Help figure out performance problems....

[walterwhiteSr]

I posted in another thread "PC / Game Performance Isn't time For?" the need for performance testing utility or built-in performance adjusters to help people with their viewer/pc setups for SL.  I learned that the SL viewer does have such capability.  This new thread is sort of related but specific to help a friend's SL setup.

One of my new SL friends didn't want to post because English is her 2nd language and doesn't feel comfortable trying to relate in public forum in english. So I'm posting the question for her.

NOTE: We are both noob / newbies of SL.

She has noticed after a week in SL her in SL performance is getting slightly worse, 3 days ago in the early AM about 2-3 AM PDT, we both went to Freebie Galaxy, and both of our systems locked up, she was using SL viewer I was am using Firestorm.  I rebooted system and since I didn't have "Home" set when relogging into SL I was starting again at Freebie Galaxy and it took 4-6 tries before I could transport out and everything was fine.  I am relating my experience because hers was identical. 

The next day I went back to Freebie Galaxy and had no problems.

Early AM 1-3 PDT today, my friend told me she went to Freebie Galaxy the same thing happened, when we both locked up.  She tried 4 or 5 times and each time she teleported into Freebie Galaxy her viewer would lock up.  She next tried Firestorm and no improvement.

Here are her system specs:  (1 year old PC) 64 bit.Intel core(TM) i3-2120 cpu 3.30 GHz 4,00 GB, she doesn't know if she has a dedicated video card ( I doubt it when you see her FPS below) doesn't know what kind of internet connection she has, she lives in a house in downtown Athens.

We teleported to a spot that had some buildings but stood on a beach facing the water, no other people on this island.

Using Ctrl Shft 1  her in SL FPS is 5.6  for comparison my FPS in same location is 15-20+

Her ping was in the low 200s, my ping in 90-110

Bandwidth, both of our bandwith was a low 1-6 kbps

My system is a 2yr old i5 3.2ghz 8gb of ram, on a 15meg cable 100 miles from San Jose I have an 5 year old dedicated gaming video card (GeForce 7600GT 256MB 128-bit GDDR3 PCI Express x16).

it is 6:30 PM PDT, I can teleport right now to Freebie Galaxy and during the last 30 minutes have done it 3 or 4 times, I had no problems with the location & my display, it does load a little slower, my FPS drops from 18-20 to 10-12, the bandwidth goes up from 100-500kbps.

I am guessing that bandwidth usage is based on load/demand so if there is a lot of people and graphics/stuff the bandwidth consumed goes up.  Also this morning both of our bandwidth on the beach was extreme low 1-6kbps.  Right now as I type bandwidth on the beach is 30-70kbps, at Freebie Galaxy it is 100-500kbps.

So one possibility the the SL network at these early hour times is doing something that ties up bandwidth, compared to right now 6:45pm PDT the bandwidth is fluxuating with the load.

She could benefit from a new dedicated GPU graphics card, however she is a unemployed college student so things are tight.

Please recommend SL viewer settings and also if someone could recommend Firestorm settings  (that would help me too).

The help is appreciated much...

 

 

 

 

[walterwhiteSr]

I posted in another thread "PC / Game Performance Isn't time For?" the need for performance testing utility or built-in performance adjusters to help people with their viewer/pc setups for SL.  I learned that the SL viewer does have such capability.  This new thread is sort of related but specific to help a friend's SL setup.

One of my new SL friends didn't want to post because English is her 2nd language and doesn't feel comfortable trying to relate in public forum in english. So I'm posting the question for her.

NOTE: We are both noob / newbies of SL.

She has noticed after a week in SL her in SL performance is getting slightly worse, 3 days ago in the early AM about 2-3 AM PDT, we both went to Freebie Galaxy, and both of our systems locked up, she was using SL viewer I was am using Firestorm.  I rebooted system and since I didn't have "Home" set when relogging into SL I was starting again at Freebie Galaxy and it took 4-6 tries before I could transport out and everything was fine.  I am relating my experience because hers was identical. 

The next day I went back to Freebie Galaxy and had no problems.

Early AM 1-3 PDT today, my friend told me she went to Freebie Galaxy the same thing happened, when we both locked up.  She tried 4 or 5 times and each time she teleported into Freebie Galaxy her viewer would lock up.  She next tried Firestorm and no improvement.

Here are her system specs:  (1 year old PC) 64 bit.Intel core(TM) i3-2120 cpu 3.30 GHz 4,00 GB, she doesn't know if she has a dedicated video card ( I doubt it when you see her FPS below) doesn't know what kind of internet connection she has, she lives in a house in downtown Athens.

We teleported to a spot that had some buildings but stood on a beach facing the water, no other people on this island.

Using Ctrl Shft 1  her in SL FPS is 5.6  for comparison my FPS in same location is 15-20+

Her ping was in the low 200s, my ping in 90-110

Bandwidth, both of our bandwith was a low 1-6 kbps

My system is a 2yr old i5 3.2ghz 8gb of ram, on a 15meg cable 100 miles from San Jose I have an 5 year old dedicated gaming video card (GeForce 7600GT 256MB 128-bit GDDR3 PCI Express x16).

it is 6:30 PM PDT, I can teleport right now to Freebie Galaxy and during the last 30 minutes have done it 3 or 4 times, I had no problems with the location & my display, it does load a little slower, my FPS drops from 18-20 to 10-12, the bandwidth goes up from 100-500kbps.

I am guessing that bandwidth usage is based on load/demand so if there is a lot of people and graphics/stuff the bandwidth consumed goes up.  Also this morning both of our bandwidth on the beach was extreme low 1-6kbps.  Right now as I type bandwidth on the beach is 30-70kbps, at Freebie Galaxy it is 100-500kbps.

So one possibility the the SL network at these early hour times is doing something that ties up bandwidth, compared to right now 6:45pm PDT the bandwidth is fluxuating with the load.

She could benefit from a new dedicated GPU graphics card, however she is a unemployed college student so things are tight.

Please recommend SL viewer settings and also if someone could recommend Firestorm settings  (that would help me too).

The help is appreciated much...

 

 

 

 

[Czari Zenovka]

Freebie Galaxy is a known haven for griefers.  My first suggestion (which I think I posted in your other thread) is to not go there! 

 

[Dillon Levenque]

Well one thing that comes to mind is that three days ago at 2-3 A.M. (depending on your time zone) might possibly have been Tuesday in San Francisco, and Tuesday is when LL does rolling restarts of sims. While a sim is being restarted it is unavailable for login.

Your graphics card will be sneered at by almost everyone, I'm afraid. I too have a graphics card almost that old but at least mine's a 9500. I can't give you performance numbers or point you to charts, but I've spent a lot of time looking at those and reading comments on this forum and I can tell you confidently that an upgrade—any upgrade—to your graphics card will help. Your friend is in the same boat. You really can't blame that need on Second Life. Your FPS of 16-20 isn't something to write home about but it's not all that bad. Hers of 1-6 is just never going to fly.

You might suggest to your friend that she try the Singularity viewer. It's been said (and I am presenting anecdotal evidence only: I have zero data to support this) that Singularity allows less than competent PC's to get around in SL. It's certainly worth a try. Even so, a GPU is always the answer. Second Life is graphics intensive.

Last but not least, these forum posts never die. You can dig around on the internet and find posts from years ago. So even though it's almost nothing: I wouldn't mention where I lived 100 miles from if you want to be really private. I speak about my RL neighborhood often because I'm okay with that, but if you're NOT okay with that you should be careful.

You didn't say whether is was the one in California or Costa Rica: I'd leave it at that.

 

[Bree Giffen]

Try turning on your texture console and watch how the textures load when you enter a sim. You'll see a lot of textures being downloaded and once the console shows no further textures you should see faster performance. There is just a huge quantity of texture that needs to be downloaded. Some places are worse than others. I imagine freebie galaxy is pretty bad because there are a lot of textures created by different people.

To get the texture console press ctrl-alt-Q (not ctrl-Q!) for the develop menu, then you open that menu and choose consoles->texture console. Or press ctrl-shift-3.

 

[Rhys Goode]

4 Gigs memory can be a problem, if there are other programs going in the background.  When I had a system with only 4 Gigs, I had to be very careful not to have other processes going, or else SL would start swaping memory on and off my hard drive, and performance would go way down.  For me, disabling voice made a big difference in how much the hard drive was used (even when not actively using voice).  Also making sure that media is disabled, depending on where you are.

I have also heard that the Singularity viewer is a lot kinder on under powered machines than Firestorm.  Might be worth checking out.

[Qie Niangao]

If I read the other thread correctly, you're soon to get a graphics card upgrade, and if you'll be getting something respectable, I think you'll notice a night-and-day difference, swamping all the other effects you're trying to optimize now.

That, unfortunately, won't help your friend. That hardware configuration seems to be on the very hairy edge of being able to run SL at all, so yeah: go for the least demanding viewer (which may be Singulariy, by reputation), and adjust the draw distance to the shortest that's remotely tolerable. (Just to see how desperate her situation is, it would help to get more complete configuration info, which is available in the viewer from Help / About Second Life -- preferably while the viewer is logged in.)

In that other thread you also mention increasing the bandwidth slider and the cache. This is unlikely to help much in your current situation, and could make things very much worse. With some effort and expertise, it's possible to determine if these settings can be improved, but that's drifting into more sophisticated tuning with relatively subtle payback if any.

[Theresa Tennyson]

Second Life tries to open a lot of Internet connections simultaneously. The upside is it can bring in a lot of information very quickly if your internet service and hardware can handle it; the downside is some services/hardware CAN'T handle it. Here are some things you can try to reduce the number of connections SL uses:

1) Go to the "Advanced" menu (Ctrl-Alt-D if you don't see it) and go to "Show Debug Settings." Type in this phrase in the dialog box until it auto-completes and then hit "Return" - "MeshMaxConcurrentRequests" (no quotes,) The value under "Number of threads to use for loading meshes" is probably going to be 32. Drop this to 8.

2) Open the "Develop" menu (Ctrl-Alt-Q) and go to "HTTP Textures." Try turning this off (select it to remove the check mark). This will mean that textures may load a little slower but it will free up connections for other services to use.