"Bouncing" Local FPS

Trying to track down what might be a bug in the client. I'm sure it's not been introduced in 1.7, as I've seen this prior to the upgrade, I just haven't taken the time to look into it at all. I'd submit this as a proper bug in-game, but I really have no idea what the steps are to reproduce it. It just... -happens-... and then logging out and back in seems to clear it.

Symptomatically, what I'm seeing is a "jerky" local frame rate. Regular speed, then "lag" (yes, I know that's a horrible word to use ) everything hitches up for a half second, then returns to normal. Definitely a local framerate issue, as the sim is at a constant 45fps, and the frame time is a pretty steady 11ms (currently in Muralis... very low population... though I have seen this in many other sims, so definitely something local in the client).

I open the statistics, and the FPS measurement is all over the scale. Actual measurements (red bar) covers 7-45fps, and the average (green bar) wobbles in a range of 18-23 fps. I start to look a little deeper, and the things that catch my eye are:

Render:
- KTris Drawn is also doing this bouncing. Red range of 250-1100 or so, green range of 500-650.
- Total Objects is fairly constant, however New Objects is -also- constant at about 1-3/sec.
>> This implies to me that for some reason, the client is erasing and re-rendering some object or set of objects nearly constantly. Would there be a valid reason for this?

Pipeline:
Couldn't really tell what most of this is, but related to the previous section, DirtyGeom is hovering at about 60/fr. Not quite sure what this is, or if it's bad. The explanation on statistics seems to cover other areas of the display, not this one. Visible Drawables is a very steady 136, so... whatever I'm assuming is getting redrawn seems to be out of sight.

Network:
Again, sort of related to the previous, Objects and Layers are the only bits showing very regluar activity here, though not much... 1-2kbps and 3-6kbps respectively. Not stressing the network too hard.

After SL Client Restart:
Okay... I'm leaving all of the above typed out, as maybe it will prove some use, maybe not. I restarted the client just now to see what, if anything changes statistics-wise. FPS range is massively improved (red 38-45+, green pegged at 45), of course (I've seen this in the past), as does KTris Drawn (red 1000-1250, green 1250). Makes sense. Everything else is roughly the same. Still appears to be a constant re-rendering of a couple objects, though the total remains stable.

The one difference I picked up on and didn't note above is that prior to the restart, every few seconds my "Pending Uploads" would pop up to 3 or 4 and count down, then repeat the same behaviour. Now, there are no pending uploads at all. Perhaps the client gets stuck in a loop of believing it needs to upload something (what, exactly, gets uploaded to the servers from our clients?)... I dunno. I'll leave this novel at that. Perhaps an engineer Linden can take a look at this and see if it makes any sense whatsoever! Consider it a very, very long bug report.

1) what are your system specs?
2) when was the last time you checked for spy/mal/adware?
3) when was the last timeyou defragged?
4) do you have the latest motherboard & graphics card drivers?

also those pending uploads and downloads from what I can tell doesn't deal with your client, but rather cross-sim communication. I've noticed an increase in pending uploads & downloads when opening up my JENC catalog so it might be an object in the sim trying to communicate with someone or something in another sim. Probly just one of your neighbors running a JEVN/JENC or some other networked object.

>>> 1) what are your system specs?
Athlon XP 2600+
Radeon 9600XT 128MB
1GB RAM
NForce-based MB (ShuttleX case/MB) with pretty much everything else on-board (network, sound, etc...)

>>> 2) when was the last time you checked for spy/mal/adware?
Hmmm... been a while, I guess. I get a bit complacent, mostly because I'm just used to avoiding all that stuff (Firefox, no Flash, decent browsing habits, low shareware use ) I'll definitely load up Ad-Aware and Spybot tonight when I get back home.

>>> 3) when was the last timeyou defragged?
Probably never I'll put that on my ToDo list as well.

>>> 4) do you have the latest motherboard & graphics card drivers?
Yep... just got off the City of Villains beta, so... kept everything more or less up to date through that (though I should probably check the NForce drivers again for the mainboard). Thanks for the advice!

Just keeps getting more confusing, however. Happened a couple more times while I was on last night, and as I was getting frustrated and wasn't doing much beyond chatting (i.e. nothing that framerate really affected) I just let it go. Same general symptoms and all, but after about 45-60 minutes, everything just suddenly returned to normal. -That- seems to scream "conflicting program", but... the extent of other active programs was a Firefox window aimed at Google, and an SSH session into my web server. This happened two seperate times and took about the same amount of time to recover back to a normal speed.

Considering that no one else has chimed in with a "I've seen this too..." I'm guessing that I'm looking at a local problem on my machine (joy!). I'll give the above things a run through tonight and see if that helps. Thanks again, Ron