Viewer settings and crashes

[JoyofRLC Acker]

Need some help.  Ive had problems with freezes / crashes after being logged in a lingish time (2 hours say) and or sailing.   The frequency of these events seems to come and go.  The scenario is:

normal operation for a period of time; then some variations on : increased "normal" lag; hard disc light comes on steadyl ping times of 2 or 3 seconds or more (zero or minimal packet loss); screen freezes and or blanks white or black; screen unfreezes for a little (but often weird lag type effects; finally i get kicked out of SL, or thrown off my vehicle or fly to EOW.

Different suggestions have been made in the areas of network, graphics card or memeory.

Im running on Dell XPS M1730 with 3 GB Ram, dual NV 8700 GPU with 1 GB memory - full details below.

I came across some threads in here with suggestions for similar problems.   I'm asking for comments as to whether they would help my problem - AND WHY (people hardly ever say what the effect od these various settigs really is!)

- turn  http: textures off  (they default to on for my setup)

- turn off Render Glow (defaulted to on for my setup)

- turn off OGL Vertex Buffer Objects

Is there a good resource on Viewer settings - that REALLy explains what they do and which ones have most impact on performance or crashes?

As I say Im having a really hard time deciding what area to look in - graphics, memory, network, SL servers.   The viewer log is not very enlightening - nothing jumps out other than to indicate there looks to be enough available memory left over.

 

Configuration:

Firestorm 4.4.2 (34167) Jul  1 2013 23:33:25 (Firestorm-Release) with Havok support
Release Notes

CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU     T9300  @ 2.50GHz (2493.75 MHz)
Memory: 3070 MB
OS Version: Microsoft Windows Vista 32-bit Service Pack 2 (Build 6002)
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: GeForce 8700M GT/PCIe/SSE2

Windows Graphics Driver Version: 8.17.0013.0142
OpenGL Version: 3.3.0

RestrainedLove API: (disabled)
libcurl Version: libcurl/7.21.1 OpenSSL/1.0.0d zlib/1.2.5 c-ares/1.7.1
J2C Decoder Version: KDU v7.1
Audio Driver Version: FMOD version 3.750000
Qt Webkit Version: 4.7.1 (version number hard-coded)
Voice Server Version: Not Connected
Settings mode: Phoenix
Viewer Skin: MetaHarper Modern (CoolOcean)
Font Used: Deja Vu (96)
Draw distance: 900
Bandwidth: 500
LOD factor: 2
Render quality: Medium (3/7)
Built with MSVC version 1600

 

 

 

 

 

[Kwakkelde Kwak]

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JoyofRLC Acker wrote:

Draw distance: 900

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I'm not sure if that's the cause of all your problems, but this is certainly "miles" too far for your computer.

If you have your draw distance that far, SL will have to download everything within a 900 meter range, which is almost 4 sims away in every direction. This means excessive amount of data that needs to be downloaded, an excessive amount of geometry and textures to process by your computer and chances are your cache will be used in an excessive way. This last thing could cause the HD light you see.

With the specifications you post I wouldn't set draw distance over 128 meters. Maybe 64 or even 32 in a club or other busy sim and maybe 256 when you want to take a picture.

[Ren Toxx]

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JoyofRLC Acker wrote: [...] 

Bandwidth: 500

 

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This is another bit that sounds suspicious to me. I'm not sure why so many viewers choose to have this as their default bandwidth setting because, in my experience as a helper/orientator, a whole lot of people suffer constant disconnections and bad lag until they change it to about 1500 kbps.

[Suspiria Finucane]

Based on your comp specs I would say  low end settings are about all you will get for your SL experience. A better graphics card would help since the minimum requirements for SL is a 9000 series.

[Kwakkelde Kwak]

Another thing I just noticed:

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JoyofRLC Acker wrote:

dual NV 8700 GPU with 1 GB memory - full details below.

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Are you sure it has 1GB of memory? All the 8700M's I find have 256 MB. SL doesn't (really) make use of the second card in SLI as far as I know. You could try lowering the texture memory use. It's in preferences (ctrl-P) -> graphics -> advanced. Setting the slider to 128MB might help lowering the load on your computer.

Does the laptop have a power saving mode btw? Some laptops like to disable the graphics card and switch to onboard graphics after a while to save power. Using a power cord instead of the battery should help out in that case.

[JoyofRLC Acker]

Thanks for the various suggestions.

Yes - DD seems to be a popular suggestion.   I understand the "square law" effect.   But as I said, I get acceptable (or better) performance for quite a while, its usually only after an hour or more that the frezze / crash cycel starts up.  Id have thought that DD "too high" would give viewer lag from the get go?

I dont understand the time aspect of this.  Anyway, lll try lower DD (though I dont like that when sailing) and see if I still get the problem.

Ill check the Grpahics specs; the machine was advertised as having 4 GB memory and I recall being somewhat miffed that they included the Graphics memory in that - this machine also does "work" and when not in SL I like to have a LOT of programs open!

Yes the dual 8700M seem a waste afik just about nothing really uses the two,   There is also a physics accelerator that i think is not used either.

How maor a job would replacing the grpahics board be?  Not sure its worth it the machine is 4 years old but I dont have new puter on the horizon this year anyway.

Any comments about the impact of those other settings:

- http textures
- render glow
- vertex buffer objects

Truning them on / off one by one is not coclusive as its so hard to do a controlled experiment in SL with this sort of thing.

Is there anythng I shold be looking out for in the viewer log?  

 

[JoyofRLC Acker]

Oh - the BW setting - Im on a WLAN (cable broadband out of the house which typically gives me 11 MBPS plus from the US servers (30 MPBS down, 3 MBPS up locally).  But the Firestorm ppl are pretty adamant to not go over 500 with WLAN.   Yes, I do keep a very careful eye on the network - and my neighbours!  

[Kwakkelde Kwak]

Not sure why I didn't mention it earlier, but do you monitor the temperatures of your cpu and gpu?

I've had a severe case of overheating on a video card. The result for me was the entire computer stalling, but from what I understand it can also just crash you to your desktop. This would certainly fit the scenario.

With a bit of luck a good cleaning might be all you need. A cooling pad should bring some relief as well.

As far as I know the 8700GT's are actual cards, so they should be easy to replace. That is if you can find matching cards.

It's one of the green things.

 

[Perrie Juran]

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JoyofRLC Acker wrote:

Oh - the BW setting - Im on a WLAN (cable broadband out of the house which typically gives me 11 MBPS plus from the US servers (30 MPBS down, 3 MBPS up locally).  But the Firestorm ppl are pretty adamant to not go over 500 with WLAN.   Yes, I do keep a very careful eye on the network - and my neighbours!  

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Not sure who you mean by "Firestorm ppl" here but 'speed' is not the end all.  You also deal with latency, packet loss,  jitter, etc.

Based on experience, the 'official' recomendation from FS for a hard wired (Ethernet) connection is 80% of your speed up to 1500 kbps.  The 1500 is because that is what the SL Servers operate at.

http://wiki.phoenixviewer.com/fs_speedtest

[Teagan Tobias]

I run nvidia and my PC was locking up and crashing. Checking online I found that the 320.18 driver has been giving a lot of people problems. I rolled back my driver and all the locking up and crashing ended. 320.49 came out and I loaded it but I still crashed, rolled back again. Waiting for the next update. Not sure this has anything to do with what your seeing but just thought I would put it out here.

[JoyofRLC Acker]

Teagan - you raise an interesting point.  Its a little trickier as my GPU is one that was (I think) specific to Dell laptops and the NV website says to used Dell drivers not NV.  Dell as had hardly any updates.    I forget te details now but a couple of years ago I went through cycles of trying the NV drivers and rolling back to Dell.   It might be worth my while to check that all out again.

...

I note that no one has really commented on the (relevance or lack of!) the other things I have turned off, as mentioned above

Talking to another sailor in world he mentioned that something is def up with SL cos of the little quick freezes that seem to be happening now.   I was noticing those big time yesterday.    (These are mid sim. not the border; and affecting different classes of vehicles - bikes and planes as well as boats).

[Ren Toxx]

I was reluctant to answer because I don't believe I have a clear, technically accurate enough understanding on those things, but at least until someone else steps up to it...

'HTTP Textures' is a notably faster protocol for texture downloading than the older UDP method, but it puts a higher strain on your connection (quite specifically, the router -some don't just handle it slowly, but also incorrectly) and, if I'm not mistaken, even on your processor. Therefore, disabling HTTP textures might lighten your viewer's load, connection-wise and even processing-wise, but you'll probably notice things rezzing sensibly slower.

'Render glow' is exclusively a graphic rendering thing: you're just telling the viewer whether to show the glowing effect of objects thus designed, or not. It's a relatively heavy effect, but the difference between activating it or not will vary a lot, because some places hardly use any glow, while others are practically flooded by it. Anyway, just as everything else, you'll have to try yourself and see if deactivating it detracts too much from your visual SL experience (though, if you like it, there are several glow-related debug settings you could fiddle with, to achieve a compromise between visual niceness and performance/stability). Oh, and for some graphics cards, Render glow may introduce more than just heavier processing load... I'm talking about rendering bugs; in fact that's one of the most common reasons behind suggestions to turn it off.

 

As for Vertex Buffers, I'm afraid I still have no idea what they are and what switching them on/off entails, in practical terms.