Lag? Or what is this?

Just a quick question to clarify. I'm running a pretty good system which should be able to handle SL without problems. It's not the latest/greatest, but it runs any FPS out there at decent frame rates without a hitch, and the drain those things put on a system can be enormous.

I have two things that seem to happen - one is that when tp'ing into a sim, it sometimes takes an inordinate amout of time to rez everything. It can be several minutes. Is this SL or something on my end just not processing fast enough? I have a cable internet connection, btw.

The other is that occasionally, the client freezes and my hard drive spins for several seconds. I can hear it doing it's thing in the case. Whatever I was doing when it freezes just keeps on going. For example, if I was walking forward, my avatar just keeps going until it crashes into something then it keeps walking into that until the little episode is over. When my drive stops spinning, the screen updates and I can see wherever I ended up. Is that lag? I've always thought of lag as those little hiccups you get walking around when your Av jumps back a few paces or refuses to move for a second. This seems different because of whatever is going on with my hardware.

In any event, it's annoying as hell. Any solutions?

Do you mind posting your system's specs so that we can make a more educated suggestion?

Yes, that sounds like lag. Welcome to Our World, Our Lagtime. When stuff takes a long time to draw on your screen, it can be a combination of two things. One you can change, one you can't.

The first is that the new locations (upon teleporting) probably have a lot of complex textures n stuff. If the people who built them put up big textures (1024x1024 e.g.) then your computer has to load ALL that info. Nothing you can do about that.

The second could be your draw distance. I'm at work so don't remember where it is exactly; maybe edit/preferences/advanced graphics? Set it as low as you can tolerate it; I believe 64 is the minimum? This means that your puter doesn't have to collect all the info from anything farther than 64 meters away from you. Easier and faster.

Re: walking/banging into stuff. This happens a lot when crossing sim boundaries...nothing to do except suck it up.

I'm sure I'm missing a lot but this is what I can come up with on one cup of coffee.

Several minutes to completely rez isn't that far out of line, depends on the sim and what's in it, how many people are in SL, and whether or not it's prime time. Lately things have been taking a little longer cuz of all the "issues".

If you're on Windows, the harddrive freezing is probably the page file being written to for quicker access, or removing things from it cuz they haven't been used in a while. I get that annoying freeze too.

Yes, system specs.....

video card? video RAM?

cpu size? dual? single? onboard cache?

what size is your Front Side Bus? (and I mean that in a most respectable manner) lol

amount or RAM?

Sorry - should have posted System specs. The problem is I'm at work and I can't remember all of them. I'm terrible at that. Let's see. 1 gig Ram, single nVidia 6800 graphics card, Pentium 4 600seq processor with 2mb Lev. 2 cache. I don't remember what I've got for video RAM. 800 Mhz front side Bus

The weak spot I see is the video card, but I'm sort of stuck with that because of the type of plug I've got. I'd need to replace the motherboard to get one of the newer ones to work (and the power supply for that matter. Like I said, it's not the greatest system ever, but it works fine for everything else. The only game that's given it lag problems was F.E.A.R. and then only in very graphics intensive areas. I was able to address that with the graphics settings, but I haven't tried that with SL because I like the graphics as they are.

I'll definitely fiddle with the draw rate, though and see if that helps. The most annoying thing is that harddrive spinning screen freeze thing. It seems to happen whenever I'm talking to someone, following someone or when I'm trying to do something where I look like a moron if I all of a sudden wander off into a wall or the ocean.

Editted to change the specs on the processor. /me dopeslaps himself on the back of the head.

I ran on a Pentium III for a while and couldn't stand it. Finally ran out and bought a new computer after my umpteenth crash back in february. I still crash but everything's a lot faster.

Crap - wait - it's a P4. I was thinking of a different computer. *&*#$* (family friendly cursing) I think I got everything else right, though, and I'll check for sure when I get home.

Edit - found the specs on the chip:

Hyper-threading, 800Mhz Front Side Bus, 2Mb Level 2 cache

This is SL's MIN requirements just to run as per LL:

* Internet Connection*: Cable or DSL
* Operating System: Windows XP (Service Pack 2)
o OR Windows 2000 (Service Pack 4)
NOTE: Second Life does NOT currently support Windows Vista
* Computer Processor: 800MHz Pentium III or Athlon, or better
* Computer Memory: 256MB or better
* Video/Graphics Card**:
o nVidia GeForce 2, GeForce 4mx, or better
o OR ATI Radeon 8500, 9250, or better


Note the proc, ram and vid.

This is the recommended system spec :

* Internet Connection*: Cable or DSL

* Computer Processor: 1.6GHz Pentium 4 or Athlon 2000+ or better

* Computer Memory: 512MB or better

* Video/Graphics Card**:
o nVidia GeForce FX 5600, GeForce 6600, or better
o OR ATI Radeon 9600, X600, or better

Again, note proc, ram and vid.

This latest stuff is indeed a problem with SL. More than likely not your computer (unless your system is in fact below the min specs). Every update to SL continues to introduce new problems. Heck, I used to run on an older AMD Athlon 1.4Ghz , 768MB and even god forbid, an Nvidia MX 4000 series (egads!, the horror to you specification junkies out there!) and the system still handled SL fine, I was even able to enable shiny on it and had good performance. That was of course till I think around the 1.8 to 1.9 update, then it all really started going downhill for me.

Just to satisfy some curiosity more, I play Lord of the Rings Online as well and here are it's specifications:

Min Requirements:

Processor: Intel Pentium® 4 1.8 GHz or equivalent
Video: 64 MB NVIDIA® GeForce® 3 or ATI® Radeon® 8500
DirectX: DirectX® 9.0c

Recommended:
Processor: Intel Pentium® 4 2.8 GHz or equivalent
Video: 128 MB NVIDIA® GeForce® FX 6800 or ATI® Radeon® X850
DirectX: DirectX® 9.0c
OS: Windows® XP / Vista
RAM: 1 GB
Disk Space: 10 GB available
Internet: Broadband DSL/Cable
Optical Drive: 2x DVD-ROM
OS: Windows® XP
RAM: 512 MB
Disk Space: 7 GB available
Internet: 56kbps Modem
Optical Drive: 2x DVD-ROM

I get excellent gameplay in LOTRO, low lag, great graphics, I could get better graphics if my card was faster and more powerful yes, but I get great visuals as is now. The important thing to note is that I get low lag and great performance. SL on the other hand it is like walking through lag soup, things rubberbanding, taking a long time to rez/load/etc. Graphics look great to me in SL it is just moving (by avatar or vehicle) and inventory issues. Also need to consider, most systems within the past 2 years should cover the min CPU and RAM specs, adding a 50$ video card (yes, you can get a good video card now for 50$. Not the latest and greatest but a darned good one) should take care of the graphics end.

Sure some people get good performance due to their system specs but so far out of the ones that post the ratio seems to be 2 good for every 10 to 15 bad, not a good ratio and not what we could factor as a normal spread.

Also, don't give me that MMO vs SL bullhockey. I know, most MMO's have their content loaded to your HDD for faster access (remember, I play an MMO). But you got to stop that argument, even sitting in the same sim in the same skybox for 5 hours, that should have been damn well long enough for the client to cache the textures in it's 30 meter view radius. Especially now with occlusion. That should have also been long enough to cache animations, sounds etc. Once SL caches the sounds, textures, anims, it is no different than how most MMOs work as then the content is on your HDD. Yet there is lag, in a skybox that has no windows, lag remains after 5 hours.

I think it is partially tied to the physics system in SL, I have thought that for a while based upon , I dunno, my over 3 years building and scripting experience here. The sims are
processing 100% of the physics data for a sim per sim. One thing I think it is, it is not just an object or a vehicle that have the physics check box active that the sim is calculating physics for. 100% of avatar motion has physics calculated for it ( why can we push each other around and why does the floor of a dance club keep you up and walls keep you in.) The SL avatar has a collision bounding box so every motion forces the sim to calculate physics for you. Even a static box has physics being calculated for it, unless it is turned phantom, that is the only way to prevent physics calculations on objects ( I think this is the majority of the reason prim limits in sims cannot really go up yet, nothing to do with the asset server and why the avatar limit per sim cannot really go up)

Even if all end users had the best of the best (yes, 100% of the active users) that would not solve SL's core problems, we would still have lag, inventory, TP and border crossing issues. This is because those things are not controlled by an end user's PC.

And just to answer the possible the questions:
ASUS P4PE main
Intel P4 2.4GHz (older, single core)
1Gb RAM
160 Gb HDD (new, old one died)
Nvidia 128Mb 5500FX AGP 8X video card (remember, graphics are 100% fine for me)
10/100 integrated Boradcom NIC

Tied to:
a Netgear 10/100 24 port switch (unmanaged)

piped to the internet via:

Intel 700Mhz
512MB ram
server running Fedora Core in GUIless mode piping to the internet via an Intel 10/100 PCI NIC to the lowly Time Warner cable modem via IPTables.

I am running 2.4 gig and 3 gigs of memory and a 8600 gt video card and I am having zero problems. Before when I had a 7300 LE video card my CPU would run high and I would crash but now I am running great with the new video card so if your running a low end video card you are going to have problems.

Not true, my wife's alt's machine is running my older Nvidia 64MB MX 4000 video card and it has not had any more problems than my machine which is much better as far as hardware specs go.

Get this though, my extra machine I use to help me test or do research is running an older 32MB Nvidia GeForce 2 and yes, the graphics are no where as nice as on my main, but SL does run ok, barely crashes at all.

Tell me, what mainboard do you have (brand and model #)?

Motherboard is MSI, My machine was purchased from cyberpowersystems.com

Your wife's alt has its OWN machine??

yep. Being a computer technician for over 10 years will do that. Get a lot of spare parts here and there as friends and customers upgrade. It is amazing the good hardware people toss out even if the HDD is the only bad part. My Wife's main system is the only new computer we have, I just built it last month for her. The other 6 systems that operate are all built/repaired from good parts gathered around here and there, this includes my Dell Inspiron 1100 laptop, a customer had me salvage data from the HDD after they spilled water on it and told me they got a new laptop so I can just toss the old one, I managed to save it and use it as a good spare. The sound is fried, internal NIC is fried and the internal battery DC to DC circuit is fried so main battery is not functional (looking on Ebay for a salvage unit cheap) and yes, the funny thing is now that I mention it, the laptop even runs SL, crappy of course because the integrated vid is not even supported by SL (Intel Integrated graphics) but SL does run on it and I can perform a lot of functions.

Just edited to add...

This irony I just went Duh! on...
Now that I rethink it, that phrase does sound a bit wonky... my wife having an alt...now that sounds like that movie Multiplicity in it's own way, my alt's alt's alt

One thing I found to help immensely with performance is when you go to preferences -> adv. graphics -> card memory. There, reduce the setting to a lower one. Say, your card has 128 mb of video RAM, set it to 64 MB. A bit of the details will get lost, but in return, SL will not power up your card to the max if it thinks you have less video RAM and it will run much more smoothly.

I have experienced that 'freezing up' quite a bit in the last week or so. Didn't really give it much thought at first -- just figured it was another so-called temporary SL issue. However, just this past weekend I installed a third-party viewer, which required me to back-level the SL client to the previous version. I have not experienced that lock-up once since then. I do not know if it was specifically the third party viewer that has maybe resolved the issue or the version of the client --- or both or neither.

@Novis -- You are so right, lowballing the video ram number has made my little laptop crash a lot less.

@Trout -- the freezing you describe is not lag. As one previous poster mentioned, it sounds like your system is running out of RAM and writing to a page file. Which really shouldn't have to happen all that much with 1G memory, unless you are concurrently running some other app that is a memory hog. Like u$ Word, for example.

What client are you using? SL's client still has some memory leaks, and it could be that something in your pattern of play is hitting a leak repeatedly (I notice more paging when I TP around a lot, which is a lot of texture loads). I use Nicholaz's client: tho SL has incorporated a lot of his fixes, it still seems to me to be less leaky than SL's client. I have have 768MB of RAM on a teeny laptop, and have been up for hours with no problem.

Lag is a slowdown, not usually a freeze. And you don't have to run out of RAM to experience it; it is related to the sim server and/or your local machine not being able to keep up with the updates that SL is trying to make.

I'm using the SL client and the only thing I ever run in the background is IE sometimes, if I need the web. I have McAfee and a firewall as well - Zonealarm. Unless something is running in sneaky mode, that should be all.

I know from personal experience that IE and Zonealarm in the background are both OK. But McAfee crashed me with distressing regularity; the latest version is very invasive and I found it impossible to configure it so as to run concurrently with SL. So what I used to do is, before running SL, is reconfigure McAfee to turn everthing off permanently. Then when done with SL, I would turn it on again.

I finally got tired of that and uninstalled it, now use AVG.

Nicholaz's client doesn't replace SL's, it patches it. If interested: http://nicholaz-beresford.blogspot.com/ Use version 18h unless you need voice and/or are feeling adventurous.

Can I borrow your biplane? /me wants to fly over Linden Village and write in smoke "Surrender my lost inventory"! I have a witch costume I can wear while I do it ...

We have a new frontrunner!!

thanks for the info. I'll shut down McAfee when I get online tonight and see if that makes a difference. I've had problems before, and it hasn't always been all that great about catching problems, so I'm thinking about replacing it anyway.

McAfee is a HOG. Turn it off during SL at least. Make sure you don't have any other background stuff running. I know that iTunes tries to keep stuff running, as does Skype. Do a Ctrl-Alt-Del to see what's running by user.

Also, I'd check the Zonealarm settings. Sometimes firewalls overwrite previously fully functional settings during updates so you have to adjust even though you didn't change anything...

For sure, stop as many processes as you can when you're running SL. Especially, change to thin anti-virus software (like AVG) and a lightweight firewall.

Also, I believe 2GB ram is a necessity (on XP - 4GB on Vista, but preferably get rid of it).

---------------------CUTE----------------------------------------


These barebones specs made be laugh. Are they ever going to up date it

@Suzi ... I am running in 768MB RAM, XP, no probs. But I'll admit it was a bit of a tightrope walk getting to this point.