Epic Long Lag Spikes

[Paul Spiesel]

I've spent hours reading through this forum as well as computing forums and can't find anything similar to the lag spike problem I'm experiencing.. I'm unable to use the latest viewers (both SL and Firestorm) because of the lag spikes which occur every 3-4 minutes and last an entire minute (I've timed them). During this time frame rate drops to about 5 per second. When I'm in chat, the cursor is lagged and it's nearly impossible to type. I can move my avie around but I can't see where I'm going because of the slow frame rate. Audio and streaming is 100% normal. No change at all in the CPU and memory usage during the spikes. I've got a decent internet connection. I was thinking I had an overheating graphics card but the lag problem goes away for almost an hour if I relog. Even when I log back on immediately. I don't see how my graphics card would have a chance to cool off in those few seconds. I've been using the older viewers and I see everyone's avies as grey so I'm spending less and less time on SL. I don't think I need to upgrade my computer (as many people suggested) because I have no problems at all between lag spikes.

[Paul Spiesel]

I've spent hours reading through this forum as well as computing forums and can't find anything similar to the lag spike problem I'm experiencing.. I'm unable to use the latest viewers (both SL and Firestorm) because of the lag spikes which occur every 3-4 minutes and last an entire minute (I've timed them). During this time frame rate drops to about 5 per second. When I'm in chat, the cursor is lagged and it's nearly impossible to type. I can move my avie around but I can't see where I'm going because of the slow frame rate. Audio and streaming is 100% normal. No change at all in the CPU and memory usage during the spikes. I've got a decent internet connection. I was thinking I had an overheating graphics card but the lag problem goes away for almost an hour if I relog. Even when I log back on immediately. I don't see how my graphics card would have a chance to cool off in those few seconds. I've been using the older viewers and I see everyone's avies as grey so I'm spending less and less time on SL. I don't think I need to upgrade my computer (as many people suggested) because I have no problems at all between lag spikes.

[Freya Mokusei]

First and most obvious guess about your spikes is connection bandwidth, you didn't give any details of your connection so I can't help you diagnose. If you're expecting help, we're gonna need more stats and numbers.

It's also quite possibly a choke on your VFS. If your hard disk is old or less than 5400RPM consider upgrade, if you have less than 2Gb free diskspace on either your Primary (OS) drive or the drive where SL is installed, clear space. If you run A/V or indexing services across the cache folders, stop doing that.

Regarding grey people though, you're gonna need a recent viewer. SSA only works for viewers built since July 9th 2013, and without this everyone will be grey.

[Orca Flotta]

Have you any other applications running at the same time? Torrents can really bog you down. Maybe a nosey neighbor riding piggyback on your unsecure connection? Have you contacted your ISP about these spikes? Maybe you're on a congested DSLam.  Have you tried changing to another sim? Some sims are lagging badly due to heavy script and texture load.

But calling 5 fps bad? You're so lucky, I've experienced far worse. Everything above 20 fps is like SL heaven for me ... and I'm a biker and race sailor, go figure.

[Paul Spiesel]

Thank you both for your input and suggestions. I don't seem to be having any problems with my internet so I didn't mention it. I have no lag time at all when I send and receive messages in IMs and in local chat. Only the mouse cursor lags to reflect the frame rate. It makes no difference whether or not I have programs running in the background.The lag spikes are always the same....3.5 minutes of normal (25-50 FPS), punctuated by one minute of lag. I tried a more accurate stat meter yesterday and my frame rate drops to a consistant 1.6-1.7 FPS, not 5 as I initially thought. Only the latest viewers are a problem. I use the same settings as the older viewers. I also recently moved to a new sim and it made absolutely no difference. Currently, I have only two choices. Either use the older viewers and see other avies as grey or suffer through these horrendous lag spikes. I have to tell people that I'm unable to move or type (unless I type and send messages "blindly"). The odd thing is that a few years back during a five-day power outtage, I logged onto SL on dialup and had much better frame rates than during these recent lag spikes!

[FangXiLi Xue]

Wow, recognition here, i got the same problem as you with this lag. I try to fight this for over a year now and its getting worse, graph settings inworld low, no change. update Nvidia Geforce GT 230, but i got latest version. Inet download speed is 60MB and my pc is not old or non-updated. even when my land is emtpy, i have this lag (i rebuild very often) My feeling sais maybe something on my land combinated with something in my viewer. cache i clear a lot, trash i empty a lot, makes no difference. got draw distance always on 300, on other sims its no problem too. my bandwidth inworld is on 250. My graph settings are medium or high, but makes no difference. with building its killing me, no fun to build like that. simrestarts doesnt help either, even wearing other clothes, or walking in my bare avi doesnt help. I use Firestorm now (latest update) but also with LL viewer i have the same trouble. Reinstall viewer doesnt work either, and after all this trying, i am out of ideas.

If anyone has any ideas, please help us, i know what Paul Spiesel is going through and believe me, its no fun.

Thanks in advance if anyone has ideas (keep it simple with explenations, coz im not a pro when it comes to some hardware/software, just a starter)

[Qie Niangao]

You say you have the same lag as this report from back in September, but I just want to confirm: You, too, have this specific pattern of 3.5 minutes of perfectly normal performance, followed by a minute of dreadfully poor performance, and this all only starts after the session has lasted for an hour of perfectly good performance?  Or you have some other kind of lag experience?

If it's really the same as the OP's experience, it would definitely warrant investigation. If it's more general lag, then yeah, I think it's likely sim content that's overtaxing your system (a GT 230 is not a terrifically powerful GPU, so it could get swamped by rendering load pretty easily).

[FangXiLi Xue]

Thank you for your reply.

Yes, i have exact the same lag, its like 3 or 4 minutes ok, athen the lag comes in for like half a minute or sometimes longer.

Its repeating over and over.Untill i loose my mind L0L.

Today again i reinstalled my viewer and put all settings lower, i mean graphics settings, so far it seem to be better, but i was not that long online. not long enough to be sure of it yet. to me the lag starts after i start building or when im online for like 10 minutes. I will continue testing it with my settings, even when i tested it before, and didnt work, i have to solve this coz its irritating me so sooo much, especially when i am building like the past few days. It really ruins the fun in SL, by the way, i had the same trouble with the LL viewer, or did i already mention that? not sure. Anyway, i keep tracking this site to see if there is someone who knows it or knows the solution. I dont deny it maybe is my pc or something in it, but i never had trouble, untill last year. somewhere in april it started and is sometimes worse than the other day, but lately its getting worse, thats why i started searching for it again.

[Qie Niangao]

I'm not sure why nobody tormented the thread's OP back in September for this information -- it would be extraordinarily valuable now, to compare with yours -- but it would be good to see your detailed machine configuration, from Help / About Second Life in the viewer.

It may be worthwhile to look at some hardware monitoring data, specifically GPU and CPU temperatures, to see if things could be getting into a cycle of overheating, automatically going into slow-speed thermal protection mode, then recovering for a few minutes before overheating again. As the OP observed, it does seem to recover too quickly and completely on relog, but it should be easy to check. (The monitoring software to use depends on your machine's operating system, of course, but you may already have your favourite anyway.)

[FangXiLi Xue]

To be honest, almost all what you just said sounds like chinese for me, let me know the steps i have to take to provide you from the info you need to investigate, and i will do it. I am a non-experienced when it comes to all those words you use ;-)

Make the steps easy to understand, like your talking to a 10 years old, then we can help eachother out better.

 

Thank you in advance.

 

Cheers

[Qie Niangao]

Sorry 'bout that. Let's start with "Getting your system information" as described in this Knowledge Base article.

Maybe somebody will come along and suggest a free temperature monitoring program, once we know what kind of machine you have (or you may be able to just use the graphics card's control panel, which might already include a GPU temperature read-out).

[FangXiLi Xue]

There we go :matte-motes-bashful-cute-2:

Today i have this lag so much again, this time after i was logged in like 1,5 hour and active building on my land, rezzing stuff etc.

I tried to unwear the Firestorm bridge, but didnt help (my husband advised me this and before it seem to reduce it a bit, but today not, maybe it was coincedence before)

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Firestorm 4.5.1 (38838) Oct 28 2013 00:03:49 (Firestorm-Beta) with Havok support
Release Notes

You are at 18.7, 153.8, 1,001.7 in San Pierto located at sim9832.agni.lindenlab.com (216.82.45.166:13020)
SLURL: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/San%20Pierto/19/154/1002
(global coordinates 130,067.0, 301,978.0, 1,001.7)
Second Life Server 14.02.28.287383
Release Notes

CPU: Pentium® Dual-Core  CPU      E5200  @ 2.50GHz (2499.94 MHz)
Memory: 4095 MB
OS Version: Microsoft Windows Vista 64-bit Service Pack 2 (Build 6002)
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: GeForce GT 230/PCIe/SSE2

Windows Graphics Driver Version: 9.18.0013.1106
OpenGL Version: 3.3.0

RestrainedLove API: (disabled)
libcurl Version: libcurl/7.24.0 OpenSSL/1.0.1e zlib/1.2.5 c-ares/1.10.0
J2C Decoder Version: KDU v7.1
Audio Driver Version: FMOD Ex 4.44.18
Qt Webkit Version: 4.7.1 (version number hard-coded)
Voice Server Version: Not Connected
Settings mode: Firestorm
Viewer Skin: Firestorm (Grey)
Font Used: Deja Vu (96)
Draw distance: 368
Bandwidth: 250
LOD factor: 10.5
Render quality: Low (1/7)
Texture memory: 512 MB (1)
Built with MSVC version 1600
Packets Lost: 36/504,311 (0.0%)

[Qie Niangao]

I hope somebody who knows Windows comes along and suggests a decent hardware temperature-monitoring program to use on 64-bit Vista. (Sorry, I've used Linux too long to remember anything useful about Windows any more.)

That said, you probably already have some nVidia Control Panel that installed with your graphics card drivers, and if you snoop around, you may find it has some temperature readouts. It may even confess to having throttled back GPU speeds to protect itself from the heat. It's worth a look (wherever Windows puts control panels).

One quick suggestion: That 368 is a monstrous long draw distance, especially while trying to build. I know you've already tried cranking back your graphics preferences, so that's probably not your real problem, but it can't be helping anything either. (For whatever it's worth, I keep my draw distance under 100m almost all the time -- and my graphics card is roughly ten times as fast as yours.)

[Theresa Tennyson]

---

FangXiLi Xue wrote:

There we go :matte-motes-bashful-cute-2:

Today i have this lag so much again, this time after i was logged in like 1,5 hour and active building on my land, rezzing stuff etc.

I tried to unwear the Firestorm bridge, but didnt help (my husband advised me this and before it seem to reduce it a bit, but today not, maybe it was coincedence before)

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Firestorm 4.5.1 (38838) Oct 28 2013 00:03:49 (Firestorm-Beta) with Havok support

Release Notes

 

You are at 18.7, 153.8, 1,001.7 in San Pierto located at sim9832.agni.lindenlab.com (216.82.45.166:13020)

SLURL:

http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/San%20Pierto/19/154/1002

(global coordinates 130,067.0, 301,978.0, 1,001.7)

Second Life Server 14.02.28.287383

Release Notes

 

CPU: Pentium® Dual-Core  CPU      E5200  @ 2.50GHz (2499.94 MHz)

Memory: 4095 MB

OS Version: Microsoft Windows Vista 64-bit Service Pack 2 (Build 6002)

Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation

Graphics Card: GeForce GT 230/PCIe/SSE2

 

Windows Graphics Driver Version: 9.18.0013.1106

OpenGL Version: 3.3.0

 

RestrainedLove API: (disabled)

libcurl Version: libcurl/7.24.0 OpenSSL/1.0.1e zlib/1.2.5 c-ares/1.10.0

J2C Decoder Version: KDU v7.1

Audio Driver Version: FMOD Ex 4.44.18

Qt Webkit Version: 4.7.1 (version number hard-coded)

Voice Server Version: Not Connected

Settings mode: Firestorm

Viewer Skin: Firestorm (Grey)

Font Used: Deja Vu (96)

Draw distance: 368

Bandwidth: 250

LOD factor: 10.5

Render quality: Low (1/7)

Texture memory: 512 MB (1)

Built with MSVC version 1600

Packets Lost: 36/504,311 (0.0%)

---

Your draw distance is too high for your video card; your LOD factor is far too high for ANYONE, quite frankly. I used to see freezes like you're describing in areas with many small detailed meshes, such as gacha yard sales and one particular mesh furnishings store.  That was when my LOD factor was 4 - I've lowered it to 2.5 and the freezes have largely gone away. I think the problem is with a high LOD factor too much detail clogs up your video memory and it needs to perform a time-consuming purge. Raised LOD's are only useful for a few badly done old sculpts and aren't useful at all for competent mesh and I find that even with dubious sculpts most resolve properly at a LOD factor of 2.5.                                                             

[FangXiLi Xue]

Found SpeedFan, a programm for the temperature.

With the "old" settings (draw distance 368 and LOD on 4)
 my temp stats are like this (no idea what it tells us)

then i put my draw distance on 112 and LOD on 2.5 and the temp was this:

So i think i this will give more info, but to be honest i have no idea what it means L0L.

Anyone who gets wiser from this?

:matte-motes-sunglasses-3:

 

PS i had no lag, i just came online, but i will see what this does later, not sure if i have time to build today...

PS2 i looked into the nVidia control panel, but didnt tell me anything like temp checking or something like that, thats why i downloaded SpeedFan

[FangXiLi Xue]

half an hour later now and still got the 'new' draw distance and LOD settings (draw 112 and lod 2.5) and i got the same lag now, one minute lag and few minues it goes good....

 

i really dont think its about those settings, but i will leave them like they are for now. now this is the temp:

 

[Qie Niangao]

I kinda wonder if your graphics card fan is spinning at all, or if it is, whether any air is getting through. That GPU -- the one with the flame beside it -- seems very hot, but I'm no expert. (Mine seems to spin up the fans to keep GPU temps below about 65C, but not sure that's comparable.)

Have you blown the dust out of the graphics card fan and heatsink lately? If not, I'd give that a try.

[FangXiLi Xue]

I clean out my pc inside once in a while, like every 3 or sometimes 4 months, with the vacuumcleaner, very carefully. I just open the pc and make that carefully, the fan is always a bit dusty. and when its too dusty, the pc shuts down by itself. Then i know i have to clean it again, but mostly i clean it before that happens. I did that about 2 weeks ago for the last time.

Any idea how i could cool it down more? Im scared to leave the pc open coz i think more dust will affect the pc then sooner, but maybe there are other ways?

[Perrie Juran]

---

FangXiLi Xue wrote:

I clean out my pc inside once in a while, like every 3 or sometimes 4 months, with the vacuumcleaner, very carefully. I just open the pc and make that carefully, the fan is always a bit dusty. and when its too dusty, the pc shuts down by itself. Then i know i have to clean it again, but mostly i clean it before that happens. I did that about 2 weeks ago for the last time.

 

Any idea how i could cool it down more? Im scared to leave the pc open coz i think more dust will affect the pc then sooner, but maybe there are other ways?

---

It is very possible and more so probable that vacuming (youch, you are living dangerously) is NOT getting the dust out.

I blow my computer out and even then getting to the graphics card thoroughly can be a challenge.

I recently changed my graphics card and was quite surprised how much dust was still in the cooling fins when I pulled the old one out.  I had cleaned my computer out only a week before.

Your temperature is too high.  With all settings maxed out the hottest my card gets is 70F.  Nominally it runs between 50F and 60F.

And on a side note, it is really pissing me off that a can of compressed air right now cost more than a can of spray deoderant!  WTF!

 

eta:clarity

 

[Qie Niangao]

---

FangXiLi Xue wrote:

I clean out my pc inside once in a while, like every 3 or sometimes 4 months, with the vacuumcleaner, very carefully. I just open the pc and make that carefully, the fan is always a bit dusty. and when its too dusty, the pc shuts down by itself. Then i know i have to clean it again, but mostly i clean it before that happens. I did that about 2 weeks ago for the last time.

 

Any idea how i could cool it down more? Im scared to leave the pc open coz i think more dust will affect the pc then sooner, but maybe there are other ways?

---

Well, I'm not 100% sure that the over-temp condition is what's causing the weird lag spikes, so I don't want to get too obsessed with cooling, but that GPU temp does seem high enough to be worth a bit more effort, even if it doesn't ultimately solve the lag spike problem. And since nobody seems to have any better ideas anyway, we may as well spend a little more time on cooling.

I don't think you should leave the PC open. In fact, some cases cool better all sealed-up except for the designed-in fan vents.

I'll tell you what I do and you can decide if you want to do something similar. About twice a year, I remove the graphics card from the machine and carefully use a large fluffy artist's brush to dislodge the dust from its fan and heatsink. For me, this seems to work better than compressed air (and much better than a vaccuum), although it's slightly delicate work. (I try to keep myself grounded to some metal on the card to prevent static, but that may be superstitious.)

Longer term, you probably want to be planning on a more capable graphics card. It really makes a massive difference in the SL experience. But you may also be considering a whole replacement machine -- I mean, everybody has to upgrade eventually -- so I get it that we really want to get this one working better for now.

[FangXiLi Xue]

!!! NEWS FLASH !!!

:smileyhappy:

How about this temperature?

:heart:

 

 

My husband helped me to pull out my Graphics Card (for the record, he lives in another country atm, so he helped me on Skype mobile of course lol)

This graphics card was sooo dusty, i cleaned it with a painting brush, and you really dont wanna know what came out of it, what a shock! All these years i thought that cleaning out the CPU-Fan from the outside, was enough, well i can tell all un-experienced people, that its not enough! L0L.

I even cleaned out the fan from the power supply (never knew there were more fans in there) and there was so much dust everywhere, i had no idea that i had that in my house!

Now the temp goes not more high then 45 or max 50 and my pc makes so less sounds too.

So far i cant see the lag, but sometimes that returns after 1,5 hour of being in SL, so i need to test that.

My husband says its good to do this cleaning like every 10 days, especially with my intensive use of the GC, so i will repeat this cleaning a lot!

I want to thank all people here for waking me up and give me the advise about the heath and cleaning, i thought i was doing so well with my "cleaning" well... turns out that was not really cleaning lol.

Thanks all out there! :matte-motes-kiss:

Im gonne run around in SL now to enjoy this as much as possible whoooot!!!

:smileyvery-happy: