1.7 Made Things Laggier? But I thought...

Well fellow SL players, As I sat watching the kalidescope of transparent grey slowly turn to colors of our world I was wondering if this will indeed help the lag issues.... So I waited...

Once loaded my eyes adjusting i turned my avatar.... well i got a smooth yet jerky turn.. best I can describe it.... I tried walking and my avie was jerky... or was it the world around my avie.. ack my eyes.....

And the textures seem off somehow.... I kept peering around at things wondering if it was me or did things get more grainy. I tried to pull up a friends profile.. its still loading as I type this.

Patch a Fix? Or Another Waste of Time Patch? I vote second.

So far I only like the classifieds tab addition.

Well, with an update, all the caches were flushed... emptied... so it'l take a bit of time for everyone's everything to re- cache... that means you don't have local info about your items or your areas... Only time will cure that much of the problem...
As for lag... those caches get filled by something, don't they... and eveyone is caching up... We probably won't get to know how well the new version does, until its had time to warm up and get to what should be its average running speed... whatever that might end up being...

Thats true. I can give it some time.

Hve now been to about 15 sims, with the longest tp times ever... and several freezes.. almost everyone can hardly walk and windows take 4 ever to open. Every sim I hav ebene to is so lagged u cant walk or fly straight u just hit keys time and time again nothing happens and then ur about 400 m away later

Its all completely unplayable right now. Its so slow I cannot even edit text or see my messages typing before they appear in world so have given up and logged off. I have been in over a dozen sims and all I see is grey and no textures?

I do NOT understand that my home sim was slow before when it dropped below 600FPS how on earth are we supposed to pay this game at 45FPS?

On the little graph bar my own FPS shows as 0.7 !!!!!

To me, this is impossible, and the game unplayable. I tried to rezz an object and over 30secs later it still had not appeared in world

I never understand how they have months of preview testing, yet every time a new version appears we lose a week or so as it always ends up a complete and total mess.. I can't do any serious work, I cant eve walk across a room without ending up on the wrong side, the lag is so severe, and who can work when u walk a few metres from a texture and its gone grey again, and reloading, over and over again. Its just the same every time

Because that 600 "FPS" was illusionary, Snakekiss. It was a result of the sim just looping over and over as fast as it could when there was nothing making it work.

As anyone who used the preview will have found, it's entirely playable. This happens after every major upgrade.

Wow... and I thought it was just me using winex on linux. Good to kno u window's user's are suffering the same problem's as me.

Yes it is true that the caches were flushed/cleared.. yes it is true that it will take some time to get all your cache files back to where they were before, yes it is true that there are teething problems after every major patch.. however, what I am seeing is really odd behavior on the network side of things.

I walk around My land for 2 or 3 hours.. not travelling very far at all. I kept my minimap up so I could see if anyone else was around, and there wasn't, that entire time.. and yet.. I was forced to continually download things over and over and over. I opened up the new Advanced Sim Status tab, and opened the Network tab so I could see the detailed network traffic to and from my client. I was continually having to download the same textures over and over..

Take 4 or 5 steps and the bandwidth for textures shoots up to around 200Kbps, stop and it slowly works its way back to 15kbps again over around 60 seconds. Then, turn around the other direction and walk back the same 5 steps and it shoots up to 200Kbps of texture updating occuring again. Wait 60 seconds and it's back to normal. Rinse, repeat and the same results.. each and every time.

I understand that there needs to be a little data passed to and fro, to see whether I have the cached textures or not and if they are different then I have to download them but if they're not different, and I am 99.999999999% sure they wouldn't have changed within a minute with noone anywhere on the minimap, it shouldn't be downloading the same texture information over and over. That is what cache files are for right?...

Anyway.. that is one problem..

Another problem I am seeing on the Sim stats in my particular sim, is that there are now way over 1,700 active scripts running.. where there was only 300 to 400 the day before the update. And it fluctuates constantly, sometimes changing by as much as 100 active scripts and then changing again and again and again, with only one person in the sim.

I've tried posing all this to the Live Help but noone responded, so I am writing it all here and hoping for some answers from those people who "tested" 1.7 in the preview.

I believe the figure now includes previously "hidden" scripts, such as scripts being worn in attachments... so now we can see exactly how much CPU is being eaten up by bling, genitals, colour changing shoes, etc etc...

I have been experiencing many of the same problems posted on this thread, although as of right now.. I can't even stay connected to SL. I can stay connected as long as I do not try to move, open menus, or type.. I recieve IM's but if I respond to them, I get disconnected. I sat still, doing absolutely nothing for 20 minutes, hoping everything would settle down, and after 20 minutes, I still had no textures, and got disconnected the second I tried looking around.

I'm running WinXP SP2, only firewall I am using is windows firewall and yes, SL is on the exception list, I did a complete reinstall after the patch.. I'm not quite sure how to solve the problem, nothing else seems to work..

Well, the textures coming up slower may be response to a suggestion I made quite a while back: instead of lagging an av to no movement, gray in all textures and allow the av to move around, filling in textures as time allows (ie, make avatar movement a top priority and texture filling a secondary priority). That way folks can move around familiar areas immediately without being brought to a standstill while textures load.

Based upon what I have read so far:
Please correct me if I am wrong on any of this, I have a long way to go to learn the technical side of SL.


The FPS reading is to mean Frames Per Second, this is a measurement that can be related to TV, if I recall correctly, the FPS of video is 26 to 30 perhaps even a tad higher , this is based upon how much data and how fast that data can be presented to the human eye. If it falls below this level, we see jerkyness or the individual frames as they wizz by, like in a flip book. Anything above this limit is not able to be perceived by the eye so it isn't worth trying to pass data off that fast as you wouldn't see it anyway. It appears that LL is tryng to maintain an ideal FPS level so that graphics/motion is presented to the client at a constant FPS of 45 to keep the graphics inline with the limits of what your eye can see, 45 giving about 15 FPS wiggle room for slow downs. By capping all activities to the same level of FPS which matches the value for the physics engine, it looks like they are trying to keep it all in sync-scripts vs textures vs physics in order to present a better data flow and co-ordination to prevent the jerkyness we have seen before where an object will go physical and drop but you don't even see it happen as the rendering was laggin but the physics was working just a tad higher therefore causing a delay in what your eyes perceived vs what really happened. Since SL is supposed to be a Real-Time platform, it doesn't really live up to it's name if an object moves but the rendering engine is too slow to show that to the client in real time.

The script measurement is all active scripts, even ones in attachments in avatars for the sim. So all the bling, special attachments like tails and body parts that go alpha with a command, prim hair that can change color by command etc are included in this measurement. It will fluctuate as avatars with said attachments move in or out of the sim and as scripted objects get rezzed out and deleted/taken. My avatar has 2 such attachments, a tail with 1 active script and my collar that has 2 active scripts in it.

And the general lagginess are a result of the major revision update, same issues last major update and this issue will always happen in future vesions. It is very difficult for data to be refreshed to thousands of clients all at one time especially when close to 70,000 residents will need to download the exact same data and update at one point in time. Get the same problems on Windows Update when a super critical patch is produced to prevent a massive worm, too many connections requesting the same exact data, aka timout condition, packet needs to resend due to expiration of the TTL or no confirmation that packet was received etc....

Sim FPS, as far as I understand it is, more to do with Simulator Frames Per Second, not Video Frames Per Second... but may be it is more of a hybrid of Sim FPS + Physics FPS = The Approximate POTENTIAL Video FPS. Anyway, aside from that I'm not too worried about the lagginess.. as has been stated a few times in other threads as well as this one, the lag will settle down after a while.. I am just concerned about the amount of network traffic occuring even when there is only one person in the sim, and nothing is changing.. only the avatar moving a few steps back and forth.

If this is going to be the norm then I won't be able to play because I only get 12GB a month on the highest account possible in my region. Before the update I was averaging around 500MB a day and I was just barely getting in under the monthly limit, now it is going to be more like 650MB a day. Which means I am going to be without SL for 5 to 7 days each month. I am a premium member paying, like everyone else, for lots of land and I need to be in the game 7 days a week to support my scripts and objects that I sell.

Anyway.. was the bandwidth like this in the preview? (see my above post)

It seems that I lose my caches each time I get disconnected.. and everytime relog everything is either gray or transparent again, I guess thats an improvement considering since the update, the last 10 minutes has been the 1st time I have even had ground textures.. lol