VOICE EATS CPU Usage=LOSS OF NORMAL GAME FUNCTIONS

With all the problems since voice (searches not working, tp's not working or intermittently working) besides hurting everyone who wants to shop or runs a business... it is the SL client taking over the CPU usage at over double what it was before the addition of voice. To find that out... hit control + alt + delete - go to performance tab... and see the % CPU usage. There is NO NEED FOR VOICE if it is affecting searches/tp's etc. until they (LL) finds a way that it does not take over your DOUBLE CPU usage. SL had enough problems with the game (for years) and they don't fix things they ADD. Also on a private sim every login you do on the sim you own, voice shows enabled even though on region/estate tab it is off. To fix, turn on and off again to disallow it on your sim. However it will not change CPU usage.

IT IS ABOUT TIME SL FIXED THINGS! I personally have lost a ton of sales as has my mall due to searches and tp's not working when CPU is maxed out. It is hurting people's ability to shop, manuever in the game, teleport, search etc. And when anyone lands on island it spikes. BEFORE THE VOICE it was NOT using 1/3 the CPU it is now. I run 3 GB of RAM and am having big troubles when I use my computer as I am sure thousands and thousands of users are, especially older or lower end computers, let alone laptop users.

IT IS NOT FAIR to players who are here to work/create and enjoy the game. Since VOICE the problems have become UNBEARABLE and ONGOING and EXPENSIVE. Disk cleaning, cache cleaning, rebooting etc etc etc over and over again to NO AVAIL.

PLEASE FIX THE GAME. GET RID OF VOICE till it can be done without taking over your computer. There is Skype, Yahoo, MSN etc. NONE OF WHICH pull CPU like SL now does with VOICE.

I AM FED UP!
I have noticed that with all the screwups that happen with the game LL never loses its ability to take my tier fees on time! I know that a problem such as that would be fixed ASAP. I don't personally care if IBM and DELL and other corporations want VOICE. The game has been and is created and supported by individual users! And as a longtime user.... I JUST WANT THE GAME TO WORK!

VOICE IS A CPU HOG which no one wanted in the first place! There are too many other voice options that work fine.

SUGGESTION: 2 SL CLIENTS.. One for voice users, ONE for those that want a good smooth running game (after they fix all the other problems that been ongoing for years)!

QUIT trying to dump the operations of this game on users! EXTERNALIZE VOICE!!!

I've been saying this a lot in the last two days. The voice spatial rendering and stream management functions are in the client side executable, not on the server. As such, the client has to process the sound related to the extra z axis along with all of the decay, echo, and other variables related to who can hear what through which output. Just like an overloaded client will need to turn off 3D sound to speed up Unreal Tournament, it will need to do the same thing here, but the amount of data being transferred by SL probably exceeds even a 16 player UT capture the flag session by 50 times.

Skype, Yahoo Voice, and MSN Voice Messenger do not render the sound. To say there is no correlation between the inline 3D voice and the performance degradation on the clients is like saying that 3D video rendering requirements have nothing to do with why Doom 3 can't be run on a 486 with a 4MB video card. And anyone who realistically thinks that a network full of maxed-out CPU bound clients will not cause enough packet loss and collision to eventually slow the network to a crawl has a little more research to do down at Cisco headquarters.

For those who claim it's nothing to do with voice because a lot of this preceded voice, I offer the fact that tons of people were complaining about 100% CPU utilization before voice got here. What was it made you think that adding a 3D voice stream and its associated overhead would not make the problem worse?

But will LL listen?
I doubt it because of the large investment made. The game is coming to a grinding halt!

VOICE EATS CPU Usage=LOSS OF NORMAL GAME FUNCTIONS
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With all the problems since voice (searches not working, tp's not working or intermittently working) besides hurting everyone who wants to shop or runs a business... it is the SL client taking over the CPU usage at over double what it was before the addition of voice. To find that out... hit control + alt + delete - go to performance tab... and see the % CPU usage. There is NO NEED FOR VOICE if it is affecting searches/tp's etc. until they (LL) finds a way that it does not take over your DOUBLE CPU usage. SL had enough problems with the game (for years) and they don't fix things they ADD. Also on a private sim every login you do on the sim you own, voice shows enabled even though on region/estate tab it is off. To fix, turn on and off again to disallow it on your sim. However it will not change CPU usage.

IT IS ABOUT TIME SL FIXED THINGS! I personally have lost a ton of sales as has my mall due to searches and tp's not working when CPU is maxed out. It is hurting people's ability to shop, manuever in the game, teleport, search etc. And when anyone lands on island it spikes. BEFORE THE VOICE it was NOT using 1/3 the CPU it is now. I run 3 GB of RAM and am having big troubles when I use my computer as I am sure thousands and thousands of users are, especially older or lower end computers, let alone laptop users.

IT IS NOT FAIR to players who are here to work/create and enjoy the game. Since VOICE the problems have become UNBEARABLE and ONGOING and EXPENSIVE. Disk cleaning, cache cleaning, rebooting etc etc etc over and over again to NO AVAIL.

PLEASE FIX THE GAME. GET RID OF VOICE till it can be done without taking over your computer. There is Skype, Yahoo, MSN etc. NONE OF WHICH pull CPU like SL now does with VOICE.

I AM FED UP!
I have noticed that with all the screwups that happen with the game LL never loses its ability to take my tier fees on time! I know that a problem such as that would be fixed ASAP. I don't personally care if IBM and DELL and other corporations want VOICE. The game has been and is created and supported by individual users! And as a longtime user.... I JUST WANT THE GAME TO WORK!

VOICE IS A CPU HOG which no one wanted in the first place! There are too many other voice options that work fine.

SUGGESTION: 2 SL CLIENTS.. One for voice users, ONE for those that want a good smooth running game (after they fix all the other problems that been ongoing for years)!

QUIT trying to dump the operations of this game on users! EXTERNALIZE VOICE!!!!

I did not download voice and I am running SL at 37% CPU and together with searching through MSN webpage I run at 44%. Did you download voice and what CPU are you running at?

VOICE SHOT MY DOG! It is true!

I check my CPU use regularly, and see no increase in CPU usage since the voice update.

In otherwords your entire, long rant is worthless.

Troll somewhere else.

I was running voice, and decided it just wasn't for me, and since SL has gotten worse since I installed it, I've turned it off and will not be using it again.

I think the number of people who will actually use it are in the minority.

The Worst Thing About Voice Is That It Makes People Type In All Caps In Order To Increase The Truthiness Of Their Opinion.

I hate Voice. I think it's a waste of time for a small % of users.

I detest the Communicate UI and would like the Four seperate functions, split back into spereate UI's (Chat, IM's, Friend's List, and Voice).

However, the actual Voice integration ahs no impact on your CPU usage, nor on the Grid. It uses seperate servers.

What it will impact is your (that that again, your, not LL's) bandwidth. The more you Vocie with, the more it will use. Same as Skype, and Ventrillo. Duh! You're basically streaming in more data.

While I have a stance against Voice, I do not believe it is the cause of all the issues as of late (or not a direct cause). It is just a chance that it happened at the same time as Hardware Failures. Though Voice may be an indirect cause by putting more stress on the network and causing minor failures to show up (which is actually a good thiing as that hardware is getting repaired finally).

~Jessy

I see Strife foot prints ...........

People have been asking for a 'Voice' at LL for ages now. I guess LL didn't really understand the question.

ROFLMAO

I just KNEW we should have drawn LL pictures......in Crayon.

~Jessy

P.S. Thanks for that laugh. I needed it =^.^=

Voice does take up more of your processing power. It is listed as SLvoice.exe and on my system it takes up between 12K and 15K. Turning it off in preferences removes it from active processes.

For those that don't know or realize, when you install the voice viewer there are 2 additional programs intstalled, SLVoice.exe and SLVoiceAgent.exe. Either one or both could very well eat up large chunks of your memory and cause problems client side.

Running on separate servers doesn't mean a whole hell of a lot, if the interface between those servers and the grid servers is faulty.

The grid runs on a few thousand separate servers not one big server. Then you have the asset server, the log-in server and maybe others.

If the server side software is buggy (which obviously it is hence a lot of the problms) and if there are bugs are in the part of the application that is suppose to integrate the voice servers with the main grid servers, then the main grid can be impacted by that also. Which it obviously is also, hence some of the problems some people seem to be having with the voice client.

eh actualy its pretty hard on older computers

I warned a couple of people that the game may not be playable if they use voice and to be prepared to

a) buy a new computer
b) dump the voice

most dumped the voice and are back to fine using a viewer that does not use the voice client at all. (see the above posts on the processes forced to run if you have the client going)

one is considering buying a new computer so they can use voice.

Crossposting the same rant doesn't help either.

for what SL actually does, in graphics quality, detail, sound, "game"play and else its performance has always been quite pathetic

it truly looks and plays like a 128 bit game and as of last year they were trying to improve the engine for average computers to run at 15fps (which is again sad)

so its no surprise that this already woefully inefficient engine has noticeable slowdown with voice, which just adds more stress to underpowered computers

It isn't just older computers - I've seen SLVoice.exe eating >60% CPU according to task manager on my computer which is a 2.16GHz Core Duo and less than a year old (OK, it isn't a Core 2 Duo but I'd hardly call it obsolete).

I produced the attached CPU graph this morning. Red is CPU of Secondlife.exe, Black is SLVoice.exe and blue (for comparison) is Skype. The graph has a sample rate of every 10 seconds, and this was taken on an empty voice enabled sim during a text chat with the only other person on that sim (i.e. both SL voice and skype were idle).

As you can see, SLVoice would be intermittently spiking to up to 25% CPU whilst idling, and as mentioned in a area with a lot of voice chatters it can be using more CPU that SecondLife.exe itself!

Matthew

I don't know ...

Mine is definitely not a modern one (AMD Athlon XP 2200+, 1.80 GHz, 512 MB RAM) and SL is running fairly stable on it, including the Voice client.

ROFLMAO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

*merges*

Thank you!

Jesus what's the use. You guys wanna continue on with this separate servers crap like the server is responsible for talking directly to your sound cards. Guess that's why some people are engineers and others are end-users calling tech support complaining because their computers won't turn on during blackouts.

You think the servers are calling the shots on your machine for voice and this is why separate servers makes the difference? How about this. The servers you keep talking about don't even have permission to talk directly to your hardware. That's what the client side component is for. That component takes up resources. Period. It tells your hardware what to do with the incoming signal and then your local hardware does it. Not the server. If your sound card doesn't support 3D sound, you don't hear it. If your machine lacks the power to run 3D video and sound simultaneously, goodbye to your frame rate. Period.

Don't believe me? Go get a Pentium III with 16MB RAM and a SB 3D sound card, hook up to a network server with some FPS running on it, and enable hardware 3D sound. See how long you last. And make sure when your machine starts crawling at 2 fps that you switch the game to faster and faster servers and then come back and we'll discuss why nothing changed.

No of course they won't. They'll spin it and mix it into the other challenges that they are facing so that nobody will be able to single out the contribution of individual services, particularly voice, which they know has become a hotbed of public opinion. And of course, some people will eat the explanation up like a plateful of White Castle cheeseburgers and with no understanding of I/O whatsoever will be found parroting that explanation back as if they deduced its theory themselves. And woe to any who don't bite.

Sorry if I sound annoyed, but I am. If someone comes to me with something they've worked out on their own that differs or refutes something I've worked out, I make it my business to examine it and accept it where I can. But don't cut and paste somebody else's lazy deductions and then claim the rest of us are idiots for not sucking it up like sponges. The people I'm talking about know who they are

Well, it's like this.

I put on voice, packet loss out the wazoo, can't move.

I disable voice. Still packet loss out the wazoo, can't move.

I go back to the old version. MUCH better. Still more packet loss, etc., than before, but not nearly as much as while on new version. Can now play SL.

But I'm stupid to draw ANY sort of conclusion about that, right?

This whole argument kinda reminds me of, maybe, a huge traffic jam downtown. Cars are running into each other, stalling all over, etc. People are climbing out of their cars and yelling for help.

But SOME people are standing in the middle of it all and saying, "Whiners! I don't know what you guys are always whining about. You'd think something was wrong here or something."

Now, if I have the voice version running and it runs like crap, and then I go back to the previous version and it doesn't, well - I guess I am a TOTAL IDIOT for assuming there might just possibly be some connection.

Because I'm obviously the sort of person who calls my ISP to rant and rave when my computer quits working during an electrical failure.

Cause see, I'm just dumb that way.

coco