Anyone know whats happening on my sims?

I have three sims....one full sim and two attached OS. All three have little if any lag. I've used both the standard and the recent Release Candidate viewers and observe no difference with this problem.

I've been experiencing the following for the last several days on ALL of these sims:


Items like candles, mist / fog emitters are the ones I've observed this problem with. I have noticed that SOMETIMES the flames on the candles will start out normal...then end up 'sputtering'. The Mist emitters will also end up sputtering or slowed down.


To try and diagnose the problem. I took the objects involved to another's sims and they work FINE . I had him bring some of his over to try on my three sims...and his worked poorly here as well.

There have been no major changes on any of these sims other than on two of them I recently put out some snow rezzers which work fine. One one sim there are no snow rezzers.

I called Concierge and they said all three regions show nothing unusual in the way of scripts or objects. The servers are running smoothly. serv. # 1.24.9.98659 on all three. Concierge was unable to find anything wrong but said to submit a ticket. Again, I detect little if any lag on all three.

Any idea what may be going on here? It does appear to be region specific ....as other sims in other locations don't seem to be affected.....yet ALL THREE of mine with no recent changes.

I'm scratching my head on this one

My best guess is that you're running into either your clients' limit on rendering particles or into SL's limit on particles per region (I forget what that latter one is; in fact, I'm not sure there is a region limit anymore). The reason why it would vary between regions is probably because other regions don't have as many particle emitters as yours does.

Are the snow rezzers you added particle generators? If so, they may have been the last straw.

When you run up against this limit (your client limit is set in Edit/Preferences/Graphics/Custom, particle slider is on the right side near the top), you see exactly the behavior you describe. Your client will choose an object and render particles from it, then the next time slice may choose a different object to render particles from, so the first one will "sputter".

Particle limits are applied to a 96m radius around you, not to your field of view. So, you may not even be looking at a set of particles that are rendering correctly, when you see your candle sputter.
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are particles not client side rendered. Meaning that any effects happening could be being influenced by the the computer the renders are happening on.

yes, particles are rendered client side, so each clients limits will affect their view differently....

it's likely you start out viewing one source, and as sources get added they take up an amount of that maximum specified in your client... when the total particles alive hits that limit new particles are not seen untill some of the old ones die off, and then it's random as to which particle sources might show new ones....

without removing any sources, you might try making some of them shorter lived (that snow machine is a likely culprit here, long lived progressively higher particle counts make candles sad)

thank you for the input. yesterday, when I came in all candles, mist, etc..were working as ithey should ... with no changes by me...no removal of snow rezzers etc. This applied to all three sims mentioned above.

This morning when I came in ....same problem...sputtering candles, mist..smoke from the chimney, etc.

As a test....on the full sim, I removed all snow rezzers...all other rezzer and partlcle emitters I could find. I did leave the few candles and the smoke .. no change ... I also checked my particle limit and it was set to the default of 4096 ,,,,, then set it to the max .... no change.

I then excited and and entered the game several times....no change. I reset the sim with no change. I even cleared all cache and defraged.....not that it would help, but tried it anyway....and still no change.

Why it would be ok for yesterday afternoon...AFTER doing nothing ... removing nothing...changing no settings.....then return to the way it was when I first made this post.......I have no idea. I'm a little ticked off that Concierge has offered no help except to 'submit a ticket'.

Any other ideas would be appreciated. As stated above this also affects the two OS that are attached to my full sim ....and others that come to the sims also see the same thing

well I'm definitely stumped, are there any actions you undertookbefore yesterday? looged in/out from a different location thatwould affect your view and what was cached? I really don't understand why it should behave that way.....

for fun you can try one more test, lower your max particles displayed all the way, effectively turning them off and on again, see if that has any effect.... and if they come back normal for you at some point, stick around for awhileand see if they don't eventually start stuttering again.

This sounds like the "particles petering out" problem that was fixed last year.
JIRA LINK: https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-418

What version of the viewer are you using?

I would bet it's the subnet your sim is on. i.e. a bad network connection...

/esc

I've noticed this before while working on particles and it's not always clear what the cause is to begin with altho it's almost always environmental - neighbours with weather or snow machines is a likely one! Remember if you can SEE your snow machine then it's causing particle-load, doesn't matter what sim it's actually in.

Supposedly the particle limit only applies to concurrent particles currently in-vision but it's been my experience that it applies to any particles within your draw-range regardless of whether they're currently in vision or not. Put a particle device out of sight and switch it on and off while checking your frame-rate and you might see what I mean. One inefficiently-scripted particle device is enough to send you way over your particle limit and cause these problems. Check your framerate while you slowly rotate your view 360° and see if there's one particular direction which slows things more noticeably - that might lead you to the errant device.

Quick way to check individual particle devices - sit on them and shoot them up to 1000m high or more - if they suddenly start pouring out particles smoothly and evenly then it's obviously the combined load of rendering all the objects at ground level in your sim that's causing the stuttering. But you've already tested them on another sim, which basically amounts to the same thing.

Couple of performance tweaks to try - switch off or reduce Anti-Aliasing if you have it on and see if that makes a significant difference - for some reason SL applies AA to particles too when it really shouldn't. Switch off Classic Clouds too, if they're on, as they add to the total particle load your client is rendering.

As has been said, the most likely reason is a particle device spewing out too many particles - many of them are incredibly greedy! If you have mod perm's for the scripts in them you can do some basic arithmetic to check total particle load - divide the AGE by the RATE and multiply that by the COUNT to get a rating for the concurrent particle load.

Lately this seems to be the generic reason given for anything that can't be explained.

Do other people TPing to your sim experience the same issue when you are seeing it? If not, it is probably client sided. Perhaps after time the emitters go to such a high limit that even the maximum particle amount is no longer enough. Have you tried resetting the scripts in the objects when you see it happening? Maybe one of the emitters is emitting more and more particles the longer it runs.

Thanks so much for your input ..... I believe what Erisitic has explained well what has been happening. I kept trying to figure out why the the snow rezzers on my neigboring OS sims would be affecting my full sim on which no snow rezzers were placed. In fact I was able to see some of the snow particles from the neighboring sim. Also when others came into any of my sims, they would experience the same 'sputtering' of the candles.

I also noticed after more experimenting...that when I would tp in from another sim...not mine .... SOMETIMES ... the flames would burn fine for a couple minutes then start sputtering.

In the end I removed ALL of the Snow Rezzers and the problem was resolved. I put just a couple back to double check...and on the same sim the effect was immediate.

Not sure I understand it all .. but maybe there is a snow rezzer I can put out here and there on the sims that won't do this to my candle's, smoke and the like.

Thanks again.