Hourly Lag Storm

Has anybody else experienced, every hour, exactly on the hour, a lag storm. FPS goes down to about 3 or 4, and nobody can can can move, and scripts that usually execute instantly take a minute. In about 3-5 minutes, the storm stops, FPS climbs back up to 40 or so, and Second Life resumes at what now passes for normal.

Feels like some kind of hourly garbage collector.

The big lag spikes seem to occur more right before a new patch... dunno why, probably too caught up with patch to maintain what's current...

It's the hourly autosave process.

Supposedly, there was a memory leak in the patch before last, which caused these types of 'lag storms', after awhile - the problem was that several regions or sims are sometimes hosted on a single computer, which normally would not be an issue, but because of the memory leak, when each sim would start their autosave process, it would bring everything grinding to a halt. As the uptime of those sims increased, the problem would become more and more noticeable until finally, when the autosave process began, the sim would actually appear to be down for a minute or more, your character would freeze, sim fps would go down to zero.

The patch that came out after that one (1.7.1 or 1.7.2, I don't remember) seemed to fix this, or so I thought - it was in the patch notes. However, I HAVE seen a couple of sims recently that are having the exact same symptoms again, most of them within the last week. It's possible that these are two completely different issues, but the symptoms are incredibly similar.

There are also severe deisgn flaws in the SL reliable network transport code (which handles texture transmission among others) that can cause an enitre sim to flail in the event of packet loss to one client attached to that sim. This is probably the reason behind Lee Linden's assertion that one client attaching through dial-up can bring a sim to its metaphoric knees.

There is also intentional packet dropping being done by the overloaded router at Linden Lab's gateway to the internet which Philip claims to not be able to see or fix despite it being reported by customers from various places in the world. A recheck as of the time of this post shows that the border packet dropping is still happening at the same rates.

Needless to say, both of these flaws have been reported to LL and acknowledged, but they cannot seem to get a handle on them. These flaws may very well be causing or intensifying the reported phenomena.

Lee's comment is interesting in that I thought that I detected a kind of lag "avalanche" a few times when a particular avatar showed up at an event; an avatar on a very bad connection funnily enough. I always thought I was nuts to associate the two things, but perhaps not.

Also - to the original poster - I have seen the hourly lag wave a lot, but I have found similar effects througout my game play here long before 1.7. So often, when you get lag it's "pulsating" or "wave lag" where everything slows or freezes for a few moments and then is released. I used to get this daily in Achemon sim as a newbie four or five months ago, and it lasted through several updates over a two month period. Because we were all newbies, I am not sure if LL evver even knew about it (which amply illustrates the giant flaw in the bug-report-it-and-we-will fix-it approach they take).

It is especially annoying because you just *know* that it's really nothing to do with you or your friends, or any of your creations. It occurs whether the sim is empty or full and whatever the particular cause of each individual case of this kind of lag is, it's almost certainly the LL network or their code.

Isabel is continuing to experience this same problem. It seems to get progressivly worse after a few days. Usually a sim restart will temporarily correct it.

Even after the latest patch, the problem continues. Hoping 1.74 will help, but I don't see anything specific in the release notes to give me peace of mind.

I had the same problem on my land, but it was every 5 mins or so. And my friends from different countries were experiencing it too when they came to my land, but not at the same times I was, either just before me or just after me.

The only stat that went down was FPS, went down to 0.1, just lasted for about 1min, but happened every 5 to 10 mins, making it almost impossible do anything. Was relaly annoying, especially seeing as im trying to run a business there. Nothing else apart from FPS was effected.

After being told nothing was wrong with the sim and that its propbably my connection (Which I was sure it wasnt) and being fobbed off countless times, eventually I was told to reduce all my settings under preferences to really low and turn most of the features off. I didnt have the mad lag spikes in any other areas.

Well this helps a lot and I'm not getting the mad lag spikes anymore. My friends experience exactly the same as me. I'm sure we cant all have bad connections.

Subsiquently I've told everyone I know with lag to turn down everything under preferences, and yes this solves the lag problem, but it just feels like its a shame that we cant use any of the nice features in the game if we actually want to be able to move around and do things.... unless of course we all go out and buy super computers.

Now I understand that everyones computers are different and everyones connections are different, but when most people are experiencing the same problems, maybe its a good idea to sort them out, rather than concentrating on putting a fancy new button in a different place on our screens.

Lee, it was similar to what you describe, a few days it wasnt so bad, but most days it was terrible.

(Feel like im a beta tester lol)

Lizette, I think the problem you are describing is completely different. The original poster, I assume was talking about the sim fps going down to 0, not the client fps. Depending on your settings, it's very probable that depending on the area, if you have certain settings enabled, SL could begin using so much memory that it begins paging to virtual memory - when that happens, you might as well start watching a slide show.

Known causes in an area include interpenetrating primitives, massive amounts of large (512x512 or higher) textures in a small area, and avatars with 5 million primitive attachments (which usually includes both of the things above). Even a build that LOOKS relatively simple, does not necessarily mean that it is.

As far as client settings go, the higher your object detail settings, the more faces that are used per curved primitive to display it - those faces use more memory. Another horrible offender is the 'use local lighting' setting - just don't use it. Depending on the area, my memory can easily go into the 1 gig+ range, and I only have 1.2gig. Bad, bad...

Another cause can be slow video ram. If you are in an area with lots of different textures of any size, the paging in and out of video ram caused by you moving through the area could also cause a bit of framerate drop. As you move through an area, SL intelligently removes textures from video card memory that you can no longer see, and loads ones you do. The shuffling around of these textures could cause issues for very slow video cards that otherwise don't have problems with most games.

Be sure to note that the term lag refers to network latency, not client framerate. If you hear people say the word 'lag' to mean that their system is performing slowly, they are using the word incorrectly.