Quad core and secondlife

Hello,

I recently build myself a quadcore system with a Nvidia 8800 GTS640 with 2GB of DDR2 1066 memory
When i run 2 clients the system slows down so much it alsmost standing still.
Is the SL client optimized for quad core systems? because on my dual core laptop its just fine.. running a single SL client in the quad system is like watching a cartoon verry smooth.

I tried to set each sl client to a specific core but that does not help at all..

Anyone else having trouble runnen 2 clients o n a quad core system ?

SL is a single threaded application, so its not even optimized for dual core systems, when they came out the exact same issue happened to them


btw sorry i dont have any suggestions atm

Nope. E6600+2-8800GTS + 3GB RAM + Windows XP SP2 1= happy SLer. 2 clients? No problem. Client with everything turned up and CS3 & Genetica and a half dozen Firefox windows and a bunch of other random crap = ok.

Make sure to turn on "Render multiple threads" in the debug menu and set processor affinity to a single core. That seems to work best for me.

Turn off everything else, too. Anti-virus will slow down texture rezzing by 10x on a bad day.

OMG I've really gotta get a better computer... Pentium 4? 3G.. 1G RAM, GeForce 6600, XP ~_~ Just renderglow makes my whole system crash.

And are you serious about the anti-v slowing down textures??? I'm iffy about turning it off though - is it possible to get a virus from textures??? and occasionally, I get trojan attacks while playing SL - so I think anti-v on is a good thing.

Aren't those conflicting settings?

I'd think that if SL had a problem with quad core running multiple viewers, you'd set one viewer to use two of the processors and the other viewer to use the other two..

The current thread schedules of the OS are the main problem, not SL. Since there is no way for a program to control threads as they need, they run very chaotically. That causes severe cache problems.

The performance will very and be random until there are better thread schedules or somehow SL is able to control the threads more.

Again with a single core? I have not turned of any corse since first look was released. What is the sence of even buying dual or 4 core COU when your turning them off? If your haing multi core problems you better look at your system and how its setup then turning off cores.

The problem is not SL. It's just the fact that SL exploits the problem with modern OSs.

I have a quad core, 2 gig ram, 8800gtx and it runs multiple clients well, I've had 4 clients open at the same time with no issues, I run on the latest beta driver which seems to work well. The driver that came with my card would barely run SL though.

I have found though that the client that isn't in focus will run significantly slower until its clicked and brought back into focus.

You mean 4 Avies running on "one" Installed client.

Multiple instances of the client however you want to think about it. 4 avatars with individual windows with independent UIs and the task manager reports 4 instances of Second Life.

You are confusing people. Your like saying your have more then one ( if a non tech person is trying to understand this they might not understand) INSTALLED Client and have 4 avies running on each installed client, on one computer. I understand that "A or ONE" installed client has 4 or even 5 different UI can be opened or avies that can be played at once ( is more understand for all ). Explaining it in a more simple manner allows others to fully understand is always better.

Hmm I actually found my 7800 card with 512Mb memory ran 2 or 3 SL's at once better than my 8800 with only 360Mb memory on dual view monitors.
I run it with a dual core 2.2 and 4Gb of memory. i have also used my 7600 no problems on the same board

Video memory has a lot to do with that, especially with dual monitors. Setting SL's video memory usage to 128megs instead of the full card memory will help a lot when using multiple viewers. SL doesn't really need greater than 128meg anyway so you won't see any difference.

I replied using the same terminology as the original poster. Would not matter anyway as you could conceivably have four copies of the SL software in different directories on your hard drive and would make no difference.

Actually it is able to run multiple threads and I see significant performance gains by turning on multiple thread rendering in the client.

never mind just trying to smiplify things for people that DOn`t understand such thimgs.........Oh well so much for trying at least

Well. let me put it more simple.

Quadcore Q6600 2GB DDR2-1066 with a Nvidia 800GTS640 video card

This system has trouble running 2 clients.. (complete system slows down)

Laptop Dualcore T7200 2GBDDR2-800 mem Geforce GO7600

This system runs 2 clients perfectly with no or litle slowdowns.

Now the question is is this due to the sl client having trouble with a Q6600 processor
or should i look for a hardware solution in my system ?


I am not talking about 4 or 8 clients or even 4 difrent installemts. just 2 clients from the same single installment using the -multiple option..

For what it's worth I have a quad core and regularly run 3 or more clients with no noticable problems.

oh sorry felow residents.. if forgot to mension both systems run vista home premium 32 bit

Ewww, no I run XP still

Try setting one SL to use processors CPU0 and CPU1 and the other to use CPU2 and CPU3.

/me wonders if you're having a disk contention problem.. Got lots of free space on the disk that holds your SL cache?

As for my experience there is no inherent problem with the hardware running more than one instance of SL on a quad core, if your computer is set up correctly with good drivers it should be able to handle 2 instances very, very well.

Almost all games in general are single threaded. The only things that take advantage of multicores so far are applications that encode music/video or render graphics. But to answer your question, running two clients works fine on my Core 2 Duo system. If I ran two at the same time on my Athlon 64 single core system, one client would run slow as hell and the other would run a lot faster. I find that this dual core system can run both clients at equal speeds.

Nvidia just released a new set of drivers for Vista that should solve a lot of problems for you, give it a shot. Vista drivers for the 8800 have been sucking badly but they say this latest update fixes this quite a bit.