If you are freezing a lot, take off your hair

Just ran into a problem yesterday that may be affecting some players. A friend came over to my land wearing a beautiful hairdo and when I tried to look at it with the camera my framerates dropped from 35fps to 1fps consistantly. She put on one of her own hair styles and there was no problem.

From this it seems hair made from seemingly countless twisted toruses are grinding my superwhamadyne computer to it's knees, something I haven't noticed before. This may be a wide spread problem as one of her customers commented that she loved my friend's hair because it was the only one she could find that didn't lag her. I thought it was just because she might have a marginal computer but it hit my 4400+ X2 AMD 2 gig 6800 Ultra like a Commodore 64 trying to run Doom3. Its something to look at anyway.

Or *not* look at.

I still need to test my favorite hairstyles for this. The last several times I went in-world, I had other matters to attend to and no time for tests.

Is there usually any delay between removing the 'laggy hair' and seeing an improvement?

It would be nice to get a better frame rate. If I have to give up my favorite hairstyles, I'm going to be bugging you for a referral to your friend whose hair diesn't cause lag...

No delay as far as I know. It hit me as soon as I would press the alt key and move my camera near her head. The computer would freeze every time.

Death by toruses : p , i have one old relic hair from awhile back, loads of torues , 3 attachments - 700 toruses , wich will kill your fps if you look near it :>

Smaller torus cluster cause fps lag much more then large ones?, havnt really tried to make that many toruses and see if it kills fps as small does easy.

We all know that already, don't we? It's called the "hoochie" effect. It's TONS of toruses, what to expect, they are beautiful but evil waha XD

I'm pretty sure this is a well known fact...Curly hair causes LAAAAAAG.

I wear it only for pictures, then it's back to simple hair for me. And when I am going to a busy event, I switch to Robin Sojourner's no-prim beautifully textured hair.

I know about the "hoochie" effect and it normally robs me of frame rate but it has never caused my computer to stop dead before, as in music stops, game freezes, external applications hang etc. and I have a high end system.

Kathmandu, you may have just saved my Second Life.

But now I need to have you divulge the name of your friend who makes good hair that doesn't lag, 'cause I need to replace most of mine! Please?

Results of a test in Magenta, when I was the only person in the sim, or there was at most one more person in the sim, somewhere. Tests were run standing outside, facing a small grove of palm trees, beyond which was the sea betwen the two mainland continents. Facing a Void Sim seems to increase frame rates, as the rendering engine seems to know there is nothing to calculate in the Void. Not naming vendors here, just showing results

Adopted a plain Ruth Human form, with just a simple bikini on. The only customization was my eye texture. Started with LL's "Women's Medium Curls", which is a simple, non-prim hairstyle. Here's the fps rates, on my little Mac Mini, which is somewhat graphics challenged to begin with:

Women's Medium Curls - 9.5 to 10.2
Prim hairstyle #1 (long straight hair, fall in back) - 6.0 to 7.0
Prim hairstyle #2 (short updo, bun with a few curls) - 6.2 to 6.8
Prim hairstyle #3 (long curly hair, lots of loose, wavy curls) - 3.9 to 5.0

Then I tried some of my Furry forms, to see how the Avatars might be making lag, with or without prim hair:

Detailed digitigrade Vixen - LL Medium Curls - 7.0 to 7.8
Detailed digitigrade Vixen - Prim hairstyle #1 - about 5.6
Detailed digitigrade Vixen - Prim hairstyle #3 - about 4.6
Cute chibi fox vixen (lots of prims, no hair) - 3.4 to 4.2

You get the picture... In most sims, with others around, I get maybe 1.2 to 2.5 fps, wearing one of the three prim hairstyles above, and my Detailed digitigrade Vixen.

*sigh*

I need a new beauty parlor!

700 prim hair. o.o;
And here I thought 80ish prims was far too much. It's amazing what a few textures will do to add depth and detail to just a few prims.

Her name is Pandia Mackenzie, Pandia's Purrrfect Hair (MAIN STORE) Georgiana (134, 147, 59). Now, I will say that she does have one or two "hoochie" styles that may lag you down but they are pretty obvious also i haven't tested them, I can only say what her customer said. I can say i've never had a problem being around any of her hair do's but being on a MIni.. there is no telling. They are like.. non-portable Ipods.

Thank you, Kathmandu! I'll almost certainly visit Pandia's shop this evening, just as soon as I get off work! Guess I'll reserve those three prim hairstyles for my modeling photo-shoots.

And yeah, I know a Mac Mini sucks for SL. But I got it before I ever intended to do anything that required such a powerful video card, and it was all I could afford at the time. And if I can fix this hair issue, my frame rate should at least triple over what I had been getting. So it will suck a lot less.

Well... I bought two of Pandia's hairstyles last night, carefully avoiding a few that clearly had lots of ringlets. I must say, they are quite nice. But they didn't perform noticably different than the three hairstyles that I was worried about. I get similar frame rates while wearing her hair.

So... I guess my original hairstyles aren't much of a problem for anyone but myself, with my limited video card. I'll wear the LL Women's Medium Curls when I encounter high lag, and stick with my normal styles elsewhere.