sl is rapidly becoming unplayable

today I make the decision to uninstall sl from my gaming pc due to continual performance issues making the game almost unplayable, my pc specs are.

2.8 GHz AM3 Quad Core
4Gb DDR2 RAM
Nvidia GT 9600 1Gb
Windows XP pro SP4
Seagate 500Gb HD Sata2
Broadband connection typically running at 6-6.8 Mb

this pc is a brand new build only software installed is sl and a lightweight AV program.I clean and defrag HD dialy, and frequently clear the cache
Recently most of the time I spend in world is waiting for things to rez or to load (inventory has taken up to 30 mins to load), TP'ing has become a nightmare with frequent disconnects and relogging can take up to 40 mins, also lag is becoming intolerable. This is making it impossible for me to "work" as music club hostess, I have lost my past 4 shifts because of technical issues either for myself or the DJ I am working with, as a direct result of this its impossible for me to earn any lindens and so cannot afford the tier on my rented parcel, or indeed the land I recently purchase related to a new job as sim manager.
The in game performance stats show my ping between 300 and 600 (ridiculously high...unless the server is on the moon), there are ZERO file sharing programs installed on this machine, and the frame rate is usually about 10fps (a joke).
I am a final year science student at the University of Glasgow, so today I experiment with pings, packet loss, and upload/download speeds to Universities in California, Washington state, Oregon and Florida, west coast uni's the average ping is 160 and east coast 120,packet loss is zero and download speeds are approx 2Mb, just under 1Mb for uploads....very acceptable performance .This leave 2 possible reasons for sl's extremely poor performance, Linden Labs Hardware and/or software is incapable of the tasks its attempting to perform OR my connection is not being directly routed to the US,perhaps through asia (adding the pings from this route can easily add up to the high ping the game reports.....(the data travels at a constant speed, ie the speed of light so the only way for the time to be longer (assuming LL's hardware and software are up to the job) is a greater distance being traveled), either of the reasons is totally unacceptable.I have a great few months playing the game, but the fun has totally gone and the game now only causes stress.
The small upgrades(fixes)are doing very little to help with this problem and I'm sure Linden have a major upgrade planned, I hope its in time to stop the mass exodus from the game.
I'll leave my account active for a week or 2 and see if these issues are resolved, if they are not I think sl has run its course and its time to put the game to bed.
I'll frequently check my e-mails and the forums (hopefully with good news), or I feel its time to look for another game to play, in short SL has stopped being fun.A fantastic concept but perhaps sl has got to big for its original idea.
Thank you for your time, I hope this feedback helps Linden Labs to quickly resolve these issues, if not I thank them for a few months of fun.
If anyone has any suggestions or advice this would be greatly appreciated
regards
islay Srabblebat

#1 - Please, please use paragraph breaks, blank lines and sentence capitalization & punctuation in the future. Your post is very hard to read all jumbled together like that.

#2 -- My computer specs are not quite as good as yours, yet I have very little trouble running SL unless SL is having problems (like now)

There is no reason to defragment your computer daily.

What sort of broadband connection do you have? Cable, DSL, wireless or satellite?

Are you using a wireless network?

What graphics quality settings are you using in SL?

What do you have your network maximum bandwidth set to?

What size do you have your SL cache set to?

Those are all things that affect SL performance. Client side FPS is greatly affected by graphics quality settings. Some wireless networks don't work real well with SL, despite working fine for browsing and sharing files over the network.

The SL maximum network bandwidth and cache size are things one can play with to see if they make a difference in how long it takes for objects, textures, etc. to load.

Also, you might get better results by using a different viewer than whatever ones you've tried.

Sounds more like a network problem to me. My old router kept seeing me getting logged out of Second Life when I tried to teleport, I didn't actually think it was a router issue but other sites were playing up and when I installed a new router, the telport issue pretty much went away.

My connection is ADSL2 to the exchange (3/4 of a mile away) then fibre optic all the way from there.
The point I make is my connection is excelent to every educational institue in the US I test the it with. Using my other pc (2.5 C2Duo, 2 gig RAM, gt7600 XP pro) I can easily connect to 64 player MP games on west coast us servers (EA , Ubisoft and Activison servers with accecptable ping and Frame rate) with no problem. The only problems I encounter is when attempting to play sl.

Please note my first post is worded to make it easy to translate into other languages (we are a multi national community), not a lack of knowledge of correct grammar.

Now Lil, you can't expect a college senior to use even remotely correct grammar skills. They don't teach those until grad school.

lol thanks Chris, you make me laugh, at least we still have our humour (uk spelling lol)

I dont use a wireless connection, and even tried configuring the game outside the router.

Available bandwith for the game and available disc space are both set fairly high, as are the graphics, with the pc spec the graphics should be abe to run maxed out without a problem, as they are with every other MP game I play (all with very much more demanding graphics than sl - lets be honest the sl graphics are pretty basic - advanced for their day but that day was almost 10 years ago).

I agree with the previous reply that recently (past 2 or 3 weeks) the issues are getting much worse (making the game virtually unplayable)

Fibre Optics does not mean speed of light all the way. It just means speed of light from when it leaves your network card until the next booster and the next after that until it reaches the exchange box. From there you could have contention with your neighbours and any businesses in the area, when I am running a bandwidth meter I can see a marked decline at home when people get back from work.

Right, from the junction box, you then hit the whole grid of Glasgow and from there you need to get pushed to the nearest satellite or cable link across the sea. Last I heard they haven't laid fibre across the Atlantic nor do they shoot lasers up into the sky.

Finally, I am in the UK and I suspect that our routing methods are not so very dissimilar because I will sometimes depending on the sim go ingot the 300-600 ping range. It is also rare for my rig to get more than 10 FPS and never over 15 no matter what I do with it.

This rig puts out Quake 4 at 60 FPS without a problem and I don't know any game that it drops below 30 except SL.

It can be set automatically to occur in Windows 7. Mine defrags nightly at 1am. Though, if i had to actively run a program and set it up i would not do it everyday.

Check your firewall settings. And since when is there a service pack 4 for XP???

When did Microsoft come out with SP4 for Windows XP? As far as I know SP3 is the latest and last Service Pack for Windows XP.

The available bandwidth for SL is 1500 kbps. That is the max the LL servers will ever send to anyone regardless of their download speed. The viewer will work on any modern HD made and as long as there is enough room on the drive to hold the software and cache it will run (a drive with very little or no free space will have problems with almost any program.....but that is not the fault of the software. But with the OS). A cache size too small or too large can cause problems with the performance to SL......experiment around to find a size that works best (the default 500 megs is probably the one to set it to). Also if you are letting Windows manage your paging file that could be slowing you down......you can manually set it and see if that helps. Your modem and any router in the mix might be contributing (they might even be "the cause" to your problem.......try resetting them. The driver you are using for your nVidia card may need updating.

A 300 ping from the US is not really that bad........I've seen pings of 600 or more. A 300 ping would certainly slow you down but not, all by itself, to point of unplayable........you can't do anything about the distance nor the route from you to LL's servers (neither can LL).

And, lastly. Your statement about being able to play games online that ARE VERY MUCH MORE DEMANDING THAN SL is likely to be incorrect. I know of no other game or software that is available to non commercial users as graphically intensive as SL (there's a lot of computational activity going on too). Some commercial video graphics programs may be more demanding but not any game availlable online for people to download and use......that includes such games as WoW, Cryis (or whatever that game is), Everquest, etc. If you don't know it already SL uses OpenGL to render the graphics.......unlike the games I've mentioned which use DirectX. Most games are optimized for DirectX so, naturally, the game makers design their games using that rendering engine....which means the graphics card manufacturers also spend most of their efforts in that direction too. It causes a few people problems with less than top end graphics (however your 9600 should work fine).

You can leave this post here and Linden Lab will probably never see it. If you want to give them feed back try emailing them. I wouldn't be as abusive though.

A test using a different PC at the same location is not that valid. You need to either test from the pc your having problems with, OR install SL on the other PC and see what it runs like on that.

Both of those would give a clearer picture of whats going on.

SL may look a bit crude and oldfashioned, but it's extremely demanding on graphics cards because it's drawing so many more triangles than it absolutely needs to draw in order to produce a scene both because it uses prims for most objects which results in rendering lots of hidden faces and a lot of content is not made by professionals skilled in and concerned with reducing rendering load.

If you are actually running at Ultra settings with a draw distance of 512 I'm not surprised you are having trouble.

You (or someone else in a similar situation) might consider at least reducing your draw distance to 256 or 128. Reducing the draw distance decreases the amount of data that you need to get.

For what it's worth, I just tried the Snowglobe Frequency viewer and it seems at the moment to be getting better than usual FPS on my old equipment.

What bugs me is that a 500 MHz CPU with 256MB of RAM laptop that has some onboard graphics card and running SL off a USB flash drive via wireless connection is getting the same output in FPS as I am.

Only difference is the wireless related disconnections.

Found your problem!

Wrong. The official viewer has an in-built bottleneck. Several others (like Emerald and Cool Viewer) let you crank it up to 8,000 kbps. And trust me, the servers are going along nicely with that.

Sorry, it's the servers that do the limiting. Not the viewer. When you set the viewer to whatever you set it to you are telling the servers that you want that amount.......MAX.

By the way, I have Emerald. I opened it up to something like 5000 kbps per sec. I still got occassional spikes to 900..........mostly about 500 though. That is exactly the way it acts on the LL viewer (even on the Emerald viewer) with it set at 1500. You'll never get more than the servers will send............and LL has set that at 1500.

I see over 1500K on the bandwith meter frequently in the regular viewer.

Spikes. How about sustained? With my Stats Bar open I see spikes that hit the top of the scale too.........but that ain't saying I just got a shot of 1.5 plus mbps of data. It means the meter got spiked. If LL decided to send more than the 1500 and you have the ability to recieve (your connection) and the ability to process (your CPU and GPU) then go for it. I will too (my computer and connection can handle that and more)........but as far as I know LL still has that max data sent set at 1500 kbps. You will never get more until the servers send it. Setting your viewer higher might make you feel better but you are not gaining a thing.

It stays above 1500kbps for long enough that I am not convinced that is the limit.

My XP system is roughly similar, and with a less capable graphics card, yet I consistently get 35 FPS and no crashes in sims that are well managed and not bloated with script overload or crowded to near max capacity. In short, that computer should run SL just fine, and many of us do so on less capable systems than yours, without the issues you're citing.

Sounds far more like an issue with your ISP, or your SL client app. Have you tried doing a clean uninstall and re-install of the SL client?

Also, it could be a bad memory module. I've seen buggy performance before when a memory-intensive app runs afoul of a faulty memory strip.

And SP4 for Win XP does not exist. You must be on SP3.

You're gonna have that when you hang out in busy places all the time. I generally am working alone in a sim that's usually pretty sparse with just a few other avies, and my specs aren't nearly as good as yours. It's definitely not your system, it's where you spend your time in-world. If you can hang on for a while (read about a year), script limitations will be in place and things will improve. Also, we all hammer Simon and Andrew Linden to work on the sim crossing issue, though after years of doing it, it's still an issue, but at least it's on the table to get worked on.

My bet is on ISP traffic shaping. which could be tested on someone else computer on the same service...

if there's has the same issues, yay, you know the source... can and harass someone.

if it doesn't have the same issues, I'd test your vid card on some other 3d stuff and see if that has issues.... and test an app that uses lots of memory too, as Ceera pointed out, bad ram can cause flaky behavior on high use apps.