Constantly crashing and being logged out, what's going on with SL?

[MartinaVaslovik]

Over the last week or so I've not been able to go to certain sims without crashing all the time, London City being the worst, and certain beaches being pretty bad too. I'll be chatting with someone after having just gotten back in, and again, gray screen and crashola. This is making SL a real hassle to deal with, and really putting a big damper on it.

This always seems to happen while I'm chatting with a friend, and we get cut off repeatedly by it.

I'd like to understand what's making this happen. Is this a server problem? Is it because the sim is too full of people? I can't be in London City any more for more than ten minutes before getting the gray screen and crashing, then I have to log back in, go to my house and then back to London City, because it won't let me go to my last location directly.

This is really making SL hard to use and not much fun at all. Does anyone know why this is happening? It used to be I could sitting at a table in London City as long as I wanted without this happening, but now I can't be there ten minutes without crashing.

I've tried increading my cache to 3072 mb but it still happens. Is there anything at all I can do on my end?

[Marigold Devin]

Certainly, the busier the sim, the more scripts that are running, the slower things will seem. More textures that have to be rendered, more chat that has to be processed, and then the inevitable 'crash'.

It sounds to me like your computer is feeling overloaded.

I don't tend to fanny about with my bandwith, and certainly, sometimes tweaking things as a guess can be like putting a kitten in with a ball of wool.

Check your graphics card drivers are up-to-date.

Check you have sufficient available RAM.

Check your internet connection.

Post your computer's full specifications here too, to see if we can see something obvious from that which may be impairing your use of Second Life.

Other suggestions will follow.

[Thinkerer Melville]

Here is a summary of such problems and solutions that sometimes work

Login fails? Lots of logouts? Summary 

TKR

[MartinaVaslovik]

Well I'm sure some of it has to do with how busy the sim is.

My computer is a brand new Mac Mini core i5 running Mountain Lion and has 16 gb of RAM. It has a 500gb startup disk and 12tb of external disk. The startup disk has 433.06 gb free.

The graphics card is integrated and uses system memory.

Just now I was logged off with the message that my account would not be available until 7:35 AM Pacific time. Bummer. That's not something on my end at all.

Internet connection is fine with no issues going on at all. I checked.

[Theresa Tennyson]

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MartinaVaslovik wrote:

Over the last week or so I've not been able to go to certain sims without crashing all the time, London City being the worst, and certain beaches being pretty bad too. I'll be chatting with someone after having just gotten back in, and again, gray screen and crashola. This is making SL a real hassle to deal with, and really putting a big damper on it.

This always seems to happen while I'm chatting with a friend, and we get cut off repeatedly by it.

 

I'd like to understand what's making this happen. Is this a server problem? Is it because the sim is too full of people? I can't be in London City any more for more than ten minutes before getting the gray screen and crashing, then I have to log back in, go to my house and then back to London City, because it won't let me go to my last location directly.

 

This is really making SL hard to use and not much fun at all. Does anyone know why this is happening? It used to be I could sitting at a table in London City as long as I wanted without this happening, but now I can't be there ten minutes without crashing.

I've tried increading my cache to 3072 mb but it still happens. Is there anything at all I can do on my end?

---

The gray screen and the "darn" message are usually a sign that the server has been unable to communicate with your viewer for an extended period of time. In SL there's a constant two-way connection between your computer and the sim you're on. Are you using a wireless connection by any chance? I used to get that problem frequently with satellite internet. Sometimes the connection would be dropped but I could catch it and reconnect before I was logged out.

[MartinaVaslovik]

okay it just happened again, two minutes at a sim and I cannot log back in. This is really making SL a terrible hassle and no fun at all!!!!

[Nyll Bergbahn]

That's your answer. Your Mac mini i5 uses integrated Intel HD 4000 graphics rather than a discrete graphics card so you will invariably run into problems using Second Life, especially in busy sims. Before entering a busy sim, turn your graphics level down low, especially the draw distance.

 

[Marigold Devin]

Yes, it does look like, from the message you got, saying "System is logging you out... account will not be available until 7.35am SL time" that the server which served the particular sim you were on is being rather slow to release your avatar's presence. 

Most of us suffer with lag issues when on busier sims, which is just an unfortunate fact of SLife.

However, hopefully you are ok, not being disconnected, when on the less busy sims. 

Also, you may find things vary from week to week, because there is new code and features rolled out to the grid almost every Tuesday. This is meant to improve things, but sometimes it does cause other things to go out of kilter. 

All I can suggest you do is see how often other people within the same sim get logged out too. Chat to people, get them on your friend list, and you may be quite reassured that at certain times its normal to suffer constant log outs (which are infuriating) and then other times you get a relatively smooth-running day.

There may be input from other residents about this, so please do keep returning to your thread. 

 

 

[MartinaVaslovik]

Okay, just crashed again, so I rebooted, and restarted the DSL modem, and then I couldn't log in at all, DNS could not resolve the host name. Yeow! So I restarted Firestorm and it finally let me in. SL is now the only think running on my system, and I find myself wondering if perhaps iTunes might be causing a problem, it does use the network when it's loaded, but a friend tells me she's having the same problems now and they started about the same time mine did.

[Nyll Bergbahn]

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MartinaVaslovik wrote:

Well I'm sure some of it has to do with how busy the sim is.

My computer is a brand new Mac Mini core i5 running Mountain Lion and has 16 gb of RAM. It has a 500gb startup disk and 12tb of external disk. The startup disk has 433.06 gb free.

The graphics card is integrated and uses system memory.

Just now I was logged off with the message that my account would not be available until 7:35 AM Pacific time. Bummer. That's not something on my end at all.

 

Internet connection is fine with no issues going on at all. I checked.

---

Don't take the time as gospel. Just jeep trying to log back in. You can usually do this well before any specified time in a message like that.

[Nyll Bergbahn]

You do appear to be having network issues although your integrated graphics is not helping with performance.

Anyway, use an Ethernet cable, not wireless and try adding Google DNS as per the link provided below to fix your latest problem if restarting your router/modem fails to do so.

:

DNS could not resolve the host name

This error may also appear as:

• Host http not found 
• Login failed. Unable to connect to a simulator.

These messages indicate that your computer has a general networking issue with the domain name service (DNS) that translates numerical IP addresses into human-readable ones.  

Confirm that you can reach internet sites such as secondlife.com, Google, or others.  Once your computer can connect to these websites, this error should no longer occur.  

Also check whether there is a wider issue with Second Life, as described below.

Usually, restarting your computer and your router will resolve this issue.   If not, contact your internet service provider.  You may also wish to try using Google's DNS servers to see if that will resolve the issue.  See Using Google Public DNS for more information.  

[GothGirl Demonia]

Its GoonSquad & PN Griefing, even if you can't see it they are viewer aseet spamming players viewers, and DDOS attacks.

For asset crashes and corruption go into %APPDATA% directory clear your cache/settings, login in a simulator by itself with no heavy assets should fix the problem from griefers and asset spam except key attacks on target that work across SL grid wide.

on windows vista/windows 7

You go to start menu, and type %APPDATA% in the start search and click enter.

In this folder should be your viewer settings depending on the viewer you use and such, if you click at the top of the bar that says the path and go to your app data directory itself instead of appdata roaming, you see Local, you open local there is also another viewer folder there you can safely delete the two Second Life Viewer folders from these directory's if your clients appears broken, or just erase the cache manually from the cache folder which is the one that has all the wierd UUID Keys.  

Example.

C:\Users\UserHere\AppData\Local\Firestorm

C:\Users\UserHere\AppData\Roaming\Firestorm

Grid Attacks.

Basically the way griefers attacks are working lately and have for quite awhile is they will load massive amounts of asset data to a users viewer such as uncached Textures,Sounds that you cant hear, Animations in attempt to make it crash, I have been around a lot of these type of attacks to see what they would do just being in the sandbox I got griefers trying to crash my client all the time, welcome areas, and sometimes private sims griefers would come into and knock everyones viewer offline such as dance clubs and so on.

In general a singe person can take about 300+ objects and wear them as an invisble prim but place a bunch of laggy sculpt maps, and textures in it to cause a persons viewer to just lock on them or lag/cause corruption, then you have the illegal viewers which have these type of griefs built into them easy to detect if you have an illegal viewer or non approved TPV that can detect them.

The other type of attack is (Key Attacking) something that is happening a lot by griefers using a script inside of a /null object to rez another object which is also /null creator and spam X persons avatar key with hateful messages, and or objects which can't be muted because it is unable to obtain the user name from this its a bug in SL which from what I hear was supposed to be fixed but a grid wide grief attack.

Sim IP's for DDOS attacks are also easy to obtain with viewer you put mouse on minimap  and it tells you Sim's IP address which I am sure is what griefers are doing too.

There are legit reasons for such tools like knowing your sim's IP address I am sure especially when you work on scripting but there are also griefers who like to abuse all these functions.