Fighting with the ugly lag monster

I need some tips on reducing lag on my property. (16,000 Sq M in Kirkstone). Its so bad sometimes that when I walk my legs dont even move and I just sort of hover around.

The things I have done:

Removed scripts from almost everything including all waterfalls, trees and anything that moves. I even went into DeBugging and clicked Show Update to see if there were any harmful scripts on the property and completely deleted those. (I was told objects that have a red pulse coming from it are baddd and blue pulse is ok) - sort of hard to explain hope ya know what I mean. haha

Can non scripted items cause lag like flowers, decorations that are low prim? Can fire cause lag? I have some tiki torches placed around the property.

I am looking for any possible tips to make it less laggy. Im wanting to host events and there is no way I can if its as laggy as it currently is.

Thank you sooo much!

I switched from a cable internet provider to a DSL service and my lag is gone. The DSL service I'm using is only a tiny bit faster than cable but it makes everything appear instantly. Buildings around telehubs appear right away instead of waiting 2-3 minutes.

*edit, I was using Rogers@Home and switched to Bell Sympatico High Speed.

Alyssa,

First of all, its important to note that the God of Lag demands a daily sacrifice. Also, worshiping the God of Dwellnor upsets the God of Lag to the point where a sacrifice is no longer effective.

Seriously - some things you can do:

Click CTRL-SHIFT-1 to bring up the Stats bar in SL. The following are relevant:

-Your own FPS (up at the top)
-Your packet loss (it should be 0.0%)
-The Sim Time Dialation (Anything below 0.95 is cause for concern)
-The Sim FPS (Anything below 100 is cause for concern)
-The number of 'Active Scripts' in your sim (over 300 *can* be bad)
-The number of 'Pending Downloads' in your sim (should normally be at 0 - under 10 is ok)

-Reduce the number of active scripts on your property. If it seems its your neighbors that are the trouble - see if you can politely speak with them & see if you could work together to solve the issue.

-Reduce the number of unique textures you use, and most importantly - keep the resolution on those textures small. Textures over 512x512, or for that matter - a lot of textures over 256x256 can cause a lot of data to need to be sent to the client.

-From my experience, as of 1.6 - lag begins to be noticible anywhere you congregate more than 15 avatars together - regardless of the health of your sim. And the more AV's you congregate over 15 - the progressively worse lag gets. (Note that in 1.5 - I seemed to be able to congregate up to 25 people without lag issues). Rumor has it, that 1.7 will begin to correct some of the lag issues we see in 1.6.

Hope this is helpful!

Thank you Jack and Travis - Great information.

I think the number of unique textures i use is very high ..... I have some large rugs in my buildings that may cause lag Im thinking.

The god of Lag needs to get a life and leave the god of Dwellnor alone! heeheee

Thanks!!!
Aly

If you like, I could come take a look at your property and see if I couldn't give you some tips.

The problem with "lag" is that it's not a very descriptive term... it was originally coined to describe the delay when sending data between two different computers, but in the context of SL, it's frequently used to describe client-side slowdowns, server-side problems, and of course, network latency.

Basically, your plot of land may be completely lag-free from the server's perspective, but if you have a lot of texture data, (specifically, large textures (512x512 and up, not how big the object to which they're attached is) or more commonly, many different textures) your computer can have trouble juggling them all in and out of video memory. Other users' computers may have no trouble at all.

If your textures have transparent (alpha) areas, this can also cause rendering slowdowns, as your computer tries to render them. Because of the way transparent textures are rendered, there's additional computing overhead.

Finally on the client, you can have a decreased framerate due to the sheer number of polygons on your screen at any one time. Complex builds can cause your computer to do considerably more work than a simple structure. In practice, however, you need a really old computer for this to honestly be a problem with prims. Avatars are still complex enough to pose a challenge to some computers, given enough of them.

As for networking, you'll generally experience true lag --a higher ping time-- when another program is downloading or uploading on your network.

Additionally, you may find that the problem rests with your connection. Wireless networks and satellite internet connections are particularly notorious for this sort of thing. Most users with DSL or cable should be fine, though of course, your performance may vary depending on time of day if you're outside North America.

On the server, lag can result from high physics load on the sim, from there being many users in the sim at one time, and from many scripts running. It's difficult to slow down a sim enough to notice by using active scripts alone, but it can happen if you use enough of them.

So it's pretty complicated to track everything down, particularly when faced with problems like the fact that the numbers for "Sim FPS", which one would think would be an accurate mechanism for gauging sim performance... well, they're basically meaningless. They do describe something, but they're all but useless for comparing one sim's performance to another.

I will definitely take you up on your offer. Thank you so much for your response.

I will IM you in game.