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Second life keeps on crashing! HELP!!!


Lacibabylove
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I am completely exasperated with this issue, it seems that nothing I do will stop second life from crashing. To begin with I am very knowledgable about computers, and I built the one which plays second life myself. The hardware I have is an intel core i5 2400, gtx 570, 8gb ddr3 ram, 1tb western digital black and 650 watt psu. My internet connection is a cable dsl conections of about 30mbps. Basically I know that this issue is not hardware related at all. I have even tested the computer, runs perfectly fine in every other current game. The temps are all completely acceptable and normal. None of the components are overclocked and the system is fully stable. I have tried some different viewers, the main linden one, starlight and a few others, it keeps crashing regardless. I initially had a hd 6870 and it was crashing a lot, so I switched to a gtx 570 as I read that nvidia cards perform better with opengl and second life, but it is still crashing like crazy. I even turned down the details to high from ultra and it still crashes! I am unbelievably exasperated with this, I have tried everything I can think of. I am just starting to think that second life is a totally screwed game. I login and it plays fine, but then just randomly crashes. Sometimes in crowded places, and other times just in the sandbox. If anyone has some advice of what to do, or maybe knows of some viewers which are more stable, I would greatly appreciate it. THANK YOU. 

 

btw, the drivers I am using are the beta 301. something. I am going to switch back to the whql 296 ones, but I highly highly doubt that this is the cause of the problem, so once again, any input would be greatly appreciated.

 

UPDATE - 

Thanks for all the advice guys. I ran some tests of my internet connection. Here are the results.
Speed:
http://oi48.tinypic.com/ndx1zd.jpg

Ping:
http://oi46.tinypic.com/1z1ts2e.jpg

also my modem is a motorola sb5101. It is fairly new and works fine. I am also using a wireless router tp link TL-WR1043ND, which is brand new and works fine. I am running second life through the gigabit port on the router, so it is still a lan connection. In regards to the memory, Im not sure if you are referring to system memory or vram. Watching task manager the system memory never goes beyond about 3.5gigs of usage with second life running, and monitoring with afterburner, the vram peaks at about 1.1gigs of usage. So there should still be memory left to spare. I tried clicking on show memory in game and nothing came up. I am using the starlight viewer btw. Another thing, I am now running on ultra and getting about 20-30fps and this seems kind of low for what I would have been expecting. Anyway, I am going to try a clean install of the phoenix viewer and see if that helps.

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I am far from being very knowledgable about computers and would be absolutely unable to build one (I can hardly put up together a simple puzzle pieces in RL actually! :D). But to answer your question about other viewers, many people having issues with the LL official one are more than happy with the Phoenix viewer (which is now mesh-enabled). I don't know if this could fix the issues you are having, but it's worth a try. :smileyhappy:

http://www.phoenixviewer.com/downloads.php

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I have had this same exact problem for the last 3-4 days. I have been running sl default viewer on this desktop for years and never had a problem until now. I am running windows XP which is old now but the sl support docs still say the viewer is XP compatible.  I have a laptop running Vista and I still crash on the laptop, but NOT nearly as often.  Just like you, I am getting frustrated as to why this would be happening as no variables have changed for me.  If anyone could help us, that would be fantastic.

Someone started to tell me to look at something in advanced settings... but then I crashed... LOL

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Welcome to Second Life Answers, Lacibabylove

I am not very knowledgeable about computers, and apart from replacing the graphics card in this one, and rigging up a separate DVD rewriter, and keeping it as clean as possible both dust-wise and data-wise, I would not attempt to rebuild this one from scratch or build one.

However, I can empathise with your frustration about all the crashing. I don't find I crash very much at all since I changed my graphics card, except when I have too many other programs running at the same time, or if my anti-virus or Firewall interfere, or when my internet connection is in the toilet (which it usually is evenings and weekends when more people are sharing my broadband service).

I don't hang about much in the public sandboxes, because they are places where I am more likely to experience a sudden crash; these places, as you will know, are magnets for griefers who like nothing more than to rezz something that places a great sudden strain on a person's system.   Now if I need a sandbox, I use the premium sandboxes, and have never crashed while in one. 

My viewer of choice is Phoenix, as has been recommended in another post in this thread, but I find my system is stable enough when I use Firestorm or the official Viewer 3, although I ensure my graphics are not on highest. 

You will receive more technical answers, I am sure, in the fullness of time, so please do keep returning to your thread, and if you wish to add replies, use the 'permalink' button at each of the posts you wish to reply to, or just add more to your original post by clicking on 'options' at the top right hand corner  of it and 'edit'.

Going back to what you said about the drivers you are using, sometimes the latest drivers will not work as well as a previous version, and you do have to revert, and also, as you will probably know, as you have such knowledge with computers, and must have read the system specifications (which may be a little out of date) on the Second Life System Specifications page, some graphics cards have not been tested and are therefore not recommended for use with Second Life.

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Welcome to Second Life Answers, Cloude. Maybe your graphics card is simply wearing out now. How long have you been using it? It would be worth you starting a new thread of your own, giving your full computer specifications, and then you'll get more specific answers. I'll just say the usual for now - are your graphics drivers up to date, and is your computer as clean and dust free as possible? And also, since this week's deploy on Tuesday, there seem to have been some technical issues that have been causing extra crashes, so this may be the reason for you to be having your current bout of issues.

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Don't think that second life is a totally screwed game - it's not a game.

First, note that SL was completely broken yesterday so anything you were trying then was not likely to get far.

As you are very knowledgable about computers you will appreciate that there is a great variety of hardware and software and they can often interact in obscure and unpredictable ways.  The SL viewers work well on many thousand of people's computers worldwide.  As you are so familiar with your own computer you are pretty much perfectly placed to help us find out why it doesn't on yours.

The hardware you have should certainly be able to run SL without problems.  99% of the trouble people report here is either because of their graphics card or their internet connection.  We can discount your graphics card as the problem both because the 570 is a good card and because you've swapped it in for another card when you were having similar problems.  That makes the most likely culprit the quality of your internet connection.  We get a lot of people who say how fast their ISP advertises their line but few who have ever stressed it in the way SL does.

As you say you can get in-world, at least for a while, please open the statistics window and tell us your ping and packet-loss figures.  Ping (as you probably know) should be under about 0.3s and packet-loss should be similarly low.  We see a lot of problems with packet-loss as low as 2 or 3%, so that should be similarly low (and preferably 0%, of course).

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Your system is obviously perfectly capable of running SL, and certainly shouldn't be crashing like that.    But I don't really think it's a viewer problem, since most people manage to run SL on just about any viewer with far lower spec machines than yours without problems.    There are specific situations that cause crashes -- trying to edit rigged mesh while you're wearing it, for example, can be risky in some circumstances -- but I can't believe that applies here.    There are also some griefing exploits that can crash you immediately, or almost immediately, but since it keeps on happening, unless you're really unlucky or someone's targetting you, that's not likely to be the case.

First, I think I would do a completely clean reinstallation of SL, making sure you remove all the caches and viewer settings and so on.  This is because you may have a corrupted file in one of your local caches that's crashing the viewer each time it tries to load it.    That's certainly a possibility.

If that doesn't work, and all your drivers are up to date, then normally I'd suspect a problem with the hardware, but you say you've tested stuff and are confident it's running OK.   Since you've swopped your graphics card, it might be an idea just to double-check with a memory stress tester  -- SL is far more demanding on a system than are many other games and applications, so I wouldn't rely on the fact other things work ok.    Recently the first indication I had that anything was wrong with my machine was when SL started crashing for no reason, though everything else worked fine for me, and then a few days later I started getting blue screens of death and it turned out there was a fault in one of my memory sticks.

You might try taking a look at your crash logs, which are to be found at C:\Users\<windows username>\AppData\Roaming\SecondLife\logs in Windows 7 (see here for other OSs), and see if they shed any light on what's going wrong.    

As to the most stable viewer, there's a league table here http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Third_Party_Viewer_Directory.  I'm not sure how useful it is, because it doesn't tell us anything about how many people are using the viewer or what their systems are like, so I strongly suspect that the reason, for example, Catznip has fallen into second place, after being the most stable for a while, is that lots of people who were having problems thought they'd try "the most stable viewer" to see if that helped, and it didn't (there's not been a re-issue of Catznip that might explain the change).

For what it's worth, I run Catznip, most of the time, on a machine not unlike yours, though with rather lower specs, and very rarely crash.   But I don't often crash when I'm using other viewers, either.    I'd give Catznip a try and see what happens.   And, if you make sure that it's set to send crash logs to Catznip, I've always found Kitty Barnett, the developer, very helpful when I'm trying to figure out what's causing problems when I do have them.

 

 

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It wasn't you. We planned a virtual conference for months and lined up 13 speakers/presenters for the event planned for April 26 5:30 p.m. SLT only to be blocked from reaching the Island.  Presenters and participants left frustrated.  I am trying to promote the use of SL for master's level education, but this type of experience doesn't make it easy.  Apparently SL was down most of the day, and unfortunately our space was down 2 hours before and 1/2 hour after the event would have started. Needless to say, the conference did not occur.

 

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The most common crash mode I've found is the viewer running out of memory. It has problems releasing memory so memory use gradually builds and the viewer will crash when it is up to about 1.5 gigabytes of memory. This most commonly occurs when using the camera movement controls in crowded areas. If you open the "Develop" - "Show Info" menu and bring up "Memory" you can get information on the amount of memory the viewer is using. A workaround is to use a viewer that's "Large Access Aware" like the 64-bit installer version of Exodus.

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Ah.. that's a point. Am I correct in thinking that, if the viewer isn't "Large Address Aware" then that caps the amount of memory it can use, no matter how much may be available on your system?

If I am correct, is the Official Viewer not LAA? And if it's not, is there an easier way to remedy it than the one described here? http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/64-bit-vista-gaming,2250-5.html

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Thanks for all the advice guys. I ran some tests of my internet connection. Here are the results.

Speed:

http://oi48.tinypic.com/ndx1zd.jpg

 

Ping:

http://oi46.tinypic.com/1z1ts2e.jpg

 

also my modem is a motorola sb5101. It is fairly new and works fine. I am also using a wireless router tp link TL-WR1043ND, which is brand new and works fine. I am running second life through the gigabit port on the router, so it is still a lan connection. In regards to the memory, Im not sure if you are referring to system memory or vram. Watching task manager the system memory never goes beyond about 3.5gigs of usage with second life running, and monitoring with afterburner, the vram peaks at about 1.1gigs of usage. So there should still be memory left to spare. I tried clicking on show memory in game and nothing came up. I am using the starlight viewer btw. Another thing, I am now running on ultra and getting about 20-30fps and this seems kind of low for what I would have been expecting. Anyway, I am going to try a clean install of the phoenix viewer and see if that helps.

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I'm having the same exact issue. I updated to the new firestorm 4.4 version and since then both my sl and my firestorm crash within 5 mins of entering. I already tried putting everything on the lowest setting but it's not working. This only started happening today. 

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I even have a bigger problem which i do not understand. Not only Sl crashes at log in but the whole computer does.

So SL is not accessable. Can reach it witrh my laptop but the desk comp refuses. It blocks everything and i need a hard stop en restart . Problem started with the latest Firestorm update. Grafic card is NVDIA Ge Force 9800GT with latest driver.

 

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