Freezing (I know another questions like this)

[Sixx Yangtz]

So I'v NEVER had issues with any SL viewer, be it SL, Firestorm, etc..  Always had good performance.  I took about a 3 month break and came back with an issue of my viewer freezing after about 10 minuts of play.  Especially at populated places, the lag becomes so terrible and freezes my whole computer up?  Any suggestions?  I've searched this blog and had done a few of the common suggetions such as clean install with no luck. :(

[Bobbie Faulds]

Check your draw distance and be sure that it's no  higher than 120. With the new interesting add in, it does some odd things if your draw distance is too far.

[Coby Foden]

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Bobbie Faulds wrote:

Check your draw distance and be sure that it's no  higher than 120. With the new interesting add in, it does some odd things if your draw distance is too far.

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Interesting, what is too far? When I go sailing I often have my draw distance set to 350 meters; sometimes even more. I have not noticed any odd things happening. What odd things have you seen happening?

When sailing 120 meters is just too small distance; it's like sailing partly blinfolded.

[Ohjiro Watanabe]

Hmmm, it freezes your whole computer up, well it could be your graphics settings, so go to Preferences/Graphics and click on the reset button so that the viewer calculates the best settings for your machine.

But normally that doesn't freeze your whole machine so look in task manager and see what else is using up CPU. You might need to exclude the viewer cache from your anti virus for example if the AV is scanning every file you download.

 

[Nova Convair]

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Bobbie Faulds wrote:

Check your draw distance and be sure that it's no  higher than 120. With the new interesting add in, it does some odd things if your draw distance is too far.

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Nope. I often run with much higher draw distance, there is no problem.

If you got a problem with 120m then it's your specific problem and maybe the max your hardware can handle in certain situations but don't assume that everyone else is the same. That's not the case.

To the OP: It's a good idea to make tests with different draw distances since that has a big influence on the performance. Update the drivers. If you use a laptop it is probably overheating. There is a big difference between new laptops and laptops that had the chance to collect dust for a few months.

[Drake1 Nightfire]

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Sixx Yangtz wrote:

So I'v NEVER had issues with any SL viewer, be it SL, Firestorm, etc..  Always had good performance.  I took about a 3 month break and came back with an issue of my viewer freezing after about 10 minuts of play.  Especially at populated places, the lag becomes so terrible and freezes my whole computer up?  Any suggestions?  I've searched this blog and had done a few of the common suggetions such as clean install with no luck.

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Without the Specs on your particular machine its all guesswork in a white coat. If you go to HELP>about Firestorm in the viewer and copy paste that here we could help more.

[Sixx Yangtz]

oh wow! I didn't even know that was an option!  Here you go....

 

I'm gonig to try getting down and cleaning out my cpu, I'm sure it's a mess.  It sounds like I may have a heat issue since I know it worked like butter before.    Let me know if anyone see's anything else that stands out.  Again thanks for your comments so far!  <3

 

Firestorm 4.6.7 (42398) Aug 11 2014 23:19:39 (Firestorm-Release) with Havok support
Release Notes

CPU: Pentium® Dual-Core  CPU      E5500  @ 2.80GHz (2800.04 MHz)
Memory: 4096 MB
OS Version: Microsoft Windows 7 64-bit Service Pack 1 (Build 7601)
Graphics Card Vendor: ATI Technologies Inc.
Graphics Card: AMD Radeon HD 5700 Series

Windows Graphics Driver Version: 8.17.0010.1280
OpenGL Version: 4.2.12874 Compatibility Profile Context 14.100.0.0

RestrainedLove API: (disabled)
libcurl Version: libcurl/7.24.0 OpenSSL/1.0.1h zlib/1.2.5 c-ares/1.10.0
J2C Decoder Version: KDU v7.4
Audio Driver Version: FMOD Ex 4.44.32
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: 128
Bandwidth: 500
LOD factor: 2
Render quality: Medium (3/7)
Texture memory: 512 MB (1)
VFS (cache) creation time (UTC): unknown
Built with MSVC version 1600

[Perrie Juran]

Let me get this out of the way first before anyone asks. 

Firestorm 4.6.7 (42398) Aug 11 2014 23:19:39 (Firestorm-Release) with Havok support
Release Notes

CPU: AMD Processor model unknown (3000.22 MHz)
Memory: 3584 MB
OS Version: Microsoft Windows 7 32-bit Service Pack 1 (Build 7601)
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: GeForce GTX 650 Ti/PCIe/SSE2/3DNOW!

Windows Graphics Driver Version: 9.18.0013.4052
OpenGL Version: 4.4.0

RestrainedLove API: RLV v2.8.0 / RLVa v1.4.10a
libcurl Version: libcurl/7.24.0 OpenSSL/1.0.1h zlib/1.2.5 c-ares/1.10.0
J2C Decoder Version: KDU v7.4
Audio Driver Version: FMOD Ex 4.44.32
Qt Webkit Version: 4.7.1 (version number hard-coded)
Voice Server Version: Not Connected
Settings mode: Hybrid
Viewer Skin: Metaharper Modern (CoolOcean)
Font Used: Deja Vu (96)
Draw distance: 64
Bandwidth: 1100
LOD factor: 4
Render quality: Medium-High (4/7)
Texture memory: 384 MB (1)
VFS (cache) creation time (UTC): 2014-8-18T19:11:32
Built with MSVC version 1600

 

Since upgrading to Firestorm with Project Interesting I too have been experiencing some freezing but I haven't taken the time to really dig into it.  Oddly enough, the first night I used it I froze so bad a couple of times I had to use Task Manager to close Firestorm but have not experienced that again since that first night.  I did start looking into some things but haven't really devoted the necesary time to it.

First, in crowded places Mesh clothes is taking longer to render.  The more Mesh that is present the worse that it is. 

But getting to the Freezing, I am experiencing it most when I try to pan around a crowded room.  I can actuallly see my computer "clocking" when it happens, often times lasting 15 to 20 seconds.  Sometimes it's shorter.  I never had this before Project Interesting.

Briefly, what I know is this.  Project Interesting loads the info closest to you first until everything within your draw distance is renderred.  Then in the background, it continues to load to your Cache additional info from the SIM so if and when you start to move the info is already there on your computer.  That way you don't have to wait for it.

My guess right now is that the loading to Cache in the background is causing a memory management problem.  The (damned) mandatory updates with the Official Viewer prevents me from running a comparison with it.  But I can still do that with Firestorm.  Firestorm with Project Interesting is using easily 30% more memory for me than before Project Interesting.

Although to my knowledge they have never admitted it, my personal belief is that the NUMBER ONE cause of crashes in SL is the Texture Memory Discard issue.  Something that for several years LL claimed was not really a problem and/or that they could not do anything about it.

During the Future of SL meeting Oz was asked about the Memory problems.  Although the question was about ATI Cards, this problem affects NVidia also:

"[38:38 / 02:43] What are Oz and the team going to do about texture memory errors (ATi cards)?

OL: We’ve actually got two changes – I didn’t talk about them as things we’re working on right now because they are actually things that are mostly finished – but they’re in QA internally… and it may take a little time for them to get out; this is the kind of project that you do very carefully, because you have the potential to mess up people really badly., so it’s worth trying really hard not to do that.

But we’ve got one set of changes that eliminates using the GPU card name as a means of recognising what it’s capable of. Those of you who have had the frustrating experience of buying the latest and greatest brand new GPU card and then having Second life decide it doesn’t know what it is, and therefore you get basic graphics. We’re going to do better than that in the future; we’re going to do a much more dynamic thing where we’re not going to rely on the GPU name. And that will improve things, I think in one set of ways.

And the other thing we’re going to be fixing is, many of you will have noticed that we don’t use all of the video memory on your video cards. It turns out that’s because of a very old bug that plagued us a long time ago and we sort-of arbitrarily, in order to avoid tickling the bug, we capped how much memory we would ever use. We are now in the process of fixing that so it now measures how much memory is there, and we use what we think is a reasonable share of that memory."

In other words, they are finally admitting there is (was) a "Big Trouble In Little China."

Having said this, it is possible your problem is something else but from everything I have been reading I put high odds on it.  My suggestion is to start JIRA's with the appropriate Viewers and attach crash logs, etc, etc.  If it is something else causing your problem, hopefully the Devs will be able to tell you what to do.  I could be wrong but I think it's going to take a look at the detailed info in your logs to figure this out.

 

ETA: Clarity

 

[Ohjiro Watanabe]

Here is another thing to check out:

wiki.phoenixviewer.com/fs_freezing