Ok, this is an issue that's been an annoyance for me for some time; I just wanted to post it here in case anyone else has experienced similar things, and has a possible solution.
First off, I know I'm running in an unsupported enviroment (and, if a Linden wants to say "shut up until we get official support for you" that's fine. I'm just curious, mostly.): I'm running Linux on my laptop and running SecondLife under winex 3.2.2 emulation. I suspect that because I'm emulating several key components of an entirely different operating system in order for SL to work at all, this is the reason I usually see "really crappy" performance out of my client-- a good day is 7 FPS, but I'm typically down around 2.7-3.5 FPS. But this is OK and not entirely unexpected; the client is still usable at these speeds.
My problem is that almost always, animations and physics seem to run about twice as fast as they should.
For example: My wife's computer sits next to mine. (She's usually around 40-60 FPS on her Windows XP box.) If we both start the same long dance animation on the same sim, the avatars (including mine) appear to be dancing just fine on her computer. However, on my computer, it looks like the AV's are all hopped up on speed, they're moving around so quickly. (Oddly, when the animation loop finishes on my computer, my avatar stops dancing on hers prematurely.) If we fly our avatars into the sky and let them drop (unselect 'Fly'), on her screen, our avatars fall smoothly to their doom. On mine, they seem to want to drop too quickly, and the result is that they jitter up and down, perhaps falling through the ground several times (I'm assuming as the server updates my client with their "true" position. The inter-polation my client is doing appears to be too aggressive.), before they finally end up a visceral mess on the rocks. This jitter is common among all physical movements on my client.
The weird part? There are occasions when my client actually sees "good" performance (ie. I'm the only one on the sim, and my view encompasses almost nothing-- I get about 12 FPS). If I log in under these circumstances, animation and physics happen at the right speed on my client, even if the cliient FPS drops down to usual levels for me.
Whenever I run SL on my laptop, the CPU is pegged at 100% the entire time (even before logging in), so I know that short-cuts are having to be made, and obviously certain choppiness can be expected. However, it seems to me that my client seems to want to do all these short-cuts in fast-forward mode. So my question is: Of those Windows SecondLife users out there that regularly exprience very low client-side FPS, do your clients also exhibit these symptoms?
My system:
OS: Fedora Core 4, X.org 6.8, and winex 3.2.2
1.86 GHz Pentium Mobile
2 GB Ram
Radeon M300 video chipset (mobile version of X300).
I typically run SL in windowed mode, in a window that's 1024 x 768.
(Note: I am wholely uninterested in any replies which could be summed up: "Pffft! Get rid of your Lame-ux box and buy yourself a Wintendo!" This message is not meant to tout the relative strengths or weaknesses of a host operating system and any replies aimed in that direction will be ignored. In fact, the reason I'm very interested in SecondLife at all is because it's such a unique collaborative system with so many possibilities. It's among the coolest toys I've ever played with, and has the potential to be so much more. And to me, I could frankly care less how beautiful the view is from your virtual apartment, or how many vehicles you have, or whatever. It's poking at and possibly solving weird technical glitches like this one that get me all hot and bothered.)
