Fields of Molasses - Snapshot and Discussion Thread

I've written in Hotline to Linden about this and I'm sure I am not the only person expereincing this headache either but figured I'd post some additional snapshots here and may be others can post their own snapshots too.

The sim I am in is Olive. I have been in this sim for about 3 months now and have never had any problem at all with lag or the sim crashing. Since the last 1.7 patch it has crashed several times and the server-side lag is phenomenal. As the subject of this suggests, it's like walking through a field of molasses. Robin Linden replied and said that they are aware of the drop in framerate across the grid but I don't think they fully realise just how bad this is. It's not a minute amount of drop.. it's a massive drop of performance making the game largely unplayable.

We're not talking about standard network latency, or even texture loading lag.. or even graphical frame rate problems. Just take a look at some of the screenshots here. The one titled "Almost Back to Normal" is the best it gets for a minute or two, then it drops back below 0.80 dilation and other stats drop respectively.

Try to reduce/remove scripts that have listens in them--or change the listening channel to other than 0. http://secondlife.com/badgeo/wakka.php?wakka=lag for more info about reducing server-side lag.

From what I've heard, this is a texture pipeline issue - and Linden is aware & planning a solution sometime next week.

To confirm whether this is your issue, check your stats, and expand the "Time (ms)" section.

If you see your Frame Time rather high (above 50ms), and the Images time taking up proportionally the majority of it, you may be being hit by the same issue.

Unfortunately, there's no hard or fast workaround for this. I'm not sure if Listeners are contributing to this problem or not as Eep suggests, but since this is an issue that affects the whole sim - unless you own every parcel its next to impossible to rid yourself of all listeners.

I experimented with shutting off the few listeners I have in Isabel - unfortunately it made no change to the time dilation. It seems that once it starts to get bad, it only gets worse from there

Well, someone rezzed about 192 listeners in a sandbox last night and it brought the sandbox to a crawl, but it was also rezzing/shooting fast particle bullets so that contributed too. But even when they weren't shooting particle bullets, it was still causing a lot of lag that went away when they were deleted.