Mesh causing large amounts of lag?

[Mira Kamiguwa]

I've been in second life for a long while now and of course used to certain regions being slower than others.  The last month or so things have been very very slow:  

Teleport fails

Items not rezzing; especially mesh clothing

Crashing while crossing regions 

Items failing to deliver 

Some times the problem is solved by relogging, but I'm finding regions with avatars wearing mesh to be especially troublesome.  Any ideas how to solve this problem?  

[Mira Kamiguwa]

[Theresa Tennyson]

The statistics you've posted show that the sim you're connecting to is running perfectly. What you're describing sounds like a connection issue. This is where you say, "There's nothing wrong with my Internet because I can do blah blah blah" and then I say that Second Life is very different as far as what it needs in a connection. Most internet applications use a single stream of data but Second Life wants to have multiple streams of data going at the same time. A lot of internet routers don't handle this well and part of the problem is that SL didn't implement how they handled some of their connections very well. They've been working on fixing how they do this to try to help with problems like yours.

Try going to the http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Linden_Lab_Official:Alternate_Viewers page and downloading the current development viewer. That has the changes they're testing and it may help your situation.

 

[Freya Mokusei]

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Mira Kamiguwa wrote:

Teleport fails

Items not rezzing; especially mesh clothing

Crashing while crossing regions 

Items failing to deliver 

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Teleport fails have nothing to do with mesh, they've been failing recently due to continued development on the simulators, and some behind-the-scenes network improvements being carried out by LL. Crashing while changing regions is related.

Items not rezzing (having to right-click to view rezzed objects) is a recent simulator issue, unrelated to mesh.

Mesh clothing not rezzing is generally caused by a buggy connection/transfer pipeline. Mesh is affected, but not the cause. You can also generally improve this by increasing the the value of the Debug Setting 'MeshMaxConcurrentRequests', but that's not a solution to a problem that is mostly caused by the viewer.

Items failing to deliver are to do with the Marketplace, and are also unaffected by mesh. Marketplace - as I understand it - isn't designed to work reliably.

Most of these problems are on-par with 'life as normal'; it is possible you have networking bottlenecks or a router that doesn't enjoy changing regions, but that is typically less common. Bear in mind that to use Second Life reliably you should be getting approximately 500-1000kbps downstream (assuming 10:1 upstream), using wired Ethernet. Your ping should remain under 200m/s (assuming you're connecting from US/EU), with low packet loss (approx. 1-2%). Shared connections, dense packet-switching through old/insufficient hardware (NICs are especially good at failing under SL's load), daisy-chained/poorly-implemented DHCP and wifi will all provide sub-par SL experiences.

[Mira Kamiguwa]

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Freya Mokusei wrote:

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Mira Kamiguwa wrote:

Teleport fails

Items not rezzing; especially mesh clothing

Crashing while crossing regions 

Items failing to deliver 

Items failing to deliver are to do with the Marketplace, and are also unaffected by mesh. Marketplace - as I understand it - isn't designed to work reliably.

 

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Items fail to deliver from inworld stores, some times appearing after a restart.  

I'd also like to metion I am using Phoenix Firestorm Release v4.2.2.29837.  It may not be mesh directly causing the issue but all was well until the latest update.  

Another thing I just remembered was turning off HTTP textures allowed much greater sim crossing stability.  From crashing 60% of the time to 0%.     

[Freya Mokusei]

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Mira Kamiguwa wrote:

Items fail to deliver from inworld stores, some times appearing after a restart.  

I'd also like to metion I am using Phoenix Firestorm Release v4.2.2.29837.  It may not be mesh directly causing the issue but all was well until the latest update.  

Another thing I just remembered was turning off HTTP textures allowed much greater sim crossing stability.  From crashing 60% of the time to 0%.     

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 I am not familiar with Firestorm directly, however it seems considerably more likely that your viewer and network configuration are far more likely to be the cause of your problems than mesh is. I do notice that some TPVs use different code for rendering mesh (if this is the case with Firestorm, you'd need to speak to someone involved with it). Especially considering the 'until the last update' part of your post. I've heard a lot of people recommend doing completely clean installs prior to updating Firestorm, but I can't say for sure whether this would improve your issue.

HTTP Textures is poorly implemented. Some people find benefits by using it, many more find they are better disabling it. Problems with it can point to network issues, also.

[Qie Niangao]

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Another thing I just remembered was turning off HTTP textures allowed much greater sim crossing stability.  From crashing 60% of the time to 0%.     

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Yes, you may want to keep HTTP textures turned off, and the problem may have nothing to do with LL's implementation nor with your local network, but rather the network infrastructure of your ISP. There are reports that some Japanese carriers, in particular, handle SL's HTTP traffic very inefficiently (perhaps throttling?). I don't know that you're even in Japan, but whatever is going so very wrong there might be affecting your ISP, too.

[ETA: I meant to add that Mesh has been around in pretty much its current state for quite a long time now, so if the problems are recent, it's almost surely unrelated to Mesh. That's not to say there aren't still huge issues with Mesh -- there definitely are -- but it's unlikely they're anything to do with the problems you're seeing now.]

[Orca Flotta]

/me throws a temper tantrum, bangs her little fists on the table and stomps her oversized boots on the ground ...

 

IT'S THAT PATHFINDING CRAP I TELL YA!!!

 

end of hissy fit

 

 

 

[Ayesha Askham]

Orca

You don't know how close to the truth you are there!  No, of course it isn't pathfinding itself, but some of the changes that were made to the server code to permit some of the pathfinding actions to  run have resulted in the servers needing to process far more information than they used to, irrespective of whether dynamic pathfinding is set on the sim or not.

The upshot is that newer servers have barely noticed the change, but the older servers, mostly on mainland, are being hamstrung.  So far as I can see, the only answer will be replacement of older hardware, which is being done....slowly.

@Mira

It is also probable the Theresa is correct in her diagnosis of your local issues...I bow to far greater understanding there.

[Gunner Grun]

Agrees

[Nalates Urriah]

Poorly made mesh objects can cause lag. Mesh can be deleiberatley made to crash viewers. But, moving to another region  usually reveals whether it is a mesh problem or not.

In general, well made mesh objects reduce lag because they reduce the number of polygons that have to be rendered.

You can sort out whether it is your connection or some other problem. Troubleshoot Your #SL Connection is specific to SL users. It is worth the read even if you think you know you have a good connection. Once you have gone through those tests, you can confidently move on to toher possible problems.

[Pamela Galli]

Some graphics cards have problems with mesh in Firestorm -- talk to the Firestorm support ppl about where to find the info page on this.

[Sybil Hallison]

I am experiencing the same problem with Mira. In specific:

-I wear a rigged mesh hair or piece of clothing (if this is even possible, sometimes I can only see the prim parts of the item)
-Try to tp, upload a texture, rez an object or even edit a piece of clothing in the appearance window: nothing happens and after a bit, the firestorm crashes.

-Relog, rinse and repeat as many times as you like, nothing is fixed. Sometimes you can see the mesh item, sometimes not.
I ve tried everything, clearing cache, move to another sim, even changing the "MeshMaxConcurrentRequests" in Debug Settings.
-The problem is solved only when I remove every mesh piece attached on me and relog.

I don't think what I am describing here is a connection problem, since I have the same ISP and connection for the last 5 years, and had no issue before mesh came to our life. As for my GPU, I use a nvidia GTX 460.

This is starting to get really annoying since I am a creator and I use a lot of full perm meshes, its not a happy thing to fail to see or modify a mesh 2/3 of the times...