. And plainly, they can't cope.

I was having some issues until I updated my video card driver. Have you tried this?

Funny, I've only been getting improved performance with Windlight myself, as most of the effects ARE client-side... sure it's not your hardware getting old?

Windlights extras are a client side option, not server side...

That's not Windlight I don't think.

I had that exact problem due to a massive friend's list, which after a couple of 40 minute calls to concierge and some weeks of utter frustration I solved the hardest way. I deleted about 1000 friends off my list, and everything worked again, right away.

I hope I'm wrong and you've got some other issue - one thing that indicated it was a problem for me was under the general preferences tab, shutting off 'show online notifications' helped greatly (but not enough).

Just sharing my experiences; your mileage may vary. Good luck.

you aren`t forced to use windlight, don`t like it? go back to the normal client, FL is beta

I'm not using it Alicia. I'm using 1.18.4 - I'm talking about the effect of it on the LL servers, which don't seem to be able to cope... but if it's not Windlight, then it's something else they're doing? Seems strange that it only happened after Windlight started though...

Desmond, your experience sounds interesting,but actually I don't think I have many more than 100 in my Friends list, so its not that - oh and when I tried logging in my friendless alt at the same times, exactly the same thing happened, so its not that for me, definitely.

And by the way, lots of people I know say they had big problems last week, so SOMETHING is amiss.

the problems with the server past and early this week was LL screwing up as server after server failing and they are planning to upgrade the code for the next client release (god help us...) so not cause by windlight

windlight is mainly local untill they add the server side aspects of it in the future

WindLight is entirely client-side right now, and even when they add the sim-side component it will be negliable since all it would do is send the client a handful of numbers once.

If the problems always occur around the same time, and across both SF and Texas hosted sims then the problem might actually be ISP related rather then grid related. Starting a thread with your specific ISP and the times you're having issues would be a good way to see if anyone else is having the same or similar problems as you at those times only and help narrow that down, or rule it out entirely .

No its an iMac, there are no changeable video card drivers. But it is ATI Radeon X600 Pro, so though its getting a little old now, it is no slouch - it easily outperforms the connection speeds I'm getting.

And my hardware may be getting a little old, but it's the last of the G5 iMacs, so it's not too bad.

That was the other thing I was going to try - the only problem with this is that it's very hard to tell when it's SL lag (where the bandwidth can be quite high but performance sucks) or not, as looking at the Statistics Chart doesn't seem to give any consistent tie-in between reported bandwidth and my problems. For instance the other evening, when I had bad problems and apparently very low bandwidth, the frames-per-second score was nearly 10 times higher than usual!

What makes you think that Apple never updates their video drivers?

Interestingly, I found the new Windlight to rez MUCH slower for me too. Went back to the pre-voice viewer and everything was back to normal. I was so disappointed they forced the new Windlight version on us this weekend.

The previous Windlight version may have been a lot slower than the old client in empty areas, but it did load textures faster, and imposters helped my lil' laptop in crowded areas.

Hopefully the next version will rectify whatever they changed in this weekend's release!

I don't know how anyone can say the problems are completely client side. Windlight requires a client coded to see the feature........that's all client side. However that client is useless for viewing Windlight if the server is not sending the code for the client to "see". I've experienced many more problems with my "normal" viewer since the very day LL announced the Windlight viewer being available in beta form for users to download and use. Both the Windlight code and the regular viewer code are being sent to every viewer all the time and it's all on the main grid. And I, for one, think it's related to the issues being experienced by many.

It may be partially due to client problems.........but it's also due to server side. Seems every time LL intorduces some new fancy eye candy to the grib we need to screw around with our settings and/or find work arounds to "fix" a problem that should not exist in the first place. Every day now we have blogs telling us some issues are being experienced with the grid.......EVERY DAY!!! So convince me it's all client side.

The server doesn't send anything different to the windlight client than it does to the regular one. It just gets drawn differently by the windlight client.

Any server issues you're seeing are unrelated to windlight.

The code had to change. Windlight was not on the servers until LL put it there. However you really just stated what I was trying to state. It's new.

The first WL download was fine for me. Rez and tex came through a bit slower, but nothing major. Then the required update came along, and with it disaster. Super slo-mo. I've had to go back to the non-WL SL. Ah, well, WL was nice while it lasted.

Windlight is viewer side, not server side. Likewise, any code that *is* on the servers has been there for a while now, as they've been doing internal testing with it for some time, and had the original Windlight first look before that.

Mari

There's a serious problem with the Windlight viewer right now, http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-3162

Objects will disappear and not be visible if you have Client > Rendering > Object-object Occlusion enabled

If not for that, I was loving it, improved performance with the fallback mode, and shiny water too (:

LOL. We had the same thing happen when voice came out; uninformed people jump to absurd conclusions, spreading FUD. Windlight is completely client-side, with absolutely no additional information sent to the servers. If you are using the main client, windlight has ZERO effect upon you. Please stop and think, and inform yourself before railing against features.