Differences in SL Viewer Performance

Okay so I've been wondering about this for some time now.

How is that two people can run SL on very similar computers, with very similar internet connections and have such different experiences.

For instance, my friend and I have basically the same computer setup and both use highspeed DSL. When I run Windlight its a nightmare, things disapearing all the time, locking up, building tools screwy etc, but she's been running Windlight since its inception with absolutely no problems at all. Sometimes I think she thinks we're making our problems up lol.

But I see this all the time with my friends. Aren't we all using the same software (as long as we're using the same version that is)? Shouldn't we all be experiencing the same problems?

Just curious.
FaTeke Wottitz

"So shines a good deed in a weary world."
Willy Wonka

I suppose the answer has to be whatever is not identical about that which is "very similar."

SL is ultra-sensitive to differences in graphics card settings, so if there's any difference in how they're configured (not just in SL itself, but in the graphics card's control panel, too), it could easily account for the differences.

Then there's the network. If you and your friend are geographically separate, or use different ISPs, that could account for the problem. Indeed, with DSL (or cable), even neighbors can have very different effective bandwidth, depending on the quality of the wiring.

Also, where you go in SL and what you do can make a huge difference in the textures that have to be loaded, etc., so if you and your friend do different stuff, it could make the difference in performance and reliability.

What Qie said.

My Resident Geek says:

You have to look under the hood. Open a list of the running processes on both machines and see what's going on. Check memory type and timings. Check clock speeds and voltages...is one of you overclocked? Run antivirus, spyware, and registry cleaner utilities to check for infections, resource grabbers, and simple inefficiencies. Check graphics card settings, both in the drivers, and the SL settings. Check virtual memory settings, performance wasters like drop shadows and other graphical UI "pretties", and turn off indexing for your hard drives. Turn off most of the stuff in your startup menu, and also check MSCONFIG to see what processes start automatically when you boot. Many of them can be safely disabled. Above all, if you have Norton or other Symantec products, uninstall them, and use your registry cleaner to root out the residual Symantec litter. That stuff is like kudzu.

For lots of tips to improve overall computer performance, look for a site offering advice on "Windows tweaks".

I recently improved SL's performance by moving the cache from the default location onto a different drive, which happens to be a four-drive SATA RAID 0 array with zonkin' throughput.