Viewer freeze periodically

[Nanina DeCuir]

My viewer is freezing every 5 to 10 seconds for about 10 to 60 seconds. This makes it completely unusable.

Actually it is freezing the whole computer. Even the cursor.

It's better when there are no people on the sim i'm on.

I tried the LindenLab viewer and the Firestorm viewer. Same behaviour. It feels a little worse with the firestorm viewer though.

I'm on a mac pro with osx 10.8.5.

 

Can someone help out? I'd really love to spend time on SL but this freeze bug makes it is no fun at all.

 

Thanks

EDIT:

Thanks for the replies. So far i couldn't fix my problem. I do think it is network related though.

Here is some more info about my system as requested. 

Second Life 3.7.17 (294959) Sep 30 2014 16:35:21 (Second Life Release)
Release Notes

CPU: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5520 @ 2.27GHz (2260 MHz)
Memory: 6144 MB
OS Version: Mac OS X 10.8.5 Darwin 12.5.0 Darwin Kernel Version 12.5.0: Mon Jul 29 16:33:49 PDT 2013; root:xnu-2050.48.11~1/RELEASE_X86_64 x86_64
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce GT 120 OpenGL Engine

OpenGL Version: 2.1 NVIDIA-8.16.74 310.40.00.10f02

libcurl Version: libcurl/7.37.0 OpenSSL/1.0.1h zlib/1.2.8
J2C Decoder Version: KDU v7.0
Audio Driver Version: FMOD Ex 4.44.31
Qt Webkit Version: 4.7.1 (version number hard-coded)
Voice Server Version: Not Connected
Built with GCC version 40201

 

 

[Madelaine McMasters]

Hi Nanina,

The hanging cursor suggests a pretty low level problem, close to MacOS. Long ago, way before 10.8, I recall having cursor stalls on network issues. Try restarting your network hardware, and if you're not running Google DNS, consider that.

Here's Nalates Urriah's compendium of methods to improve your connection to SL...

http://blog.nalates.net/2011/10/26/troubleshoot-your-sl-connection/

If nothing there helps, try a clean install of one of your viewers. It's possible some file is corrupted, and doesn't get replaced by a standard install. Here are instructions for doing that...

http://community.secondlife.com/t5/English-Knowledge-Base/How-to-uninstall-and-reinstall-Second-Life/ta-p/1375231

Read the note about saving and chat logs if you want to keep those. Read my notes at the bottom of that page for Mac specific details. Firestorm has a feature that allows you to save and restore settings across a clean install. So Firestorm might be the first viewer on which to try that.

Good luck!

[Rolig Loon]

Maddy's right.  Unlike on-line games that you may have played, Second Life sends a lot of information back and forth between servers and your viewer in real time.  Scenes in world are updated 45 times a second, and new information is fed to your computer.  You make your own changes by moving your avatar or sending a message, and the servers share that information with everyone else.  The result is that Second Life doesn't work well with weak or unreliable Internet connections.  It lags or times out.

Follow Maddy's advice about DNS and other solutions in Nalates's blog.  Also, read

http://wiki.phoenixviewer.com/fs_very_laggy

http://community.secondlife.com/t5/English-Knowledge-Base/How-to-improve-Viewer-performance/ta-p/1316923

http://community.secondlife.com/t5/English-Knowledge-Base/Wifi-and-satellite-connections/ta-p/1296823

[Nalates Urriah]

I've seen this behavior from time to time. Suddenly the whole computer freezes for a time. Some times for a minute or two.

In my case it has been video driver related.

Also, the iCloud and other cloud drive software can cause the problem. You can temporarialy remove those progams (don't close the account) without losing your cloud data.

You can read through the viewer's log to see if it gives you a hint as to what is happening. On Windows it is in the Roaming folder, I don't have the Mac location. The file location is in the SL Wiki. Search the log file (text file) for warnings and errors.

When you ask a tech question include information about your computer and viewer. Get the info from the viewer's Help-About... and paste that into your post with your question. Help->About... provides all the version numbers we need.  To add your info to an existing question use OPTIONS->EDIT. It’s in the upper right of your post.

It also helps to know if you are using a laptop or a desktop and a wired or wireless connection between the computer and gateway and/or between the gateway and ISP. T-Mobile and other ISP’s use a wireless system to connect to you.

Without information all we can do is guess. That means you have to try all our bad guesses and eliminate them one by one. This is easier for all of us, if you give us good information to start with.