"Pulse Lag"

Sent you the pics, post them if you like.

Unfortunately I am less techie than you and I know nothign of dual-core AMD's beyond what they are (dual core AMD's). I am on a G4 Powerbook which is I think a single core processor.

My suspicion about the pulse lag (and nothing I have heard and none of the evidence I have seen disputes this), is that it is a network issue to do with the routers at SL and various other ISP's.

Just before most of the pulses there is a failed file retrieval or some other thing that triggers the lag, and the network pathways (as indicated by the ping) are wildly fluctuating in length. This can only throw the timing of the server communication off, which would cause exactly the kind of thing one sees.

Just my (non-techie) theory of course, but as time goes by it seems to be more and more true, and all the other explanations seem to fail to explain it. It also is a good reason why no one seems to want to talk about it since LL is notoriously touchy about people blaming their routers and switches even though they have been proven to be a problem at least once.

I had the problem with my 3500+ single core, and recently upgraded to a 4400+ Dual Core, there is no difference in SL, it still has the lag spikes as the single core did, and I dont have any issues with the games I play, since I upgraded also. Once I updated my video drivers it seemed to help quite a bit too in other games. A network issue seems like a possibality, but its most likley on SL's programing side, my download speeds are around 28mbps, from what I know, thats almost the speed of a T3 line and my pings are no greater than 120ms.

Well i sort of meant a bit of both. I think the underlying cause is the network behaviour, but it's the SL code that seems unable to respond to the variable network conditions. They do all their testing internally AFAIK, so they never experience SL as it is when you acces it on a network from Europe or Canada and are subsequently unaware of those kinds of issues I think.

The fact that when I experienced it, the fast timers seemed to be telling me that I was waiting for an image update, when no image updatge was really necessary, tells you that the coding is probably wrong. Instead of having the game freeze waiting for an image update that's not necessary, it should be able to work around it IMO.

It's a bug to have the entire game freeze waiting for a piece of information that is not really necessary to recieve.

this would sorta explain why a network/server problem would cause what otherwise appears to be clientside rendering lag, and due to the nature of this, we're getting alot of people telling us it's due to people nearby with complex attachments, or otherwise high poly-geometry, when that's definately not the problem. i understand the connection between lots-of-polygons = more rendering time, but this is coming and going with no notable change in the number of drawn surfaces or (far as i can tell) memory use. so for the time being i'll return to my conclusion that this is indeed something where the client is getting confused by a bad/missed message and hanging, waiting on a new one, or something along those lines.

i'll post your fast timer pics first thing tomorrow when i've got time to do email and uploads must sleep immediately!

here are dianne's fast timers

I'm going to be asking further about this--anyone experiencing the same types of things? Hopefully clearer patterns will emerge.

You're still wearing attachments. Are THEY updating? Try taking off ALL attachments and see if the "pulse lag" still occurs. Try setting your avatar and object LOD settings all the way left. SL lags when it LODs lots of prims (especially complex ones like torii with twists, revolutions, cuts, hollow, etc).

Also, just because you're high up doesn't mean things aren't still happening. Clouds, water, etc are still being calculated (depending on how high you are--800m still shows water despite fog obscuring it). Moving still renders everything up to your draw distance (in a frontal arc) even if you can't see it.

Go into Debug, turn on fast timers, in ..Rendering > Types (and Features), turn off everything (except UI of course), and you should still see things being updated--most notiably/expectedly, UI and timers.

Make SURE you're not running any background programs, specifically virus scanners, that constantly scan newly created files.

Incidentally, this has NEVER happened to me so I suspect it is your system (vid drivers, perhaps).

Okay, I've been messing around lately, and getting even worse lag -- but I DO have a screenshot. (but maybe not what you think...)

I run a dual monitor workstation, so this is gonna be a wide pic.



Okay, so I've got process explorer running on my second monitor.
As you can see, SL seems to stop processing for some unknown reason, and this is the lag I'm getting as SL's not responding.
No clue what's doing this, but if you look at the top history bar, you can see that it keeps happening.
The only thing I had running other than SL was Skype, with a text IM session, Firefox with ONE tab open, and Process Explorer.

I really wish I could figure out just WTF is happening
(And for those who attempt to blame it on my dual monitors, the same thing happens in single output mode.)
I'll try to catch it next time with Show console turned on, Fast Timers, and process explorer, with nothing else running.

This is a AMD Athlon XP 2100+ (1.7Ghz) with 512MB of ram, and a SATA 200GB Maxtor drive with 16MB cache.
And no, the harddrive light isn't on when this is happening.
(which reminds me, LL REALLY needs to fix these crazy memory leaks, I've been seeing SL attempting to use over 1.4GB of ram, when previous versions would use 300MB-350MB and stay there.
I've used process explorer for a long time now, and monitor it closely at all times.)
Try using Valgrind on your code, or some other auditing tool!

I was at a wedding with 58 avatars, SL used up ALL my ram and would of used more if it could but I ran out since I have virtual memory disabled. 1.7 gigs! I have the pic to proove it lol.

I've had this happen as well, but probably not as bad as some others. I think it basically boils down to how the rendering engine works. Its like everything with computers, you can only be as fast as the weakest(slowest) link. And I dont mean the end users hardware(althogh it applies). Now, this is based on my experience with both of the pc's i've owned. When turning or moving sometimes one of the tasks like(usually) image update or geometry will have to calculate something big.

Unfortunatly -- for some reason, they force everything to stop and do the complete task. your average fps could be 60fps, but if it takes 100ms to do a task and it does this every second it make it feel alot slower. In an ideal world they would process big tasks like this over several frames, and would fix that problem, but its harder to do. If the other frames need the info 1st then it needs to process it sooner, ect. -- But there are games out that do this now (games with no loading screens, etc), and I know, SL is very diffrent

This could be diffrent from what the OP was talking about, it can also be spikes in lag(the real kind, aka latency).

wow this thread returns!

i got lucky and 1.10 seemingly magically fixed my lag issues. of course i still lag, but it's "normal". it's consistent with the complexity of what i see being drawn on screen. yay! i'm also on a dual monitor setup. vote prop 1070!

I have been having the -exact- same problem described on my intel iMac since the 1.10 update. (It was fine in 1.9.) Nothing, including today's update has fixed it.

On the exact same machine, running Windows (via BootCamp), I have no problems at all.

Something's fishy. This problem has become so bad, and such a pain in the butt having to reboot to Windows to play that I am considering quitting the game. I pay for this??

I have mentioned this problem on the Mac discussion forum for a while now, and haven't seen a single Linden reply.

=( I am about to give up.