"Pulse Lag"

I am fed up and looking for solutions to the problem of "pulse" or "wave" lag which is also sometimes refered to as "turning" lag (although that might be unrelated.)

I have complained about this since before 1.5 and it mostly comes and goes with different updates and with the network conditions of the day, but when you get it, it usually lasts for days and days and makes the game really unplayable.

I tried bug reporting it once when I was really mad (I used some expletives I think), and about two months later I got an email from the bug guy to send a detailed report but of course it wasn't happening at that time, and when it came back, I had lost the email.

Also (and this is REALLY IMPORTANT for the bug people to get in their heads), some of us cannot make a bug report. The kind of bug reports that get noticed and answered are the kind that are full of technical details and speak "bug report" language. There are tons and tons of users like me that never make bug reports cause they dont really know what to say or how to phrase it like the bug guy wants you to, or so they will have some idea what you are talking about and actually look into it.

Okay, so the symptoms are as follows:

- You freeze periodically, like in "waves" or "pulses" of lag. They last for a second, perhaps two, then you unfreeze and turn around ... just in time to run into another wave and freeze again.

- Sometimes this goes on constantly for hours and hours at a time! Sometimes although it will lessen after a few hours, it's back later and continues in that fashion for days and days at a time!

- This used to happen when I had a bad computer and low stats like FPS, so I jsut figured I had a crappy computer. But since the last few updates and since installing a huge amount of memory, I notice this still happens. Now I have excellent "stats" as compared to before, all my nubers are great, but it still happens. So it has nothing to do with FPS etc.

- It happens on high FPS, low FPS, or with lots or no time dilation at all. It happens in an empty sim with hardly any scripts and it happens in Neualtenburg under heavy script lag, it just doesn't seem to be realted to anything I can see at all.

- The only clue I have is that it might be "ping" related. It happens under high ping numbers and also under low ping numbers, but it seems, maybee to happen when the ping numbers are "racing." That is if they are high and stable or low and stable, then it doesn't seem to happen much, but when it's happening, usually the "user ping" and the "sim ping" are out of sync with each other and racing back and forth on the scale.

So what is it? and whats the cure?

When it happens to me, it's almost always caused by a loss of signal between me and the Lab. Tracing the route general shows an extensive drag in some median area such as Dallas or at LL's front door in San Fransisco. They've hopped on the colo before when enough people have emailed them trace reports, but then that's technical stuff i suppose and doesn't answer your question.

That's generally what causes it though. What's the cure? Being in a block of sims hosted by a colo closer to you will help. Crossing regional borders will be more of a bear; but that's a problem that's never gonna be fixed anyway. As soon as people embrace p2p and give up the notion of virtual vehicles, we'll be ready.

We see that LL is already understanding and moving in that direction by providing multi-sim regional tools.

You might get more constructive response to this if you ask that the thread be moved to the Technical Support. That's what they keep telling us anyway.

Thanks for the response. Acutal information after only half a year of wondering.

- What's a colo? Is that close to the rectum?
- If I get you right this is hardware related to the routers that LL uses? If so why would it matter about sims and sim borders?
- It seems to happen to me no matter what sim I am in on a given eveing, i.e. moving to a different region or sim has no effect.

On a related note, how is it that ping changes so wildly without affecting performance anyway? I often have ping numbers in the thousands at times and at other times in two digit numbers but dont ever really see a increase/decrease in performance in terms of FPS. At least the FPS and general laggyness is not *always* related to the ping and my ping seems to fluctuate wildly.

*note to RESMODS** Please move this thread if I have it in the wrong forum or you think it will get a better response in the tech forum.

i would like to know why framerate must be tied directly to your connection and the speed the sim is running at. a little serverside movement lag is one thing. clientside lag like this just shouldn't be happening. i understand sl's architecture is different and all, but come on!

one short term fix i've found is, hit alt-enter. changing to/from fullscreen/window mode seems to flush whatever it is causing the lag out of your system...for a minute or two at least. just changing from fullscreen to window when i'm getting this lag without changing the direction i'm looking at will often change me from 1fps to 30 or more, and that's a huge difference considering i'm still looking at the exact same textures and geometry. (debug shows the difference here being in the time spent on render_geom) - torley and some others have made posts on this in the past, going back a year or more.

and khamon, i could be wrong, but i was under the impression there was only one colo, in SF, so there's no way to get on one "closer" to you?

This happenes to me when my Hard Disk is fetching crap
Now mind its not a "slow" disk (ata 133 10,000rpm fireball) but ive got lots and lots of little php files, and peices of textures, that im working on, in combo with virtual memory, SL's wonky cache, and the fact Ill defrag maby once every 2-3 months...
all of that is there to help the "pulse" lage, on my machine. but usually it only last's a second or 2.

GL and happy hunting

Oh btw do you happen to know your hard disk speed, if not is it a new one or a older one. cause you can time the speed difference tween a ata 133 5400 rpm disk vs a ata133 7200 disk with a wall clock, the difference increases if your using older ata tech (like ata 100, 66 or 33 <- doubtfull, but lets not forget compaq and their love of bigfoots a few years ago)

hmms, i've got 2.5GB of ram, and defrag nightly. i've heard of people completely disabling virtual memory. how much should i have to try this?

you can do it now, but if you run out of ram the computer dumps the progam or worse, goes bluescreen, it really depends on what apps your running.

IE: ive got 1.5gb if i turn off VM i cant place 1 complex vector down in Paintshop Pro before a crash

But i can play the QUAKE 4 demo all day long

That actually used to work for me as well, till the last update, in which a bug was introduced that seems to crash the SL Client when shifting from full screen to window mode. More than likely its because I use a ATI card though so not likely something many experience.

The lag I am talking about is definitely not HD related.

I am running SL on a relatively new laptop with tons of memory, good specs and running no other programs at the time. Also there is no undue HD activity that I have ever noticed at the time that it happens.

Sometimes I think it's related to the fact that the "interest list" is notoriously broken from time to time.

For instance the freeze happens a lot when you are turning, so the client does something with the server (asks for a new interest list?), and for whatever reason the server can't talk back? It also seems to happen more when you turn with the arrow keys than if you use the mouse.

If that's the case, they could fix it by simply tellling the server not to freeze the client if that "interest list update" or whatever, is not going to happen. I would rather turn around and see a blank texture, than have my client freeze because the server is having trouble sending me a list of textures that I *might* need to see.

On the other hand it happens just standing still at times, so I have no idea if the "turning bug" or the 'interest list bug" are actually related at all. they might be different things, or they might *cause* the pulse lag, or the pulse lag might cause them.

Anyone know what the whole "ping user" and "ping sim" measurements even mean? that would be a start at least. Any Lindens or bug guys reading this?

Maybe this should be moved to the tech forum, now that I am talking about it I would really really like some kind of answer from someone in the know.

Ok, I may be waaaay off here, it definitely wouldn’t be the first time, but I’ll try to help anyways…

But, first under the debug menu (Ctrl-Shift-1), open up the advanced-tab and at the top you’ll see two different meters labeled “k-tri” something or other, which basically is how many thousand polygons it’s trying to draw onscreen… IF this number jumps up real high (like 4k+) at the same time you get your freeze-for-a-second-or-two lag, then it’s possibly due to complex geometry (I.E some twisted torii or other complex shapes). The tough part is that the interest list/whatever seems to still grab up and get confused by complex stuff like this, even if it’s behind a wall…

Recently I ran into this issue building a forest out of twisted torii and complex shapes… The worst part was that even if I had a wall between myself and the forest area, or if I was inside a house, ect, I’d still “hiccup” when turning to face the direction of the forest. In other words, as long as I was A. close enough for it to be within my draw distance, and B. facing it, it would stutter/freeze for a second. And k-tris drawn would jump up drastically right along with the stutter/freeze…

If you turn down “object detail” in your preferences, this seems to help; also turning down draw distance helps… Or removing the complicated geometry, of course, which isn’t always an option because it’s probably on your neighbors land. The fact you say it freezes for a second or two, usually when turning, is what makes me think it’s this issue, as it seemed almost random to me/ only when I turned until I realized it was happening whenever I was looking in the direction of my complex forest. Like I said, this is a longshot, but I mention it just incase it helps…

just for the record laptops have SLOW ASS hard drives, they cannot compete with the sheer rpm of the desktops becuase of the wattage draw on your battery. Seek/ read times are much slower also, again becuase the pulse motor that controls the magnetic head swingarm just doesnt get nearly as much punch (do to wattage restrictions)

Also on moderen systems that little Light doesnt blink every time your disk is accessed (like it used to on old computers) im sitting here now listening to one of my disk's doing something (probally with virtual memory) and there is no light activity.

User pings is how much time it takes to send a chunk of data from your computer over the internet to their computer and back

Sim ping im not too shure about, ping is of course the way we determine conectivity and how long it takes from point a to point b and back ... now is it going from the sim server to maby the asset server, or sim server to router, or sim server to sim server i dunno

probally user ping is going to an account server, and the sim ping is you to the sim server its self

This is cool and handy info!
I love finding out little tidbits like this that are actually usefull tools.

I will definitely check this out when I get in world tonight. For a variety of reasons I don't think this is the cause of my problem, but I don't want to be negative I will totally check it out.

Os - we should talk later

I've had a bizarro problem with my laptop that sounds similar to this. I rarely play on my laptop, so I haven't cared so much. But, I've been using it more lately.

Here's my deal:

My desktop system is a Athlon 2600+, 1.5 GB of system memory, and an nVidia 5600 256mb card.

Normal framerates for me at the Shelter are 10 - 12 FPS.

My laptop is a Dell D600 - mobile pentium 1.4 ghz, 512mb system memory, and a mobile radeon 9000 video w/ 128mb.

When I first sign onto SL with the laptop, I get an amazing 20-25 FPS, at the Shelter. It stays that way for about 10 minutes. I can walk around smoother than it is on my desktop system.

Then suddenly, I hear my hard disk make a noise, like its spinning down or spinning up - and my framerates drop to 0.9 FPS. I can barely move or type, and my User & Server ping times are in the thousands.

It'll stay this way for 15-20 minutes - then all by itself, my framerates will jump back up to the 20-25 level again. Then after about 10 minutes, they'll drop back down to 0.9. Over, and over again.

I thought the problem might be Intel Speed-Step on my laptop. But there seems to be no way to disable that in the BIOS.

Setting "SecondLife.exe" to "HIGH" priority seems to bump my FPS from 0.9 to 1.4 - but its still a dog.

The "Disable Virtual Memory" idea quoted above intrigues me. Think its worth a shot? Or any other ideas?

It amazes me that (initially) I appear to get such high framerates on what should be a sub-par system.

So do you think my theory about the two pings being "out of sync" in some way makes any sense then? That's about as far as I get when I brainstorm it by myself.

The idea being that if the network paths are so screwed up as to be unreliable in timing, then the packets are all either bashing into each other, or perhaps timidly waiting at various router points unsure as to whether to step out in the stream.

Either way it is sounding to me more an more like a hardware problem and brings to mind that scary post of about 6 months ago where some techie guru claimed he had proof that LL's own main router had massive packet loss and was a major bottleneck of the system.

I would sure hate to think that the software is written so that a simple avatar turning manouver freezes the client becuase of a hard coded need for some data from the server that isn't really that necessary, but I wouldn't be surprised I guess.

I jsut wish there was someone more technologically inclined that had this same problem and could actually communicate with LL about it. Then something would happen. This "feature" makes the game almost completely unplayable when it happens and I have been gettgin it off and on for many months.

Sorry but the networking discussion makes me cringe, I don't think you know what you are talking about and it will just mislead people.

From what I've seen I don't think this has anything to do with networking or sim performance.

I've been testing this with someone who makes me freeze a lot. Anything over the second point on the object details slider will cause me to freeze up for variable amounts of time as I walk up to him. He is quite primmy with a lot of spheres/toruses.

I believe this is something to do with LOD on avatar attachments because:
* Minimising the object detail sliders stops the freezing not matter how much I zoom in
* The person I'm using to test gives me a peak of 2200 KTris Drawn, with about 500 for surroundings. Once past the freeze framerate returns to something usable unless the distance the person is from me changes.
* Extremely large delays show up on Fast Timers for World Update and for UpdateGeom on the frame console.
* Your own av can freeze yourself. I don't have anything primmy enough to make it as bad as how some other people freeze me but it causes the same things mentioned above.

I don't know what "turning lag" is but I assume it's freezing when you are turning around? It's probably the same as this, the 3D engine only renders a cone of vision a certain number of degrees in size from the cameras viewpoint. Things only get rendered when they enter this cone so someone behind or to the sides of you will only cause you to freeze as they enter your view (Easy test, walk up to someone primmy backwards and turn around, don't get too close as the camera hangs behind your av and they may enter the rendering field).

eata, i realize the network thing does make it sound like we have no idea what we're talking about, but months back i'm almost certain i heard from an official mouth that sim performance and client fps were related (and i agree, there's no reasonable reason why they should be, and if it was, it may no longer be the case). if anyone knows more about that topic, please chime in.

as i said above, i'm not sure what to tell people about the complexity of geometry, cause the behavior i posted (changing to/from fullscreen) so reliably clears up my lag (for a short time), and i'm still looking at the exact same geometry. camera hasn't moved a bit. noone has come or gone from the area (i'm way up in the air, out of clip distance of the ground. this is just my skyhome). i'm also of the impression that the LOD settings affect it. i get really choppy when zooming in or out right around the time i see a shift in prim geometry, i just hang for a sec often.

i DID go ahead and disable my page file, and it helped a tad. i think i'll keep it that way, but it didn't solve the overlying problem. speaking of OS, while i'm mainly playing on windows presently, now that you mention it, i never got the "turning lag" while playing on linux with winex a few months back. i got normal chop as would be expected when looking at more complex builds, but i didn't get the random slowdown-speedup we're describing here. also like many other fun bugs, this one doesn't seem to affect everyone. perhaps a hardware spec list in here (comparing both those who do and don't have the problem) would be beneficial.

One suggestion--as Fa mentioned earlier, I've had experiences like this.

I'm not terribly technical so when this has happens, I take pictures. Lots of them. Big colored bars, DEBUG menu ---> FAST TIMERS. Typical Fast Timers shot:



Looking at that shows the "rhythm" of the "pulse". And not only does it show YOU'RE LAGGING, it shows WHAT'S MAKING YOU LAG (on the clientside, specifically). If the bars go by quickly but you have a hard time walking, the problem may lie elsewhere.

I did have a very, very nasty UpdateGeom (geometry for objects inworld being updated) lag problem early in my Second Life that appeared outta nowhere and bugged the HECK out of me because I didn't know what was causing it. I never found out, but months passed by and it went away.

Another problem I later had was THIS LOCAL LIGHTING ONE. Again, with the pictures. I've found it to be really effective for communicating.

Moving this to Technical Issues and there is just a bundle of great discussion here! If I can share any more about my personal experiences, ask and I will.

A part of my whole point in posting this is that I *don't* know the technical side of things and it's my experience that bug reports only get noticed and fixed if you can state the problem in a "technical" way. so I am resorting to the forums because all the tchnical folks have failed me in this regard and LL has failed to fix this issue over a very long period of time or even recognise that it exists (I am not the only one who gets this kind of lag).

People are still not really listening though to what the description of the problem is.

Eata, its *nothing* to do with the complexity of the objects drawn.

I dont think I know a single person with more than four prims in their hair and none of them are tori. I live in a rural island sim with no advanced geometry and no complex objects to be drawn at all.

This is *not* a case of turning to face a girl with hoochie hair and having everything lag to a halt. This happens across a variety of environments regardless of the objects in the immediate vicinity and is *not* fixed, by turning down my draw distance nor by adjusting the detail level of the objects I am looking at. It is not fixed by increasing my memory or by closing down programs inthe background as I have huge amounts of memory and dont run a single thing but SL whenI am running SL. It's a single use machine.

- It's a pulsating lag that seems to have little (if anything) to do with the traditonal "specs" of the game and FPS or drawing details. My "numbers" (including ping) are often excellent when it happens, but it still happens.

- It happens when I turn, but not only then. It often happens when I initiate any kind of movement (turning, forward, back) especially if I use the keys or the virtual keypad instead of the mouse.

- The only (semi-consistent) symptom I have ever been able to identify is "out of sync" ping readings (user and sim) or wildly fluctuating ping readings (varying from two digit numbers to four digit numbers over a period of a second or two and back again for protracted periods of time).

*Thats* why I keep talking about the network issues as the ping thing is the only fairly consistent symptom I have to work on. Maybe it's nothing to do with that, but then what is it?

I do know that the ping affects lag in that many of my friends are in Europe and get *horrible* ping numbers betwenthemselves and LL and experience horrendous slowdowns in performance releated to those numbers. If having really high ping would slow you down,why would not fluctuating ping numbers cause problems also?

I realise I am not so technically inclined and if anyone has any other bright ideas as to what causes it I am open to hearing them, but this is starting to sound like LL's phone advice to people who can't connect ("it must be your router". People keep saying "it must be your object detail" or "it must be your draw distance" or "you must be facing some complex object" and it jsut *isn't* anything like that.

I thot it might be of some fascination to post a little more about FAST TIMERS (a fave of mine!). Ever since I was showed how to use this (and the similar FRAME CONSOLE) to break down clientside "lag" into itty-bitty pieces, it's been a joy.

Here's a quick test I just did.

Went out in the middle of nowhere, Eunpyung.

Rezzed 320 tori. Twisted them so Revolutions = 4.00. Zoomed in on them.

Did DEBUG ---> FAST TIMERS. Clicked twice on "Render" to expand it. Notice how green = rendering things taking up so much of the time, and Renderpool is 53.4 ms? That's pretty high--and slow! Zooming the camera away so they weren't in my field of vision immediately sped things up.

Each horizontal = frame per second, correspondingly broken up into pieces that make up your SLexperience.

Now, this was a deliberate experiment, but sometimes there are bugs that do crop up that manifest similar conditions when they should not. FAST TIMERS is helpful to find the way!

What do yours look like when you feel the pulse, Dianne?

Thanks for stepping in Torley and apologies if I sound exasperated.
Unfortunatley however, you are more technical than I.

I have looked at those console displays from time to time over the whole year I have played the game ( I discovered the debug menu very early on) and never made hide nor tail of any of them despite a high IQ and a whole lot of ernest trying.

I understand the Cmd-Shift-1 console for the most part, (I know what most of the numbers mean and whats good and whats bad etc.), and I *sort of* understand about a quarter of the texture console. Months of looking at the others however still leaves me with absolutely no idea what they represent.

Looking at the "fast timers" to me is like looking at christmas lights blinking. It's kind of pretty and I get mesemerised quite quickly, but no information crosses betwen the screen and me.

I feel that the several times I have phrased and rephrased my problem in this post is about all I can do on the subject so please take that as my "bug report" and let the techies do with it what they will.

Mostly I am too busy living my Second Life to get even this involved in bug hunting ( I dont even have time to get to Greeting and Mentoring!). I would be happy if the hunters merely realised that there are problems like this that dont get reported in the usual bug channels because of these kinds of communication issues. That's a big part of my message, that it's so frustrating to have this happen over and over and to not know how to tell anyone about it, even though my command of English is quite excellent. The bug people dont seem to speak English and I dont speak "bug."

If they could understand that, it was worth reporting it even if it is never solved for me.

That's why I'm here. To bridge that communication. I don't even know what most of those FAST TIMERS words mean, but already I've had several experiences taking screenshots, showing them to Lindens who DO know--the picture = 1000 words.

So no worries Dianne! If in doubt, when the lag hits you... just take a screenshot with FAST TIMERS on, even just press Print Screen button, and post it on here. If you find forum attachments don't work for you, use a free image host like Imageshack.us or Photobucket.com. Or even send me a picture inworld (SNAPSHOT button and SHOW UI IN NEXT SNAPSHOT)... that'll do too!

Heh. I was making a post about how I "dont understand fast timers" while you were writing this one.

I will try this experiment the next time I "feel the pulse" but I don't have much hope. I really don't think it has anything to do with rendering for the reasons I already mentioned, but I will try to get numbers for you.

The trouble is it isn't happening to me right now and hasn't for about four days, but before that it happened for about three days continuously, no matter where I went or what I looked at. Sometimes it doesnt happen for months at a time, sometimes when it happens its only for an afternoon and sometimes for days, continuously.

That's the kind of behaviour that makes me think that its nothing to do with objects I am looking at and more a general condition of my connection to SL.

Anyway, almost midnight, going to bed...

Have a good sleep, Dianne.

It's like hunting Sasquatch, I know!

i'm out of world at the moment and don't have sexy pics for you, but in some previous testing after reading an older torly post, i did try the fast timers thing. i'll do it again with pics tomorrow if i get a chance, but basically, when i get a spike, green bar (render geom) gets massive (and by massive i mean it runs way off the right side of the screen). when i hit alt+enter. the green bar goes back to a nice 2 or 3 inches long size, and i jump from ~1 back to a happy ~30 fps. this is looking at the exact same scene, and works whether i'm going to OR from fullscreen, or even if i go from one to the other and then back, so i i'm still looking at the exact same scene at the same resolution in the same mode of full-screenedness.

Exact same problem here, been having it ever since 1.7. In fact... I was scanning the forums just now to see if I could find anything on it.

When it does hit, it's RenderGeom that keeps pulsing. My harddrive light DOES NOT FLASH, so it is not a paging problem. Often, logging out and back in fixes it, but that's annoying as hell. I'd say it sounds like a memory leak, but that would mean it would start paging, which it doesn't. So I have no idea.

But it drives me INSANE. MAD, I tell you.