Having Issues with SL and your Mac?

Are you having issues with Second Life on your Mac? I'm trying to collect some data on what the top annoyances, crashes and problems are that you are experiencing on your mac. Let me know, either IM me in world or send me an email: [email]chris@secondlife.com[/email]

Music streaming is still very intermittent. Sometimes it works mostly it doesnt.
iTunes always works ok so I'm guessing it's a bug in SL and not a bandwidth issue.

Sometimes SL will hang for a very long time when it quits, ( network timeout ? ).

- and ( one for a wishlist ? ) it'd be great not to have to relog to switch Local Lighting on/off!

I really can't think of any other issues that really affect me specifically as a Mac user. On the whole the current version is really very stable, it would be nice if it was faster though !

ill go with faster too i cant think of any specific mac issue right now other than that.

but a big thank you chris for asking about it



jester



.

Most of the Mac-specific errors I see are rendering issues. Often a texture with a lot of fine lines (like a white tile with fine black grout lines) will mipmap poorly at severe angles. Also, reflective surfaces will sometimes use a distorted (or just downright corrupt) reflection map.

My biggest personal issue is speed, but then I'm only using a 1Ghz Mac Powerbook 17".

Hi Chris

Thanks for asking !

Rather than re-iterate it all here, please see thread 31707 entitled :

' Graphics corruption on Mac G5, Nvidia 6800 Ultra '

There is a bug report logged since last Autumn (Fall), but it's an ongoing continual graphics problem that me and a number of other users do suffer from.

Thanks !

My biggest problem is that I can not do a force quit on my mac when SL crashes. 99.9% of the time I have to restart my machine.

YES.... this kills me.

Do you hold down the mouse button on the icon in the dock and click force quit, or do you actually go to the force quit menu? I have found that the menu for some reason works better.

You know, I have that problem on my PC as well. But maybe it's just because my computer's crap.

Thanks for asking.. and starting this thread

Yes.. issues just started the last couple of days - and seem worse today.

1. streaming music does not always load.. getting worse.

2. SL quits responding (does not crash) and seems to somehow 'lock up' my cable modem (Motorola SB4101 Surfboard). I then have to reboot BOTH the cable modem and the computer, MacOS X 1.3.8

3. I trashed the SL app, inlcuding all support, plist, caches, and crash logs and reinstalled SL. seems to help the streaming music issue.

4. I changed nothing on my computer in terms of hardware or software prior to these problems starting the past couple of days.

I don't think it is a resource problem on my end.

Mac Dual 2.0 G5
Mac OSX 1.3.8
2GB RAM
ATI 9800 Pro Special Edition card w/256MB VRAM
High Speed cable connection - routinely get 4.0Megabits on connection speed check at the website - http://bandwidthplace.com/speedtest/ (just tested it = 4.1 megabits/sec)

I have noted a couple of things on LL end. Could these be related to Mac User's problems?

1. The rolling out of the new server version 1.1.15 on a sim by sim basis
2. The new network connection that was activated last night.

Any help / advice would be geatly appreciated.

E.

I run on a PowerBook G4 "Aluminum" 1.33ghz 17", 1.5GB of RAM, ATI Mobility Radeon 9600 64mb.

My biggest complaint would be that I play this game via wireless LAN (802.11g). The problem is really in how SL behaves in regards to out of order packets. Unfortunately, out of order packets are not abnormal with wireless connections, and less so with UDP. Secondlife does not appreciate this, however, and attempts to throttle the network bandwidth cap (which doesn't seem to work right in the first place). The problem is the amount of traffic has nothing to do with the reason for the out of order packets. So as this remedy is not related to the problem, but does have other side effects, it continues on a rather nasty downward spiral.

I would love to see some tweaking of the network communications to allow for better response to wireless networks in general, not just on the PowerBooks.

My other complaint would be that SL is typically slow as dirt if there are more than 3 avatars present. Sometimes as many as 5 can be livable, but avatars seem to be a "killer" to the PowerBook (where they aren't a problem to my desktop). I assume this is a CPU power limitation.

I can't say i've experienced the problems that any of the other people are seeing. I did have some problems with SL hard-locking the system long ago, but it seems to have gone away many patches ago (or possible OSX patches ago).

OH! Let me second the wireless network issues. For me whenever I am on a wireless network my messages get repeated. That is, I will type a message once, and as soon as I hit "enter" my message spams the the chat 2-5 times. I'm told this is due to packet loss *shrugs* I don't see this problem with any other application, like instant messaging or IRC.

Not a huge priority since I now have a really fast desktop and prefer to play there.

To Mac wireless folks:

If you have an Airport Extreme base station, try enabling Interference Robustness on the base station and on your client machine if you haven't already. I've found it makes a difference for the better.

Just like Tiger, I've seen a lot of distorted and/or corrupted reflection maps, which can look really disgusting.

My biggest annoyance? Deletion. I'm on a Mac laptop, so I have to hit fn-delete when removing prims or items from inventory. If we can't have delete on the Mac work by itself, it'd be nice if Command-delete worked (that's what the Finder) uses.

Just like Tiger, I've seen a lot of distorted and/or corrupted reflection maps, which can look really disgusting.

My biggest annoyance? Deletion. I'm on a Mac laptop, so I have to hit fn-delete when removing prims or items from inventory. If we can't have delete on the Mac work by itself, it'd be nice if Command-delete worked (that's what the Finder uses).

some times sl will crash, and then it will require a force quite before it will run again. Some times this has to be repeated twice before it will work again.

Video buffer coruption. *g-force 4 ti* Some times the wrong texture is drawn on a poloygon.
Some times the 3d gui interface get jumbled up. This has some thign to do with the camera angle.
flying to a cerin high increases the chance of coruption.
constant panning can increase/cause the problem.
some time the video buffer seems to be miss alined. causing a blender like effect on the image and or textures.

Some of the error message reffer to the "c" drive.

Some error message have the wrong path, (pc path not the mac path)

thanks for asking, sl dose some amazing things, and it dose those things well.

Why does SL require more memory on the mac?
My 4-year old PC has just as much RAM as my friend's shiny new ibook, but SL runs really slow on it. I think it's a RAM issue... both our computers have only 256 megs.
Graphics quality on the mac is a dream, though!

Just a note to second Kurts comments about the Geforce 4 Ti, because the rendering effects he describes are pretty much identical to those seen by me and others on the Geforce 6800 Ultra (and a little on the 5200FX) - as described in the thread I quoted. Whatever is at the root of the problems, it seems to specifically affect Nvidia cards, as temporarily swapping out to an ATI clears it up in my experience.

Again, thanks for listening to our problems Chris

The base of any app in OS X seems to require a significant amount of ram. If you actually look at a process listing under OS X, you'll find the system itself uses more than 256MB. I wouldn't consider it sufficient to run the OS well, which is why Secondlife will have even more extreme problems with it.

Same here. This problem only began happening since I was at Chinatown on its opening night when that sim crashed. Overall performance has degraded since then. This includes regular crashes, packet loss, repetitive relogs to alleviate lag, and more. I had hoped the new servers would restore my client to it's pre chinatown performance but it has only worsen. I've patiently waited for server issues to resolve themself as advised on the login screen. An improvement was observed onlyesterday. (Finally, a night without a single relog!) I am running a 1.8Ghz G5 with 512 MB DDR400 SDRAM, 160GB ATA, NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 64MB DDR.

I very pleased to see a focus on Mac os performance issues. Be nice to have a section in the wiki.

The graphics have always been great, of course! But, now SL won't load. Sometimes it crashes during log in, but now it seems to crash always after log in process has finished, while I'm waiting for the surroundings to rezz. Usually one or two seconds. REALLY frustrating. Haven't been in SL for weeks. Have uninstalled and reinstalled to no effect. Have changed nothing on my machine, as far as I know.

The other annoying thing is Packet Loss! But I guess that's a Linden problem, right?

Me:
17"PB G4
1.5 GB RAM
80 GIG HD
Radeon 9700

For a long time I had a problem with UI and in-world sound.
I created a new user for SL and the problem went away.
System disk is a little short of space so I moved the user to an external disk.
No UI or in-world sound again !
Move user back to system disk.
Sound returns !

So it seems something in the SL sound library is hardcoding the user path ?
It will only work if the user is on the same partition as the system.

ie...

this is ok
/Users/Laukosargas


this is NOT ok
/Volumes/anyvolume/Laukosargas


In the latter case SL runs fine except there is no sound, world is silent.