Barely walking in sims with 70-90 Avis

[SLtesterL2]

Hello everyone. Now I know what your thinking: "Well of course there's going to be lag with that many avatars, it's common sense!" Well it isn't so much of asking how to fix it (sorta) but why does it do it. For me, I was in a pretty big place with that many Avis and I was stun my lappy was still pushing double digits! (20-27fps) So everything was working beautifully but what weirded me out was that though everything was smooth and there was no rubber band effect, I was still walking like I was in cement. I would've been perfectly fine knowing that my viewer was experiencing 4fps and the cement shoe having avi but my situation made me curious. So any suggestions on why mine did this and maybe how I can fix it? Thank you

[KarenMichelle Lane]

Your lappy sounds pretty hot. At lease it's graphics subsystem was doing it's thing with what information you were receiving from the Region Server. However, there is not much you can do about Time Dilation, A Server Lag Measurement which is reporting that transactional data is lagging behind the transmission speed needed to allow the real-time feedback that walking needs.. The 65-70 AVs to be sure were helping to make this a non-reality on that region.

[Kwakkelde Kwak]

Like Karen said, there are various types of lag: server, network and local. Network lag is when the network can't keep up with the server and your input, that causes rubberbanding. Low fps are usually caused by your computer not being able to render the scene quickly enough. 70-90 avatars will simply lag the server itself, that's most likely what's going on.

More here

[Nalates Urriah]

You probably know about Viewer Statistics: Ctrl-Shift-1.

Open it and check how the server is handling the load. Time Dialtion, as mentioned, should be 1.0 or very close. As TD departs from that level it is an indication the server has more to do than it can handle. You will typically see the SIM FPS degrade too. Perfect SIM FPS is 45 FPS. If the server cannot complete all its tasks in 22ms, it lowers the SIM FPS to get more time for those tasks.

PING is the time it takes network packets to travel to and from you and the server. Anything at 250ms and lower is pretty good and usable. Above that expect problems.

Also, the Viewer Stats PING is not your typical PING. Your computer's or router's PING is different and will give you different timings than the Viewer's PING. The Viewer's PING is very dependent on the SL server and Linden network. If you see slow PING in viewer stats check PING using your computer's PING. If you computer tells you things are good, it is the server that is having a problem, not your connection. Of course if SIM FPS is low you will see PING going up. But, PING can go up when SIM FPS is good, which means it is likely a Linden network issue. Or possibly your connection having a problem.

In general you get a sluggish walk and turn action when the PING is high. PING at 2,500ms is lagging you 2.5 seconds. A busy region can overload the communications and drive PING up. All that information about what each avatar is doing is increasing the demand on bandwidth.

You can go into the ADVANCED menu and activate Show Updates. This will turn on blue, green, and red dots that tell what types of updates are being sent by which objects. It will give you and idea of the amount of information being transmitted at any given moment.

The real time display of SL is very complex. There are litterally hundres of things that can affect the performance you see. Lots of avatars mean lots of textures to download and lots of activity to update and track. Plus all those moving avatars greatly increase the physics calculations. That is one of the reasons that places like Hair Fair are made mostly from non-physical objects, to eliminate the physics calc for collisions. Some people fly to reduce walking collisions with the ground.

[WolfBaginski Bearsfoot]

I've seen very variable effects from large crowds.

Yes, I'd expect a sim that was so full to be very laggy.

But I went to the Raglan Shire Wootstock Festival and that was packed out, but not laggy.

And I know a few clubs which lag horribly with far fewer AVs present.

I reckon that whatever is behind the lag situations, the Tinies have figured out a fix.

[Mick Scarbridge]

 That is a ton of server, network, and viewer lag. I would probably not be able to move there, or tp out to prevent getting stuck in a lag-a-thon. The only way I could see to reduce the amount of lag in a situation like that would be to ask people to detach all scripted attachments and then sit on a non-physical, phantom object to make their avatars not use the physics engine for calculating collisions, and while getting the land owner to temporarily disable media access and voice in the region to avoid excess lag sources.