Texture rezzing problem: any feedback?

Last week I posted here in Linden Answers regarding a problem I was experiencing. Textures are partially loading then stopping: trees incompletely rezzed, clothing blurry, walls and buildings a smudgy mess. 15 minutes later, the textures are still unrezzed, no bandwidth is in use, and no packet loss to speak of. The textures will "snap" into focus if I click on the affected object(s). Between 20% and 50% of the objects I encounter appear this way.

I submitted a bug report on 10/19/2006: #443774

I've had more opportunity to observe the problem (it hasn't gotten better at all), and have now found that other people are experiencing the same or very similar things. I've submitted another bug report (#45251 with some further details. Only some people are experiencing this problem, but I am yet to find a common thread other than the symptoms themselves.

I realize this forum isn't for technical support. But is it possible to get some confirmation that Linden Labs is aware of the problem described here and/or if there is any progress towards a solution? Thank you!

Tomas, hi! As you likely already know, textures not loading can be similar symptoms from a variety of causes. It isn't clear in that linked thread, nor have many people posted to it to filled in their personal experiences.

I don't know of any mass texture rez issue affecting many Residents (there *have* been, in the past, including involving heavy packet loss).

So I'm sorry I don't have more info; what's odd here is your packet loss is in the clear. If you can find someone with similar hardware, it'd be worth asking if they have probs too... in the meantime I will keep an eye out for it, and move this to Technical Issues should anyone else look at the detailed specs (thx for sending a bug report already!) and be able to relate... because they're experiencing the same thing.

Errafel, that matches my experience as well: I click an object with an unrezzed texture, it "snaps" into focus (the texture downloads). If I walk around in the same sim and come back a little later, the texture will have de-rezzed again. As I have mentioned several times, this is not a bandwidth problem, nor does packet loss have any apparent bearing.

I must admit I'm disappointed that LL has no clue about this problem, and it's a bit frustrating to have it tossed back into my lap. But if other people are experiencing the same problem, perhaps there is some commonality. I'll note my configuration specs here again:

1. Processor: AMD Athlon 64x2 (Dual core processor) 4600+
   1. I have installed the AMD dual core optimizer utility
      
   
   
2. Memory: 4 GB RAM
   
3. Video: ATI X1950 XTX PCI Express
   1. Catalyst driver version 6.9
      
   
   
4. Operating system: Windows XP Professional x64 Edition
   
5. Disk: SATA3 RAID0 Array of two WD Raptor (10,000 RPM) drives
   
6. Internet connection: 4.5 Mbps certified business grade ADSL
   

If anyone else is experiencing the "textures stop rezzing, no network traffic or packet loss observed, incompletely rezzed textures rez when object is right-clicked" symptoms, perhaps they could post their specifications here as I have. Maybe we'll identify enough of a pattern for Linden Labs to fix the problem if it resides within the Second Life code.

suzanne zeluco clued me to the following trick, but none of us know why it helps (hold your nose)

Edit/Prefs/Network and move the Bandwidth slider

makes no diff which way or how much you move the slider, just move it. exit prefs. wait a few secs. things actually improve.

rumors that sheep entrails may make it work more quickly have yet to be tested.

Good suggestion, Espresso, and one I tried already. It doesn't seem to work for me, unfortunately. However, other people claim it helps. The fact that it helps for some people suggests that there might be something wrong with the way SL Is managing bandwidth currently. Although why it doesn't work for me is a mystery: probably Torley had the developers put a special if (avatar="Tomas" { breakTextureLoad(); } condition into the code...

Please see my post here
/139/0a/146397/1.html

Hopefully this might help you

Changing the bandwidth throttle makes some sense. If you have the text console window, you'll see that SL automatically changes it from your set value based on network performance, and how many black cats are in the alley.
IF changing the slider resets that, it still doesn't explain why it helps textures load, because the automatic change doesn't appear to adjust it by a huge amount.


INFO: Sending throttle settings, total BW 896
INFO: Tightening network throttle to 917504
--
INFO: Sending throttle settings, total BW 960
INFO: Easing network throttle to 983040
--
INFO: STAT: Increase/Decrease in bandwidth based on packet loss: 320
INFO: STAT: Max bandwidth setting: 640

Then I bumped the slider, (which was set to 640 to 630 and back again), and waited..

The same values came up again.

Leaving it at 630?

INFO: Sending throttle settings, total BW 882
INFO: Tightening network throttle to 903168
INFO: Sending throttle settings, total BW 945
INFO: Easing network throttle to 967680
--
INFO: STAT: Increase/Decrease in bandwidth based on packet loss: 315
INFO: STAT: Max bandwidth setting: 630


Keep in mind it keeps toggling between tightening/easing the throttle throughout the session.

I have the same problem, I'm a little disappointed in the answer that was given by the linden, Just because SL residences don't report any thing does NOT mean there isn't an SL wide issue, a LOT of residences don't bother to report things in SL.
And MANY don't want to bother with it or are too lazy.

When I tp to or log into a region things take a long time to rezz.
Usually I see basic grey prims. I right click as it is the only thing that works to force rezz things, every thing from Av textures to object textures.
After the latest release, Things seemed to have gotten worse, Textures including sOME av textures now take longer to rezz. Some don't rezz at all.
Also since the new release there has been an odd packet loss and horrendous lagging SL wide whether the sim is busy or not. Wile things are trying to rezz I notice the packet loss jumping up, way up, to as high as 20%. before this new release there was no packet loss. recently the lag has been so bad, that it causes the client to freeze and crash.

Also there has been an increase in the number of Client crashes.
What ever you guys did with the new release seems to be effecting the way the client proccesses the incoming data, in a bad way.

I use a mac OS X, with all the latest soft ware.

This has been driving me batty for some time. My biggest complaint is that the clothes on my back often (but not always) take forever to rez, if they rez at all. Some days are *much* worse than others, and it doesn't seem to have any relation to the business of the sim I'm in. I've had this problem standing in an empty sim out of visual range of anything.

My most recent comments are at the bottom of the following thread:

/111/e3/143806/1.html

My machine:

P4 2.8G
2G memory
nVidia 7600 GS w/256M

The texture problems are much better during the night than in the day, and on the preview grid where there seems to be less than 3 people at night, does not seem to be a problem at all. Maybe the asset server can tell clients not to load textures over a certain size, and until you use various methods that seem to force it to anyway, it just never loads them.

Just to indicate that probably there are multiple problems at work here, ... I have had almost no bad packet loss numbers lately, ping is generally good, FPS is good etc, but very consistently bad performance.

I can't even bug report it as there is (according to the numbers) nothing wrong at all, yet I get a freezing "pulse lag" of sorts a great deal of the time lately, and huge problems making anything appear on my screen.

Many many times lately, I enter a sim (even an empty one), and the numbers are excellent, but I am standing alone on an empty plain. Sometimes up to one or two full MINUTES later, the geometry appears and the textures follow. If it's a busy sim the textures sometimes take a while to download, but they all eventually do.

This same effect occurs when I fly around.

SL is supposed to be an immersive world, but in fact if you fly from place to place instead of using the TP, you will find it is far from it.

Even at normal avatar flight speeds it is easy to "outfly the res," and I have to pause in every sim for a half a minute or so to make it res, so I can see what I am flying over. All of this with (usually) quite normal, even "respectable" numbers on the debug consoles. There is also a complete "hitch" when you cross a sim border lately, if you are flying at high speed you will do that sort of "pretend scoot" across several sims, before the system realises that you are in a diff sim and then you appear back in your true location just inside the border of the new sim.

To me this is classic indications of the sims not communicating with each other. Almost certainly the fact that nothing appears for TWO MINUTES is due to the fact that this sim does not know I am even there yet.

I haven't been playing for that long, but it wasn't like this when I started at all. Something (or several somethings) are seriously screwed up, but don't hold your breath waiting for LL to let you know what it is, or what they are doing about it.

Heh. It was when I joined. Not horrible, but not great.

I was thinking exactly the same thing, Errafel. The way the texture download is behaving for me suggests that the client has been told that the texture download is complete long before it is. 50% of the textures I see suffer from this effect: when I say this I am describing the situation in a private sim with one other avatar.

When I click on the unrendered texture, it is as if the client resends the request, the asset/texture server says "Oh, geez, if you insist, here's the whole thing", and the selected texture completes loading.

What bothers me is that the problem is not more universal. It may be that a lot of people are suffering from this issue (although figuring this out is muddied by people talking about lag or slow texture rez as if its the same problem...which it isn't). However, it *seems* as if only some people are experiencing the "texture partially rezzes, stops and won't rez no matter what unless you right click/hover your mouse over the object" problem.

Errafel, can you list here what your configuration is (assuming you are observing the same problems)? See my example above.

OS: XP SP2
CPU: Turion64 ML-34 (1.8Ghz)
Mem 1GB
GPU: X600/64MB using omega radeon drivers (6.9 base)
HD: Seagate Momentus, 100GB 7200
Network: 640kbit ADSL.


Just out of curiosity, in preferences, what do you have set for the terrain detail radio button? Thinking about it, the texture issue seems to happen more often when it's set to Low

Hmmm: we both have ATI video cards with Catalyst 6.9-equivalent drivers, and we both have AMD processors. Yours is single-core, so that minimizes my concern about it being a dual-core problem.



Terrain Detail is set to high...interesting suggestion, though, so thank you for that.

I have the problem as well, have had it since day one (some six months ago). Posted, searched, pleaded, still broke.

Win XP 64
Dual Nvidia 7800 GTX in SLI 512 megs (problem occurs independent of SLI mode).
4 gigs of ram
Quad Opteron server, processor affinity set.

It's the most frustrating thing about Second Life. I would like to add that on my laptop, a much weaker machine (1.6 gig centrino), on the same network, using a Nvidia 6800 Geforce GO (256 megs) textures load perfectly every time. If not for the fact that the laptop is a much weaker machine with a 17" monitor (as opposed to my 30" widescreen) I'd use it for Second Life.

This is a serious problem that needs fixing. Please stop blowing me (us) off about this. I hardly log in anymore because of my frustration with this.

Before someone points fingers at xp 64, I dual boot, and have 32bit XP on the same box. Same problem happens for both versions of XP. I'm finding it more difficult as each month rolls by to invest further time and money into software with issues that have existed for half a year now (or longer).

When the heck is the upgrade to the physics engine going to happen?

Hmmm: well, darn it. You have NVidia video card(s), so that suggests that the problem isn't limited to the ATI chipset.

It *could* be something to do with PCI Express type video cards, perhaps? My machine with an AGP graphics adapter doesn't seem to be experiencing the problem, although I don't log in to SL as often on that machine so I really should double check that.

I also have Win XP64, but Errafel has plain old 32 bit Windows and says he's experiencing the same problem as well. So I don't think its the Windows version.

And Tanstaa, I agree that this is a very frustrating and disheartening problem- it's taking away from my pleasure in logging in. Everything looks...well, frankly, like crap when I log in. And I spend a big chunk of my time clicking on things to get their textures to load...then I walk around for a few minutes, come back to the same area, and the textures are de-rezzed again

I have this problem with an AGP nVidia card.

Darn...okay, so there goes that idea.

This is perplexing. I have two machines sitting side by side, one exhibits the problem, one does not.

Machine #1 (exhibits incomplete texture rezzing)
- dual core AMD Athlon 4600+ processor (processor affinity is set)
- PCI Express ATI X1950 XTX video card
- 4 GB of RAM
- Windows XP x64
- Soundblaster X-Fi

Machine #2 (works fine)
- single core AMD Athlon 3400+ processor
- AGP ATI X800 video card
- 2 GB of RAM
- Windows XP x64
- Soundblaster Audigy 2

Both are running the latest OS updates and drivers. I'm getting to the point of thinking I might pull out the extra RAM from the newer machine, or the sound card, and see what that does. But from the other responses to this thread, I don't think RAM or soundcard is part of the problem. In fact, given the different hardware configs in this thread, I'd say we've eliminated most hardware or OS factors.

Anyone else with ideas to offer?

Another update of sorts:

I have completely removed the Creative X-Fi soundcard and all its drivers from my machine on the theory that it might be causing problems. There are a lot of reports of problems with the X-Fi in some configurations due to the heavy load it places on the PCI bus.

Unfortunately, this made no difference whatsoever. I'm still seeing textures partially rez, then stop. 15 minutes staring at them, and no network transmission going on, and still they remain unrezzed. Click on the offending object, or hover the mouse over it for a period of time, and the texture downloads. Turn away from the offending object and / or walk away, come back and the texture will have de-rezzed again.

There don't seem to be any consistent hardware/OS build characteristics that cause the problem. We have people in this thread with NVidia, ATI, AGP, PCI Express, single core, dual core, 1 GB of RAM, 4 GB of RAM, Windows XP, Windows XP x64...the whole gamut of configurations. My previous post lists two of my machines sitting side by side, they are definitely different configurations and if that was all we had to go on I'd say it was something to do with the ATI X1950 XTX, PCI Express, dual core processors, or machines with 4 GB of RAM...but other folks posting in this thread experiencing the same problem have configs that break all of those theories.

It is as if the texture download priority for some textures drops to zero or they fall off the download queue entirely. I really believe this is fundamentally a Second Life client problem, and its showing up when some combination of performance characteristics exists. From the looks of things, I'd speculate the problem occurs more often when the client is a high performance machine.

If someone has a machine experiencing this problem and finds some way to fix it, or can add to the list of "data" we have regarding machines experiencing the problem please post here.

Grrrr!

Or Eureka, depending on how you look at things

I decided to try one last thing: I restricted Windows to 2 GB of RAM by adding the /MAXMEM=2048 parameter to my C:\boot.ini (hidden / read only file). I rebooted my system and launched Second Life. Voila, no more "incomplete" texture rezzing.

My guess: there is something in the Second Life client that doesn't deal correctly with memory addressing beyond the 2 GB limit. Tanstaa, if you are reading this and could try the MAXMEM parameter I've noted and report your experiences here, that would be appreciated.

Some users in this thread who are experiencing this problem and have 2 GB or less of RAM may be mis-describing the symptom. Alternately, the memory addressing problem could be more complex than simply a boundary issue.

I'm going to draw this to the attention of the SL developers again via Linden Answers in the hopes that they can test / confirm function on systems with > 2 GB of RAM. Key factors in their validation- do *NOT* click on every visible object or hover your mouse over everything. Do *NOT* test on an OC3 link- something like an ADSL line is reasonable, as there could be factors like prioritization of the texture load at work here. Stand still, watch the rez, and if textures stop rezzing part way and never complete rezzing unless you click/hover, you are experiencing this problem.

i found the solving of my problem in an error in the autodetection of my graphical memory, it had snapped back on 16mb

cranked it back to 512mb and voila

Interesting, and congratulations on finding/correcting your problem, Kyrah.

I also have a 512 MB video card. However, in my case it is properly detected and showing as set at 512 MB in Second Life.

There could definitely be several different problems at work here, all with the same resulting symptom (I.E.: textures stop rezzing/never complete rezzing).

Been trying to get SL Labs to notice this problem via the bug report about what seems to be the same problem (/327/cf/162924/1.html) but got nowhere.

Read your piece about the 2GB limit and decided to reduce my RAM from 3GB to 2GB and voila, all textures now rez fully, trees rez fully (something I didn't notice before) and generally everything works like it should now.

My machine if you're interested (pretty close spec to yours)...

Athlon 64 x2 3800+ (Win XP 64)
3GB RAM
Radeon x1950xtx (Cat 7.2)
Soundblaster XFi Fatal1ty
2MB/280kB ADSL

There's definitely somthing up with SL on machines with more than 2GB RAM installed.