New resident - lag ?

I've just joined SL, and the one thing I notice most is the "lag", mainly in the delay to repond to a keyboard input (i.e. walking forward).
I've played quite a few other MMO's, and the level of lag I feel every day in SL is much higher than i've ever seen elsewhere, given
it's not caused by serious server issues or client-side issues.

So on this i have a few questions :

- Is this recent ? Will it blow over, or is this the every day second life.
- Could it be i'm doing something wrong client-side, or is there something else i could do to lower this absurd lag ? (I have no firewalls, nothing else taking up my bandwidth, no other applications running)
- Is this an isolated problem ? Or is this something everyone willingly endures ?

There has been a huge influx of new users during the past few days. If you are in a crowded area then you'll experience a significant amount of lag.

If you have left Help Island, click the Map button at the bottom of your screen and find a place that is empty or only has a few people in it (the green dots), double-click a location within the empty area and you'll teleport there.

SL is still likely to be a little laggy (due to the large number of people online now) in empty areas but should be better than the crowded areas.

If you are still on Help Island, try to login later, or if you are in North America, try to login earlyier in the mornings -- SL is overall not as busy during mornings in North America.

Welcome to SL

-2fast

Lag can depend on a lot of factors. Just on your PC, there's the speed of your computer (mine's slow), how great of a video card your have (mine's old), and the speed of your Internet connection.

If you move into an area, your computer has to try and download all the textures of every surface you can see, as well as the shapes. Moving in areas with lots of shapes, large textures, and lots of people will cause some lag.

Personally, I tend to keep my settings in tune with my surroundings. If I am in a crowded area, I will dial down my draw distance (Edit/Preferences/Graphics) to 64 meters, and reduce the resolution of Avatars/Objects/Trees/Flexi (Graphic Details tab), turn off Shiny, turn off High detailed terrain, etc. You may need to experiement to see what settings let you move ok but still see enough detail to have fun.

Sometimes I find the Move object I bought from Catherine Omega's store seems to help with stopping moving around long after I let go of the keys, but I haven't tested this in any scientific way.

Crossing sim boundaries can also cause a slight bounce.


I played World of Warcraft on the same box, and found quite a bit of lag when entering places like Ironforge, probably due to the number of avatars there. Less crowded places do seem snappier, but we have to remember in those games the number of shapes and textures is strictly defined, people don't have the freedom to make their own (so I don't have to keep downloading textures and shapes as I move around). This is a trade-off, but one I'm happy with.

It seems to have gotten worse recently, but reports vary.


As someone else mentioned, there are several factors, which can include bandwidth, RAM, processor, and graphics card. I have high-speed connection with a pretty nice machine, and I see a great deal of lag. It often depends on where you are. There are places in SL that are simply not worth going to, ever, because of overworked servers. Explore, there are a great many places that *are* worth going to!


It is extremely common. Reports will vary depending on so many factors that you will simply never get a common answer.

Most people who for various reasons do not routinely experience insane lag will blame it on your client machine, network, or whatever, but the fact remains that some places simply are overloaded on the server side and should simply be avoided at all costs.

On the other hand, there are many great and interesting places where lag is minimal, so it's well worth exploring to find such areas.

Welcome to SL, Bradley!

It's most likely the 'crowd effect'. If you have 20 to 40 other Avatrs in the same sim with you, lag's going to start to really hurt, unless you have a screaming-fast graphics card with huge amounts of on-card video RAM, and lots of system RAM in the computer. SL does not handle large crowds well. Heck, it doesn't handle the population of a decent cocktail party well.

As Jerimiah said, if you see a lot of green dots near you on the map or mini-map, expect it to be slower than if you're alone. Try moving to an area with fewer people nearby. If you're in an area with lots of different textures displayed, like a busy mall with lots of seperate merchant shops, expect it to take far longer to rez everything than if you're in a small room with plain walls and simple furnishings. The more complex the scene, the longer it will take to render.

Unlike most on-line games, virtually ALL content in SL is user-created. So the system can't store the 27 allowed swords, 12 allowed types of bows, 132 possible clothing outfits, and what have you that the game designers built into it, and just yank those from a cached memory reserve. There are infinite variations in every nuance of what you see in SL. Even a simple thing like a T-shirt could have infinite varieties of color shading. So each thing that you see, down to the last small weed in the lawn, has to be checked against the asset server and downloaded to your client, so you can see it. Needless to say, if you don't have a killer 3D video card, it's going to be slow going.

Will it get better? We hope so. The Lindens are working to improve asset server efficiency. Better video cards are becoming more affordable for end users, and the Internet itself promises to some day have faster throughput, and to be able to offer more bandwidth. But it will take time.

Be patient. SL is a wonderful place, but is suffering severe growing pains.

Welcome Bradley. I have an excellent note card on lag and how to deal with it. I will try to look you up in world and drop it on you.

SL eats top-of the-line gaming rigs and high-speed connections for breakfast!


Becuase of the unique architecture of the SL platform and the various things it allows residents to do (that they can't do on almost any other on-line game), lag seems to go with the territory at least for now.

The huge increase in residents over the past days primarily cuz of the Yahoo and Wired magazine articles, is contributing to an unusual amount of lag in the areas you are probably most likely visiting.

There are adjustment you can make to your settings that can help reduce the lag:

Here are some of them:

Go to the Edit Menu on top of your screen:

Select Preferences.

Select Network Tab and adjust the bandwidth setting to correspond to your connection.

Select Graphics tab: Many residents limit their Draw Distance to no more than 128 outside and 64 when indoors.

Select Graphics Detail Tab: Uncheck Rippled Water; Uncheck Bump Mapped; Select Sun and Moon only. Select low for terrain detail.

There are sliders at the bottom. Initially Slide the Top one maybe 1/4 from the left. All others push all the way to the left. These settings can then be increased by moving the sliders to tha right as your PC set-up allows

Other things to do (Will noticeably degrade on screen image outdoors)

Press Ctrl+Alt+D

Open Client Menu on top of screen

Clik on Rendering>Click Types on menu that opens on the right>Select and clik on Clouds.

Open Client Menu>clik Rendering>Clik on Features>Clik on Fog.