Lag

is it me, is it my computer, is it SL? Suddenly, and for no reason I can discern, the lag I experience everywhere I go in SL is so awful as to make SL usless...it takes 5 minutes for local objects to rez....there is a five second delay in movement...which then proceeds in fits and starts. Was I supposed to upgrade something....what is happening?

Neal, I've moved your thread to the right place, Technical Issues.

Hoping you can provide more details about your lag too, because it's hard to make out what it is.

For pointers, please see this post by Lee Linden on lag.

I'm also having terrible troubles.....have been for awhile now.
I've just recently upgraded to a new computer
AMD 4400, nVidia GeForce 7600 GT, 1 Gig RAM, ViewSonic monitor, gaming machine
I've gone into preferences to change all settings to their minimums (also raised the
max bandwidth to 960 because I have a good DSL line)
and still my avatar, which is simple w/ no attachments, is so jumpy and the camera
view so jerky that I can't enjoy it.

I tried going to a minimal sim, Kissling 45, 196, 63 and the performance is the same.

I used Ctrl-shift-1 for the settings. I don't know what they mean but hopefully you do.
FPS 100-300
Bandwidth 1 - 10
Sim FPS 45
Packet loss 0
Ping sim 42 msec
Ping User 32 msec

If you need the other stats let me know.
I read the Wiki and the Linden message on Lag but they have not helped much.
My system is more than powerful enough... it should run really smooth.
Please help narrow this down if you can.
Thanks,
Tai

Hey neighbor.... try hopping over the sim boundary and see if you're still seeing the same performance issues.

I've found a few hellaciously lag inducing objects in our sim over the last few weeks.

"* My character won't STOP walking for several seconds after I stop pushing forward (really bad latency between user PC and server"

specific enough?

SL just crashed ?

I'm having many of the same issues. It started after the grid was down so long on Sunday. I type something into chat and it doesn't appear on screen for several seconds. I type something else and it sometimes pops in before the first thing I typed.

Even after I've stopped typing, SL sometimes animates me as if I were typing.

Doesn't matter which sim I'm in. When will this be fixed I wonder?

Hey Jopsy,
I tried going to Perry 193, 175, 24 and it was just as bad.

Then I went to Pomponio 55, 205, 97, again because it is fairly quiet and
things got real bad ( 10:52 p.m. PST).
From keystroke to action was 4 seconds, REALLY jerky.

FPS 53 to 70
Bandwidth was 7 to 16 and then jumped to an erratic 700 spread.
Packet loss 0 %
Ping Sim alternated betwen 41 and 4294967296
Ping user alternated between 29 and 4294967296
Teleport was at 5 seconds and counting before crash

Torley or other tech folks, I hope you are listening.
Folks won't come if it's not an enjoyable experience.
Tai

ive had the same issues... it takes a second to start walking. And i have lots of skipping when flying. not low FPS, but missing frames.

It may not be just SecondLife.. since early tuesday evening I've been seeing rather atrocious lag on (ahem) "Other" MMO's as well that I've never had problems with.

Could be the avian bird flu has jumped species and is now infecting internet backbone routers.

interesting how this has proceeded. I try to get help in the one part of the forums where I can expect an answer from a Linden. Instead I get switched to another forum. What I get there is a referral to a piece of (IMHO) rather arrogant techie talk that leaves me feeling the fault must all be mine somehow. I play the game. I quote a bit of the tech talk and specifically identify an aspect of my problem...and now what? Nothing, apparently.

Unless you ask specific questions in the right forums, your never going to get answers. The post by Lee Linden is very good as it helps you to be specific about your problems.


You identified that your problems are caused by latency between your PC and SL.

What can LL do to improve your connection to their servers?

Neal clearly explained that he was non-technical, so when he said the problem was latency, you have to take that with a pinch of salt. It doesn't necessarily mean network latency.

As he was looking for customer support but got redirected involuntarily to a technical forum, I think it would be helpful and appropriate to give him some simple tests to run to help diagnosis. Then we would have something technical to discuss, rather than taking him to task for not asking specific questions here on issues outside of his sphere of competence.

A year ago I remember seeing some official articles posted by support Lindens on diagnosing lag. Does anyone have any links to them that might help Neal?

I've found this support item on lag, but it's not one of the ones that I mentioned seeing above, which were Linden forum posts.

This guide to the SL client's Statistics Bar is probably not at the right sort of level for non-technical support, but a great link to bookmark for other queries.

i still think its SL.. ive tried from two different RL locations and i see long load times, and rubberbanding when i fly. Also a pause before i start walking

Neal... I poked around a little in our neighborhood this morning... there's obviously something physical bouncing around which would add a little bit of lag, but not cause the long rez delays you're seeing. The behavior you've quoted could be any of the following:

1) problems with the internet equipment somewhere between you and Linden Lab.
2) problems with your internet service provider
3) there could be large uploads/downloads going on between you and your service provider,
4) something interefering with your wireless network, if you use one.

If it were only very slow rezzes and texture downloads it could be problems with the asset servers on Linden Labs side... but if your movement is profoundly affected as well, particularly in our quiet sim, then it's more likely a network problem, and outside of LL's realm of control. :-/

I have an athlon 64 fx-60...fastest chip to date...and four nvidia 7900's for graphics..all tuned like a piano. This mass of fans and other wierd stuff slices through some of the most demanding programs like a hot knife through butter. But Lee Linden (of 'it's the user's slow pc' fame) will have to configure a hotter number than I have to defeat lag, 'cause many times I still am choked by lag during high usage times on SL. Not much of a difference from my old pc on this puppy, 'cept that I now see the rippling water.

Xandi Mars thinks it's my connection. Empty my cache now every time I log on. Seems to help. But barely. Think grid attack practicum may be the cause, but who knows.

FYI..if you have a serious build to do...better do it during the low usage/low attack times of the SL day. Like when the cali folk are deep asleep.

Interesting post, Margot.

"It's your connection" is just a brush-off, unless there is engineering data to back such an assertion.

Every highly interactive game or world system like SL must have instrumentation built in to diagnose network timing problems between client and server. This has to be built into the infrastructure, and not done with ordinary networking tools alone. Generic tools cannot easily identify the in-game delays and bottlenecks on specific packets properly. (I'm a networking and systems engineer, by the way. The standard tools lack the required world-semantic controls and don't provide feedback at a level appropriate to the problem.)

The SL client has very thorough instrumentation and diagnostic screens, some of the best I've ever seen in such systems in fact. The problem is that they're not being used for customer support! When a customer reports heavy lag, it should be possible for support staff to enable instrumentation up-feed from his client to allow very precise diagnosis of what's going wrong.

Anything we can reply or suggest here would pale in comparison to such a powerful engineering approach. How come it's not being done? It looks to me like 95% of the mechanism is already in place.

Thanks morgaine. I appreciated your interest and your attitude. As far as my problem goes...I can't really blame it on the computer or the connection to my service provider...nothing seems to have changed except SL. Ther are other symptoms...I just chose one so I could quote 'the expert' and see what result I got. Other things that are happening...takes foreever for textures to load...parts of my buildings have changed...I click edit...the whole things seems to be there...but one part has become invisible and can't be unlinked or in any way manipulated. I had to just create a new prim and paste it over the invisible prim. Then there are these strange lines eminating from that same build...click on them and they identify themself as part of the build with the missing parts. Or, sometimes, the missing part appears in sections...sort of turned inside out...Is this my graphics card going out?

And thanks Jopsy...my most excellent neighbor. I just want to reply to your suggestion that it might be something in Teal. Trouble is I get it everywhere.

I just did something that let me know that it is indeed my machine.

3:33 pm PST - I ran SL on my old machine just fine
(P4, 2.66 Ghz, XP Home ed. , , GE Force4 MX 440, 64 MB,1024X768 display)

Then I logged off and back on w/ my new machine,
(AMD 4400, 3.0 Ghz, nVidea 7600 GT, 256 MB, 1Gig of RAM, XP media ed.
1280 x 1024 resolution)
It was horrible and jerky,

On the old machine the FPS was a steady 13 - 17
and the BW was a well-behaved range 20-300

vs. the VERY erratic ranges I found on the newer machine

It was the same network connection. I can't explain the difference, it's not a bottleneck but rather an overload.

If any of you can further narrow it down, maybe with dissimilar machine tests,
it sure would help us all out.
Thanks, TAI

Not unless we have the same graphics card. It looks like high tension lines anchoring down to the south of your tower yes?

I suspect what may have happened is some of your roof corner prims have some how gotten corrupted and are now horribly skewed. (I think it's been like that for a few months now)

If you can't grasp the prims on that object... or can but notice that object no longer has any ownership information, give the LiveHelp folks a shout and have someone come take a look.

Course... I'm sure it won't help with the lag but it should stop the roof from leaking.

We did come across an issue recently with the Linux client involving poor performance and excessive memory usage, turned out to be directly related to draw distance - took us a while to find it as the only change had been SL.

Something is definately amiss. I have a sexy new powerbook, and a college T1 line. My friend is playing Eve like there is no tomorrow.

Me, I can't even go to the ATM, I have so much packet loss. It has been like this for a few weeks now.