Weird lag when running two viewers

[Skye Meinster]

hey everyone!

first of all i apologize if I'm not posting in the right place, the forums are still pretty confusing to me.

I recently got a new PC that runs second life wonderfully. It runs on Ultra smoothly, with a lot of things running in the background, and still not scratching 50% of the physical memory used. However, everything changes when I start another viewer. I checked the task manager and the physical memory usuage is still low (37% with two viewers and google chrome) but this awful lag kicks in, even when i lower the graphics to minimum. I can still run a lot of programs in the background and they will run flawlessly, but two second life viewers just refuse to work together. 

Has anyone ever experienced this issue before? What is there to do about it? :(

[Freya Mokusei]

...What kind of lag?

Is whatever kind of lag it is system-wide or in-viewer?

If so which?

When?

How?

Do you use multiple monitors, with separate SL instances in each?

What's your OS version and name?

Which viewer are you using (version & name)? Does it have Run Multiple enabled or are you using a workaround?

How much bandwidth does your connection have?

Is it wired to your router?

Does running multiple instances increase packet loss?

Does it increase Ping Sim?

How much RAM?

Which speed?

Is this enough or are you relying on virtual memory/paging?

How are viewer caches configured?

Both to the same disk?

What disk?

Post more info.

[Dora Gustafson]

Two machines?

Two different viewers?

Two instances of the same viewer on the same machine?

Note that when the viewer window isn't active and in focus the frame rate drops significantly!
(place both viewer windows on the screen, shift focus between them and you will see)

:smileysurprised::smileyvery-happy:

[Skye Meinster]

wooo first of all thanks for the quick replies everyone.

i got this fixed though- i was using the official viewer with multiple clients enabled, but the results were SO much better using two clients on RLV or firestorm. Basically, any other viewer works a lot better than the official when it comes to that, lol. thanks again everyone.

[Rhys Goode]

I run two instances of FS at the same time, on occasion, with two different avatars.  I find that it makes things run more smoothly if the two avi's have different caches, and settings.xml files.

The cache is set from preferences while running FS. 

The settings file lives in C:\users\"you"\appdata\roaming\Firestorm\user_settings. Or in C:\users\"you"\appdata\roaming\SecondLife\user_settings.  if you are using the official viewer. The appdata/roaming folder may be hidden, I think that widows hides it by default.

My widows shortcut for starting FS has: 

 "C:\Program Files (x86)\Firestorm-Release\Firestorm-Release.exe" --settings settings_firestorm--rhys.xml --set InstallLanguage en

for my main avatar, and - settings settings_firestorm--alt.xml for the alt.

 

[Skye Meinster]

thanks for the cache tip! i just set it to be saving cache seperately. hope that helps.

about the setting.xml files; im not sure i know how to make seperate ones (honestly im not sure i know what those files are and how to access them in settings) is there a chance you could explain a little more on that? 

[Ren Toxx]

It’ll probably make a huge difference if you go into Debug Settings and set BackgroundYieldTime to something quite above the default 40, since even if you have two viewer instances running, you’re unlikely going to be able to operate both simultaneously... rather, you’d switch between one and the other, no matter how quickly. That means that at no moment will both viewer windows be active, and when one of them isn’t, a higher BackgroundYieldTime will ensure it frees CPU resources for every other program running... including the other viewer instance :smileywink:

 

As for multiple settings, many viewers (including Firestorm) have an explicit button or text indicating the folder where its “settings.xml” is located; once you locate it, make a copy of it, rename it however you want (for example, “settings_alt.xml”), then create a copy of your viewer‘s shortcut in the Desktop or Start Program menu, whichever you use, and then modify the new shortcut so that it uses the same viewer (hence the same .exe file) but the new .xml file, not the original one: the way to do it is to go to this new shortcut’s properties, check the “Target” field and, at the end, add this:

--settings settings_alt.xml

 

From that moment on, when you launch the viewer with the new shortcut, it will use different settings (at first they’ll be the same as your original ones, since you copied the .xml file), and you can therefore change the cache folder and anything else you want for this second instance viewer. Don’t forget to set BackgroundYieldTime to a higher than 40 value in both, though.

[Skye Meinster]

woah, thank you so much. this really improved things! 

[Rhys Goode]

good stuff, Ren.  I did not know all the details.