Poor sim performance

I'm just wondering if anyone else has had a problem similar to mine?

For the last couple of weeks, but only since the last viewer/havok 4 update, I've been experiencing very poor performance in my home sim of Nuclear.

Things have got so bad that I can't really visit there once the online users start getting towards the region of 50,000.

Since the last upgrade I've been getting lock-ups on a regular basis, as well as getting what I call "dodgy sim crossing" syndrome. You know what I mean, where you start walking uncontrollably and can't stop.

The odd thing is that this only seems to be when I'm at home or in my shop or nearby.

I did have a little wander around Nuclear this afternoon, and not all areas seem to behave this way.

It's driving me nuts. I'm trying to run a business here so it make it very awkward.

Other areas seem to be fine most of the time.

One thing I have noticed is the adjoining sim has a very busy area right next to me. I'm wondering if this could have any effect on my performance or not?

Any ideas are greatly appreciated. I'm sure I'll get more help here than from the Lindens. I submitted a ticket well over a week ago and still no reply.

Yes. There are lots of kinds of lag, but for simplicity we can categorize them into that which affects everybody in the sim (visible in the lower part of View / Statistic Bar), and that which affects your client specifically (roughly, Frames Per Second, shown at the very top of the Statistics Bar). Avatars in neighboring sims ("child agents" of your sim) can affect both kinds of lag. But judging by the fact that you feel it locally to your area, it's most likely client-side lag; you may get relief by turning your draw distance down much lower there than you normally would. This won't solve all the network traffic and client processing caused by nearby avatars, but it's likely to make it better.

Physics performance since the most recent update (1.21) that was rolled out Thursday/Friday is especially poor, in simulators that had extremely good performance (frame-times of less than 10ms) I'm now seeing big spikes in time spent calculating physics, resulting in huge amounts of physics lag =(

Here's the JIRA issue, please vote:
http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-2236

To confirm if you're seeing the same issues, hit Ctrl-Shift-1 to bring up the 'stats' sidebar thingy, click the 'Total frame time' at the bottom to open up a breakdown of frame-time, you'll likely see that a lot of time is spent on physics, which is unusual, as in most populated simulators script time is the highest stat.

I found I can get guaranteed crash within minutes in in Andraca and a couple of other sims using the RC viewer, but be online for hours elswhere no problems. If I want to lok after my properties in Andraca I swap back to the Standard 19.1 viewer and then have no problems. I confirmed the same results using alts too.

Well I'm not sure if my problems are the same as yours.
I just logged in a short while ago (logged in to Huntsman, no problems there), online users were only around 38,000, and it was worse then ever. Managed to get a sreen shot of the stats before the mini map went red and I had to quit out. Here's what it said...

Basic

FPS 21.7fps
Bandwidth 452kbps
Packet Loss 0.0%
Ping Sim 371 msec

Advanced

Simulator

Time Dilation 1.00
Sim FPS 45
Physics FPS 44.9
Agent Updates/Sec 14.0
Main Agents 8
Child Agents 6
Objects 11838
Active Objects 682
Active Scripts 5189
Script Perf 57367 ips
Packets In 188 pps
Packets Out 419 pps
Pending Downloads 0
Pending Uploads 0
Total Unpacked Bytes 250 kb

Time (ms)

Total Frame Time 19.8ms
Net Time 0.5ms
Sim Time (Physics) 1.4ms
Sim Time (Other) 2.2ms
Agent Time 1.1ms
Images Time 1.1ms
Script Time 14.6ms

I'm afraid most of this is gibberish to me, so hopefully someone here might be able to enlighten me. The basic section is about the only bit that I understand.

I did lower my draw distance right down to the lowest setting, but I don't usually have it any higher than 128 normally anyway, 96 most of the time these days. Didn't make the slightest difference

If anyone happens to fancy a challenge and has some spare time on their hands I'd be gratefull if someone would visit and take a look around. See if they can work out what could be causing the problems (see my sig for location). I really am at a loss. As I say this has only happened since the last upgrades.

One thing I haven't mentioned is that I run a Mac. iMac 20" 2GB ram, 256MB graphics, system 10.4.11. I have read other Mac users may be getting similar problems to this.

I have tried the latest regular viewer, as well as the previous viewer and the RC. All have the same problems.

Just thought I'd give this a nudge and see if anyone else has any ideas. I'm running out of them myself.

My sim is unavailable again!!! 3 out of the last 5 times I've tried to get home, my sim is off line...Tupi...what's going on here?

I keep locking up after just a few minutes on my home sim. I've been looking in the LL blog, etc. for news about this. Anyone else having this problem? Along with prims sliding back after you edit them? Slingshot AVs?

I have been experiencing this (prims moving and slingshot (or rubber banding as I like to call it) for well on 2 weeks, maybe longer

makes it hard to make anything

It could be a hardward problem, a problem with the filing system seem most likely. Or it could be a coding problem. Another thing to look for is collision spikes...though, with the new Havok 4 simulator, that seems unlikely.

One thing I have seen that has brought a sim to it's knees are self replicating physical objects. See if that has anything to do with it.

I'm just shooting in the dark here, as I am not an administrator.

I made a short "house call" and can't say that I've isolated the culprit here, but the sim is definitely seeing some large physics spikes that periodically hit time dilation, and force script processing time down into the single-digit milliseconds per frame. So, if that's going on when you're feeling the lag, maybe we can eventually track down the physical object(s) causing the problem. (But... the thing is, this would be the same throughout the sim, not just local to your area. And it's sporadic, so... would be just coincidental if it only kicked in when you were around your area. And, the statistics you posted in that other thread look normal--*not* what I'm seeing here tonight.)

I'll try to get back in-world later and take another sample, and go hunting more diligently for physical objects in the sim.

[Edit: God, we really need some kind of performance tools for Mainland. My attention is drawn to a physical animated sculptie shark swimming around, but I have no way of knowing whether it's the thing sucking all the physics cycles or not. Hopefully a Linden will respond to your ticket and sniff out where the problem is.]

Do you think it's safe to hold my breath till this happens?!

Depends. Do you need air to survive? If yes, then the answer is no...

In my typically elliptical way, I was suggesting a couple of things. First, I'm not even 100% sure that what I was seeing--those physics spikes--are really what's hurting your experience of the sim's performance. You might want to watch that Statistics Bar for a while, with the physics numbers graphed (click once to get a bar and again to get a kind of scattergraph), to see if misery correlates with physics lag. (It did for me while I was there, but those spikes were very different from the numbers you reported in your earlier post.)

And if physics is indeed the culprit, perhaps cozy-up with the sculpty-swimmy-sharky thing and see if s/he might remove it temporarily as an experiment. It's possible that H4 is not playing nicely with it (or with anything physical; there are a couple other physical items easily spotted with beacons turned on, including what seems to be an oar resting on the beach and a non-Linden beachball stranded in some ferns; there could be lots more hiding anywhere on the sim, of course).

As for holding your breath... blue is the new black.

Thanks for all your help Qie. I sent the owner of the sharks a message a little earlier on. There's actually two of them, one's just under the water. Thanks for the tip about how to find the physics stuff too. I'll go hunting tomorrow, IF I can get into Nuclear that is, or whenever it decides I'm allowed to

I think the other physical things may belong to a good friend of mine, so I'm sure they'll take them back to inventory just to see how they affect things.

Now at least I have some positive things to try out, rather than running round in circles (or straight lines, SL crash style) and getting nowhere, cheers.

If you can't get into a sim here;s a trick to try, try TP to the 4 sims around it and walk in from one of them, I found once my home sims was only visible and accessible from one direction, also I could not tp from the sims on one side to those on the otherside for a radius of about 5 sims
Of course if it's an Island you're hosed :/

Funny you should mention that. That's been the most successful way of me getting "home" for the last couple of weeks

Such a shame that my home sim performance isn't like my original little 512 first land plot. I still have it, and it's always lovely there.

Submit a "Sim Down" ticket detailing the problem and they should fix it pretty quickly with a restart.

Mmm... did that... still waiting!

Not sure if this is a significant development or not as I don't have a clue about coding, but I've been watching a JIRA issue about freezes on the Mac.

Someone's just added some info which sounds very interesting.

Take a look at the latest comment by Kathrine Jansma... https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-2358