Is this lag, slow loading of things, etc going to be fixed

or did LL do something that requires us to buy new gear??

My laptop used to run SL fine (besides kncking my wireless out) but these days it gets worse and worse.

Now, i cant even move without major lag, and everything takes entirely too long to load. I tp to a region and its grey for quite awhile.


Talked to a ton of ppl who are experiencing this too. Hmm?

I`ve downloaded 2 "updates" since i began experiencing this and everything remains the same, if not worse.

No, they likely cannot fix it as it results from too many people trying to access a shared server (the asset system). New gear doesn't help. Everyone but the Lindens seem to be affected by it (well actually I think they are they just don't like to admit it).

I've yet to see any player with any machine in any geographic locale teleport to a new place and not say something like "hang on a minute until I can see things" or "until I can see things that aren't grey".

since the updates about 2 weeks ago, i wasable to run everythingfine..

now i regularally drop below 1fps.completley freeze up for periods from 10 seconds to over a minute, have textures drop out constantly, am utterly unable to walk, etc..


sl hasn't been a whole lot of fun, as of late,at all.

That's another regularity of updates. LL appears to have few configurations that they do limited testing upon before release. Couple that with very fragile code and/or code that pushes the graphics chips harder than anything else and you see many complaints "it worked fine yesterday".

This happens upon every update. The SL client is wildly dependent upon client hardware in a manner I'm not sure anyone understands fully.

I'm experiencing the same thing. Extra long time to rez since the update yesterday.

Last night I was standing still in opne place for about 10 minues chatting and all of a sudden....locked up and frozen. Shut down SL and restarted and I was fine for the rest of the night.
It was almost like a corruption cloud/wave passed through the sim and froze me....weird.

This can be a combination of things.. I'm not defending Linden Labs as such however to blanket blame the asset server isn't quite right. Slow rezzing can be as simple as having the bandwidth setting wrong ( and mine got reset somehow so worth checking ) - a difference of 300 against 1000 ( if your broadband will handle it ) really does make a difference.

As for rez problems, I can't say I have any. When I arrive in a zone it can take a few mins to rez everything BUT my bandwidth is generally sitting close to max, indicating not an asset server problem but a sheer weight of data limitation.

That isn't to say Rezzing can get slow for other reasons however I'm not convinced it's ever an asset problem per sae. Heavilly lagged sims can also rez slowly. For instance at Ice Dragons my RL partner just refused to rez when they tried on a new outfit. Teleporting home fixed the problem indicating quite probably again a rez problem related to being on a heavily loaded sim. Should Linden labs look at this example? Sure but in this case we'd probably find it's running fine just right on the limit of current technology.

Also check settings like avatar vertex shader and bump or bump+cloth. fiddling with these settings can improve rezzing too.

This looks like a good thread to post this. For the past couple of weeks the sim I live on is housed in a class 3 server and we typically get only 10-12 FPS performance. We have complained the LL about it and every time a Linden comes out and checks they say everything is working fine check your system. So today I was out exploring and happened to visit Phoenix Enlightened, I checked performance and was amazed to be getting 54 FPS. Ok call in a Linden to explain it. Kenny Linden comes out and his comment was "wow". Why do I get the feeling these people don't know how to improve the performance of their servers.

Also have recorded the Help/About Second Life information for three sims:

Second Life 1.10.4 (4) Jun 21 2006 10:11:25

You are at 257803.4, 260536.8, 29.2 in Chinati located at sim625.agni.lindenlab.com (69.25.105.57:13002)

CPU: Not supported (2993 Mhz)
Memory: 2048 MB
OS Version: Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2 (Build 2600)
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: GeForce 6800/PCI/SSE2
OpenGL Version: 2.0.1
Packets Lost: 93256/1042472 (8.9%)
Viewer Digest: 35ad4f11-b323-4060-dab4-7892d0b51db3

Second Life 1.10.4 (4) Jun 21 2006 10:11:25

You are at 263311.7, 252319.0, 152.7 in Sand located at sim792.agni.lindenlab.com (69.25.105.224:13002)

CPU: Not supported (2993 Mhz)
Memory: 2048 MB
OS Version: Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2 (Build 2600)
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: GeForce 6800/PCI/SSE2
OpenGL Version: 2.0.1
Packets Lost: 127969/1485519 (8.6%)
Viewer Digest: 35ad4f11-b323-4060-dab4-7892d0b51db3

Second Life 1.10.4 (4) Jun 21 2006 10:11:25

You are at 269187.7, 261538.4, 33.2 in Rainbow Falls located at sim891.agni.lindenlab.com (72.5.12.41:13002)

CPU: Not supported (2993 Mhz)
Memory: 2048 MB
OS Version: Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2 (Build 2600)
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: GeForce 6800/PCI/SSE2
OpenGL Version: 2.0.1
Packets Lost: 196074/9308722 (2.1%)
Viewer Digest: 35ad4f11-b323-4060-dab4-7892d0b51db3

Chinati and Sand share the same class 3 server so the info on the server should be the same but Rainbow Falls is 1 month old and shares a class 4 server with 3 other sims. Why does the info look identical if the servers are different?

I is a little confused... You say Sand an Chinati are on the same server.. yet their IP addresses and HTTP address are different. For them to be on the same server you'd expect the same IP and (probably) a different port number.

You must be right the website that I use to check the now lists Sand sharing another server and Chinati alone on a class 3 server. That must be why performance has gone all the way to 13.5 FPS. Before the update 2 weeks ago I was getting 34 FPS in Chinati that is why I was wondering if the update caused the slow down. After that update there was a huge slow down experienced all over the grid. The question remains why does Pheonix Enlightened get such good performance, when my gf left I got spikes of 66 FPS.

That is the only stat you need to see to know what is causing your lag.

Also, all of the framerates you are quoting are client framerates, which show how many pictures per second are displayed on your local screen.

There is little or nothing on the server spec that will change that - if you want to know the server framereate, which is a measure of how many times per second the geometric and physical state of teh sim are updated, press CTRL-SHIFT-1 and look at the sim stats. For a normal sim - ANY normal sim - on ANY class of server, the framerate should be about 45, or just a touch under - it will NOT go higher - 45 is considered to be full speed.

If you see a SIM framerate significantly lower than this (i.e. below 30) for more than a few tens of seconds / minutes, call livehelp to report it to a linden, since it is a sign of a serious problem in the sim that should not happen.

The update 2 weeks ago introduced a bug that was fixed 3-4 days later in the Sunday rolling restart where it WAS killin sim performance. Even late saturday night early sunday morning, they were working to (successfull) fix that issue.

And if you want to see creat client perfomance, such as 30+ fps (client-side) just go somewhere on a private island that has not neighbor sims, and no prims on it - nothing to do with the server - just down to the amount of work that your PC has to do to render teh view.

But - for a cause of your exceedingly poor performance, you don't need to look any further than the very high packet loss you are seeing.

Anything above 1% will cause noticable lag in everything you do, especially in rezzing.

go to http://secondlife.com/tiki/tiki-index.php?page=Experiencing%20packet%20loss for help with it, and if it turns out to be a problem at LL's end, scream at them over their support line, but at least you can tell them what the problem is, not just "some kinda lag" that way.

Although you are absolutely correct about this, it should not be so.

SL opens a single UDP channel to transact with the client. This was smart for certain asychronous "don't care if it doesn't make it" packets. However, as texture downloads are a huge part of the flow, using UDP and a really lousy retransmission protocol for "reliable" transmissions is why any loss kills an SL session.

LL has known about this issue since about forever and has failed to add a second TCP channel for reliable transfers (textures don't do well with parts missing from the middle). This is not technologically advanced, FTP has been doing this since around 1983.

Linden Lab: The Past Begins Tomorrow ®

added: oh, the border router at LL's "front door" is still as lossy as I've documented many times in the past - I just rechecked it. 25 hops from me to a sim, all lossless except that penultimate hop. LL has long maintained that this is "not a problem".

Absolutely so - an awful lot of the data streamed is not suited to UDP and would be much better off being pumped across a TCP channel.





I just checked it from here too - 100 packets from work (17 hops) and home (19 hops) - and both gave the same results.....
no dropped packed from either from any of the linden end servers, and an average round trip time of 8ms (4ms for home) FASTER from the sim server than from the gateway router.

What that means is that the router is working juuuust fine, but that it may be a tad slow turning around an ICMP echo request.

Sorry to disillusion you, but routers do this - when they get busy, pings are the first thing that they drop. doesn't mean that they drop other packets - that is usually bandwidth related, since it takes a lot more effort for a modern router to receive, process and respond to a packet addressed to it than it does to transcribe a packet from one interface onto another once it has processed _just_ the header of the packet.

Having worked network support in an ISP, I can tell you that if the sim server isn't losing packets, then anything dropped by the router next to it can be safely ignored.

But I do wish that the non real-time date would be moved across onto a TCP connection

Bitzer, I want to thank you for your help and have bookmarked the link for further evaluation but currently we are not experiencing any packet loss and the performance gets up to 15 FPS. When I was at Phoenix Enlightened there was zero packet loss also but my performance was 54 FPS and the only major difference I could tell was the difference between the class 3 server we are now on by ourselves and the class 4 server that has 4 sims on it.

once again, I _know_ that you are quoting client framerates there, because sim framerates simply do not go that high.

How much prim clutter is there on the Phoenix Enlightened sim? and how many other av's were present? Becasue I have to say, that 54fps is a phenomenally good framerate for SL anywhere any time with any surroundings.

last time I was there about 2 hours ago there were 3 av's and the frame rate was about 49.

.....still lagging more than ever.

not much problem with slow rezzing now, however when i go in to put a texture on an object its all grey for awhile.


Lag is bad bad bad bad bad bad. my chat is severely delayed. I can barely walk without my avi "running" a marathon and me ending up in someone elses yard. This game is spiriling down the drain for me.


And it all happened after the last major update.

Out of interest, those having issues, what is your CPU, Graphics, Memory, Broadband Download speed and the setting in SL for Bandwidth?

Wow. Lucky you. The highest I've ever gotten is 14. lol What kind of card/ram do you have?

Ok, I'm not a computer whiz by any means so you may have to ask more questions later but my computer is a Dell Dimension 9100 with a Pentium D Processor 830 with Dual Core Technology (3GHz, 800FSB), 3GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 533MHz, and the video card is a 256MB PCI Express x16 nVidia GeForce 6800. My connection is a cable modem that I need to check preformance thanks to Bitzer Balderdash. I haven't done that yet due to RL family obligations this weekend (big wedding, not mine). I don't know what most of those numbers mean and I just installed 2GB of Ram and I think it is faster than 533MHz but it should be at least that fast, I bought it from Dell. Finally I don't live at Phoenix Enlightened was just visiting and my home typically runs at 12-14 fps.

The actual Client Frame rates will vary a LOT dependant on the complexaty of the sim and isn't something LL can do a lot about.

Your PC spec is planety good enough. Frame rates of that order aren't bad.

Rezzing performance is dependant on a number of factors but the client end bandwidth CAN make a difference. Hence knowing that can be handy.

The info looks identical because most of that info is your own computer. Not the server. Don't you think it's odd their servers are running Windows XP and a pretty good graphcis card when the servers don't even need a graphics card? Or that their servers are supposedly the same kind of system as yours?

Bane Darrow

lol, absolutely right