How to reduce this lag?

My laptop is only a coupe years old, so its not too outdated or slow. However, theres a serious lag when i pay second life starting about 10 to 20 minutes after i log in. Besides logging out and logging back in a hundred times a day, what can I do to reduce lag?

Quite a few things you can do in your graphics settings and network settings. I'm sure if you do a search for lag reduction or something you will find numerous posts with good information.

Turn off particles.

Do you have an Intel card? They are prone to lag in SL after some time. Also NVidia cards have shown that behaviour,

See here: http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-7072

What seems to help some times is turning on forcing FXT1 compression in the OpenGL settings of your graphics card, but if you do that, sculpties won't render correctly anymore.

Most likely it is the continuing memory leak problems of the client that only a reboot will truly fix.

How do i do that?


Yes, I have a Nvidia graphics card.



How do i do force the compression? And what exactly is a sculptie?

Sorry to sound like a noob, but I am one. But i am trying to fix that.

Sculptie is a type of object and if they do not render correctly anymore then a very large part of your SL world will no longer render properly. Possibly a sculptie hair will stay looking like a round blob on top of someone's head - maybe stuff like that.

reduce your draw distance to 64
This makes a major improvement to performance.

edit - preferences - graphics
Then there is an advanced tab on that dialog where you will see draw distance.

Also on the same page change local lights to "sun and moon only"

Might I also suggest you be very VERY careful with how HOT your laptop gets. SL is very demanding and can be painfully hard on laptops in particular.

/me has totally fried 2 laptops over the years from the heat generated

Play WoW instead.

Reduce your SL cache to no more than 500 megs............250 is good.

I have it set to 100 Megs.

I'm pretty sure its a memory leak, as has been suggested. I turned on a program that monitors how much RAM is used, and the number keeps decreasing until there is barely any memory left. Then, when I close out of Second Life, all that memory is magically freed up again!

Unfortunatly most laptops are just not designed for playing 3D games.

Unless you have one of those $2000+ "gaming" laptops SL s going to suck.

and even then a $500 PC will blow it out of the water every time.

OH NO! The green haired one got to Colette!

Sounds like you're overworking your gfx chip (and processor), and it clocks down to protect itself from heat death...

Do you maybe see weirdly rendered things sometimes too? (Lines, garbled textured, prims all wrangled up)
Is your laptop getting really hot?

Try reducing your gfx settings. (view distance particularly).

Hmmm. How much memory are we talking about here?

There are some memory leaks in the client, but often they originate in the OpenGL libraries supplied by the graphics card makers. So it may help to know a bit more about this machine and what's installed on it. Specifically, from "Help" / "About Second Life..." you should see something like:
... except without all the Linux stuff. Some folks may know Windows nVidia versions, their specific OpenGL screw-ups, and to work around them what settings need to be nerfed.

When I first log onto Second Life, its only taking 100 MB, but works its way to 400-500 MB, which makes it real choppy and laggy. I can barely do anything at this stage so
I have to log off at that point. From log on to log off is usually 20 minutes to half an hour. If I'm lucky, 45 minutes.



And here is my graphics settings for SL: [img=http://img221.imageshack.us/img221/9818/slsettingshr4.th.jpg][img=http://img221.imageshack.us/images/thpix.gif]

Anyone know what I can do to fix this problem? Do any of the alternative clients patch up the memory leaks with the current release of Second Life? (unfortunately, Nicholaz doesn't have a release with the current release of SL)

I have a 3 year old HP laptop which is truly not up to running SL, but I can get it going - just about. Based on my experience I recommend the following:

- try Nicholaz Berresford's old style viewer
- use a laptop cooler or a riser of some kind to keep the air circulating round your laptop
- reduce draw distance to the minimum
- try reducing the Maximum Bandwidth in case the internet connection is part of your problem
- get up the Advance menu (CTL ALT D) and uncheck rendering for any types you do not need - don't render particles, clouds, trees, grass, animated textures, bump
- don't have lots of complicated avatar attachments, e.g., hair with lots of prims with alpha textures.

and... try and be patient. Good luck

This is mostly a *bump*, but if it were me, I'd check to see if a newer version of the nVidia drivers helps. It's a mixed bag, with nVidia screwing up different bits of OpenGL with each release, but I'd give it a try. Also, I'm thinking that somebody who actually uses the Nicholaz viewer will know which version to try these days.

I find that changing lighting settings makes very little difference to the lag.

I have a fairly low end graphics card on my laptop, the setting that makes the MOST difference is "basic shaders"

If I can ever get the Linux client to work on my Puppy Linux, I should be good to go. I usually have 80%-95% of my RAM available when not on Second Life (when surfing the web or playing another game!) as compared to the 40%-50% Vista gives me when not on Second Life.

Download this little utility and keep it running while you use SL - it will give you an indication if your graphics card is getting too hot:

http://www.cpuid.com/hwmonitor.php

If you haven't discovered it already, there's a subforum for SL Linux users at /263/1.html. The Linux client is very dependent on a solid set of OpenGL drivers. Sound is also tricky just because it's such a horrid mess in Linux (so if Voice is important, this can be either tricky or a showstopper). And for video, all the gstreamer stuff has to be happy. But all that said, I like the Linux client very much, and almost never crash with it--even the current RC that seems to be giving problems to many.

OMG! You're her alt?!?

Well, after four straight days of endless lagging on my end, I believe I finally solved the problem (at least for me anyways). I do have a high-res graphics card on my PC, and I knew SL would run more smoothly over time. All I had to do was clear the Internet, avatar, and group cache. To clear the group cache, I just go to Advanced, then select Clear Group Cache on the drop down menu. To clear the cache, I just go to Preferences, and I forget off-hand where to go from there, but I did find a way to clear the cache. Once you click the Clear Cache button, you just click the Apply button, and then OK. Do that immediately before logging off for the night, and you may see results. The cache will clear once you log on again.

The lagging problem depends on certain circumstances. For the most part, I can declare the lagging is the problem of the user - if he/she neglects to clear the group/avatar cache each time, or if he/she has an older computer, or if he/she has a not-so-great quality graphics card on his/her PC. And having an above normal number of users online at some point doesn't really help if you neglect to clear the cache on a daily basis. Failing to clear the cache can lead to lagging if the cache accumulates and eventually it eats up the PC user's virtual memory. Virtual memory is what may cause the graphics to load up easily no problem. If the graphics or SL loads up slower than normal, virtual memory is a bit low. If they load up faster, virtual memory is getting better. I will clear cache over the coming days, and I may end up seeing good results.

So, do all of us a favour and please - remember to clear the group and user cache every night before logging off, and you'll see positive results the next time you log in.