Community Manager Linden Lab Posted October 30, 2014 Community Manager Share Posted October 30, 2014 There have been some major performance improvements made that you can read about in our Featured News blog. In addition to the high level changes overview there, a more technical look at the specifics of the CDN changes can be found in this Tools and Technology blog. We would love to hear how these improvements are working for you, and invite you to let us know in this forum thread. Please be sure you're using the latest Official Viewer to experience these improvements. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bunyip Fanshaw Posted October 30, 2014 Share Posted October 30, 2014 I don't know what Second Life you're living in but it isn't mine. Not only has performance not improved for me, it has actually deteriorated recently. In particular, teleports are way slower, if they happen at all. Rezzing in some places has regressed to a snail's pace. Chat lag is not as bad as it was, but still bad enough to be annoying. Picture quality is erratic ...the flickering at the horizon which went away with some bug fixes a couple of moths ago has returned. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lindens Ebbe Linden Posted October 30, 2014 Lindens Share Posted October 30, 2014 Bunyip Fanshaw wrote: I don't know what Second Life you're living in but it isn't mine. Not only has performance not improved for me, it has actually deteriorated recently. In particular, teleports are way slower, if they happen at all. Rezzing in some places has regressed to a snail's pace. Chat lag is not as bad as it was, but still bad enough to be annoying. Picture quality is erratic ...the flickering at the horizon which went away with some bug fixes a couple of moths ago has returned. Bummer. Strange. What viewer are you using? Where are you located? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sparkdaemon Posted October 30, 2014 Share Posted October 30, 2014 Improvements? i didn't noticed anything. But i noticed that the ping (who were ~ 120 ms before the update) is now around 240 - 300 here (France). it's now impossible to do some think like drive, fly precisely (Was already hard before) and all the stuff who need precision. Don't tell me that it's my connection, I have ~22ms on google servers. sparkdaemon. EDIT: I use Firestorm, and same problem with Singularity and Alchemy Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lindens Ebbe Linden Posted October 30, 2014 Lindens Share Posted October 30, 2014 Sparkdaemon wrote: Improvements? i didn't noticed anything. But i noticed that the ping (who were ~ 120 ms before the update) is now around 240 - 300 here (France). it's now impossible to do some think like drive, fly precisely (Was already hard before) and all the stuff who need precision. Don't tell me that it's my connection, I have ~22ms on google servers. sparkdaemon. EDIT: I use Firestorm, and same problem with Singularity and Alchemy Thanks for the info. Do you mind trying the new official SL viewer to see if that makes a difference? http://secondlife.com/support/downloads/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Oz Linden Posted October 30, 2014 Share Posted October 30, 2014 Sparkdaemon wrote: Improvements? i didn't noticed anything. But i noticed that the ping (who were ~ 120 ms before the update) is now around 240 - 300 here (France). it's now impossible to do some think like drive, fly precisely (Was already hard before) and all the stuff who need precision. Don't tell me that it's my connection, I have ~22ms on google servers. EDIT: I use Firestorm, and same problem with Singularity and Alchemy Firestorm and Singularity have not yet adopted all the improvments we've made (doubtless they will soon). I believe that Alchemy just released a version with pipelining. The changes we've made shouldn't have any negative effect on the ping time that's reported in your viewer. That number depends most strongly on the network path between your viewer and the simulator and to some extent on how loaded the simulator is. A difference as large as you're seeing is certainly in large part a change (hopefully temporary) in the way the network between us is behaving; something we can't do much about. Since Google is on entirely different systems elsewhere in the network, times to them don't tell you anything at all about time to us; the path is likely completely different beyond the first hop or two. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pamela Galli Posted October 30, 2014 Share Posted October 30, 2014 Oz Linden wrote: Firestorm and Singularity have not yet adopted all the improvments we've made (doubtless they will soon). I believe that Alchemy just released a version with pipelining. Should those of us not on LL viewer see any of these improvements at this point? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sparkdaemon Posted October 30, 2014 Share Posted October 30, 2014 I don't really see improvements here, even on official viewer. I have a question: do you planned any RAM improvements? every viewer i know use up to 1Go of ram after an hour and up to 1.4Go after 4hours. especially when i script. My computer isn't old (3 month) but i have 4Go Ram. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Oz Linden Posted October 30, 2014 Share Posted October 30, 2014 The CDN will improve texture and mesh load time for anyone on any viewer. (in theory, maybe not for a very very small subset of users who happen to be very very close to our datacenter, but even they shouldn't get much worse). The viewer changes are complementary to the CDN, and when those code changes are integrated into a TPV you'll see another performance bump. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Anne Cloud Posted October 30, 2014 Share Posted October 30, 2014 What, if any, changes have been made towards reducing the frequency of texture thrashing in the main viewer? There are related issues with content that require large textures, however I notice this problem regardless of whether I am in a texture heavy or texture efficient situation (be it environment, worn or HUDed), OR how large my texture cache is set. My cache is set to 512MB but my video card has 2GB RAM. I most often notice this problem after the viewer has been running for a while or if I've just switched back to the viewer after working in another program (as someone who works full-time creating content in-world, this describes ~85% of my SL experience). I've also noticed that it has been growing markedly worse over the past six months. There was a time prior to that when I could avoid this to some degree by disabling HTML textures, but doing so no longer helps me for some reason. Shouldn't textures cache once unless they are updated by the region? It doesn't make sense to me that they should continually reload, and on a visual level, it's a headache to look at. This, above any speed improvements to initial mesh or texture loading, is a far more noticable issue to me and continues to be a frustration every time I spend more than about fifteen minutes logged in. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Manuel Ormidale Posted October 30, 2014 Share Posted October 30, 2014 Hiyas sorry to tell, since thursday restarts it has become more slower for me. Even dragging Prims around is now in "stop.and go". That problem is in firestorm. After switching to the offical viewer leads to crashs after ten minutes. Just standing in the skybox. But ... Chat has improved (less chatlag) in both viewers. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ai Austin Posted October 30, 2014 Share Posted October 30, 2014 I read the tech paper from HighWinds on the CDN.. and with all the caching and proxies I wonder if it will work well when there are rapidly changing assets such as presentation screen content, moving objects meant to be seen synchronously by others, and changing clothing and hence baked textures for avatars. Does this get pushed quickly to all cache copies? May be worth a test and see if its more delayed than before? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Perrie Juran Posted October 30, 2014 Share Posted October 30, 2014 Second Life 3.7.18 (295539) Firestorm 4.6.7 (42398) Second Life 3.7.18 (295539) Firestorm 4.6.7 (42398) Oz Linden wrote: Firestorm and Singularity have not yet adopted all the improvments we've made (doubtless they will soon). You are scaring me. Because if this is what happens after FS adopts all your enhancements I'm either going to need to buy a new computer or kiss Second Life goodbye. I took these shots this afternoon using default graphic settings in both Viewers, Medium High for me. I've got a 3gig AMD processor, 4Gigs Ram, GTX650ti GPU, Win7. I know, I'm a minority and not everyone has my problems. And I've now started getting an error message on log in that I hadn't seen in a long time, "Your clothing is still downloading....." in both the Official Viewer and Firestorm. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sirhc DeSantis Posted October 30, 2014 Share Posted October 30, 2014 Only a very quick look (official viewer as requested) LEA sandbox - awful flicker looking in to neighbour sim (east) Grendels - rezzing seems fast (ok the sectional 'interest' bit comes in chunks but understand reasoning there). Hey why do an easy test eh But - watching data transfer rate stat even stationary and no visual change or av in view seeing around 5 or 6 seconds at 20k then a spike to 250, rapid drop to 125 then pattern repeats. Both sim ping times circa 200 ms, about par for my location (northern europe and thats all you get) so no change from before. (viewer defaulted to ultra which was nice and framerate 20 ish which is good for my h/w at that setting) [ inserts usual grumble of slow (to my subjective view) UI response then not a fan of xml for everything hihi ] Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Theresa Tennyson Posted October 30, 2014 Share Posted October 30, 2014 Perrie Juran wrote: Second Life 3.7.18 (295539) Firestorm 4.6.7 (42398) Second Life 3.7.18 (295539) Firestorm 4.6.7 (42398) Oz Linden wrote: Firestorm and Singularity have not yet adopted all the improvments we've made (doubtless they will soon). You are scaring me. Because if this is what happens after FS adopts all your enhancements I'm either going to need to buy a new computer or kiss Second Life goodbye. I took these shots this afternoon using default graphic settings in both Viewers, Medium High for me. I've got a 3gig AMD processor, 4Gigs Ram, GTX650ti GPU, Win7. I know, I'm a minority and not everyone has my problems. And I've now started getting an error message on log in that I hadn't seen in a long time, "Your clothing is still downloading....." in both the Official Viewer and Firestorm. Perrie, in that first picture I'm pretty sure you've got "Depth of Field" turned on. Texture loading issues won't look anywhere near that. Third picture is probably the fact that LL viewer doesn't have preferences option to jack up the LOD factor and the "Bogarts" sign is badly optimized. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bunyip Fanshaw Posted October 30, 2014 Share Posted October 30, 2014 I'm using Firestorm 4.67, no particular location. I'll try again using the official viewer and look for improvements. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SaraCarena Posted October 30, 2014 Share Posted October 30, 2014 Ummmmm......pretty sure this thread is about any improvements noticeable on latest sl viewer which is Second Life 3.7.19 (295700) btw. Texture/ mesh fetch are pretty epic for me in W. Europe compared to what they were. Region crossings noticeably smoother in general but there`s always going to be ones that`ll dump you on the seabed or up in the air somewhere. I`d try leaving the texture memory slider at default on sl viewer Perrie an see how that goes for you. Scene loading is good at lower draw distance settings. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Perrie Juran Posted October 30, 2014 Share Posted October 30, 2014 Theresa Tennyson wrote: Perrie Juran wrote: Second Life 3.7.18 (295539) Firestorm 4.6.7 (42398) Oz Linden wrote: Firestorm and Singularity have not yet adopted all the improvments we've made (doubtless they will soon). You are scaring me. Because if this is what happens after FS adopts all your enhancements I'm either going to need to buy a new computer or kiss Second Life goodbye. I took these shots this afternoon using default graphic settings in both Viewers, Medium High for me. I've got a 3gig AMD processor, 4Gigs Ram, GTX650ti GPU, Win7. I know, I'm a minority and not everyone has my problems. And I've now started getting an error message on log in that I hadn't seen in a long time, "Your clothing is still downloading....." in both the Official Viewer and Firestorm. Perrie, in that first picture I'm pretty sure you've got "Depth of Field" turned on. Texture loading issues won't look anywhere near that. Third picture is probably the fact that LL viewer doesn't have preferences option to jack up the LOD factor and the "Bogarts" sign is badly optimized. TY. Turning off DOF was a big improvement. Almost as crisp but still a touch of blurring (you can see on the leaves in the trees but I wouldn't normally be looking that close at the trees.) (They changed out the Happy Halloween sign) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Theresa Tennyson Posted October 30, 2014 Share Posted October 30, 2014 Perrie Juran wrote: TY. Turning off DOF was a big improvement. Almost as crisp but still a touch of blurring (you can see on the leaves in the trees but I wouldn't normally be looking that close at the trees.) (They changed out the Happy Halloween sign) Firestorm and the LL viewer are basically identical as far as the actual rendering engine - the Firestorm developers themselves say they don't have anyone with the expertise to do much that deep in the system. The main differences you see are different default settings. Turning various settings on and off should make the view practically identical for you. In particular, the LL viewer tends to turn on Advanced Lighting for more graphics cards. Jessica Lyon doesn't like Advanced Lighting for some reason. Advanced Lighting uses a different anti-aliasing system which probably accounts for the differences with the leaves you're seeing. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Whirly Fizzle Posted October 31, 2014 Share Posted October 31, 2014 Bunyip Fanshaw wrote: ...the flickering at the horizon which went away with some bug fixes a couple of moths ago has returned. sirhc DeSantis wrote: Only a very quick look (official viewer as requested) LEA sandbox - awful flicker looking in to neighbour sim (east) This flickering is probably MATBUG-252 , which started with the materials code and will happen on any materials enabled viewer when Advanced Lighting Model is enabled in graphics preferences. To work around the problem either disable Advanced lighting model under Me -> Preferences -> Graphics or activate the Develop menu in the top menu bar with CTRL+ALT+Q, Develop -> Rendering -> Object-Object Occlusion -> untick it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Community Manager Linden Lab Posted October 31, 2014 Author Community Manager Share Posted October 31, 2014 Ai Austin wrote: I read the tech paper from HighWinds on the CDN.. and with all the caching and proxies I wonder if it will work well when there are rapidly changing assets such as presentation screen content, moving objects meant to be seen synchronously by others, and changing clothing and hence baked textures for avatars. Does this get pushed quickly to all cache copies? May be worth a test and see if its more delayed than before? No, there shouldn't be any speed changes to texture baking or changing assets. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Whirly Fizzle Posted October 31, 2014 Share Posted October 31, 2014 Linden Lab wrote: Ai Austin wrote: I read the tech paper from HighWinds on the CDN.. and with all the caching and proxies I wonder if it will work well when there are rapidly changing assets such as presentation screen content, moving objects meant to be seen synchronously by others, and changing clothing and hence baked textures for avatars. Does this get pushed quickly to all cache copies? May be worth a test and see if its more delayed than before? No, there shouldn't be any speed changes to texture baking or changing assets. Funny you brought that up Austin, we had a shoe creator contact Firestorm support today who reported her customers suddenly complaining about the textures taking a long time to change or just remaining grey and never loading when changed via her texture HUD. I did some testing with her and I can reproduce the problem with the textures staying stuck grey and never loading, or taking a loooong time to load (as long as 5 mins in some cases) on both Firestorm and the default Linden viewer, Second Life 3.7.19 (295700) Oct 20 2014 13:37:20 (Second Life Release). Her shoes have been on sale a long time and the complaints just started recently and she has had 10 complaints since Tuesday. I have no idea yet if this is connected with CDN rolling out grid wide but I'm going to get those assets onto Aditi and test on one of the non-CDN regions to see if there is any different behaviour. I'll file a JIRA issue once I have more info. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ardy Lay Posted October 31, 2014 Share Posted October 31, 2014 I can agree with the water on the horizon flickering part. Try disabling Object - Object Occlusion by hitting Control + Shift + O for temporary relief until that gets fixed. As for the other points, I have experienced some temporary events that I will call "service outages" that were brief that could fit your descriptions but overall things are greatly improved recently. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Perrie Juran Posted October 31, 2014 Share Posted October 31, 2014 Theresa Tennyson wrote: Perrie Juran wrote: TY. Turning off DOF was a big improvement. Almost as crisp but still a touch of blurring (you can see on the leaves in the trees but I wouldn't normally be looking that close at the trees.) (They changed out the Happy Halloween sign) Firestorm and the LL viewer are basically identical as far as the actual rendering engine - the Firestorm developers themselves say they don't have anyone with the expertise to do much that deep in the system. The main differences you see are different default settings. Turning various settings on and off should make the view practically identical for you. In particular, the LL viewer tends to turn on Advanced Lighting for more graphics cards. Jessica Lyon doesn't like Advanced Lighting for some reason. Advanced Lighting uses a different anti-aliasing system which probably accounts for the differences with the leaves you're seeing. I wonder if a reason she doesn't like it on by default is they get more complaints like mine that way? I know it comes with the territory but sometimes I get so tired of tweaking settings. I just want to log in and enjoy myself. I'm still not sure what is causing me to suddenly be getting "Your clothing is still downloading." It comes and goes but it's been ages since I had that. That is a minor annoyance. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Whirly Fizzle Posted October 31, 2014 Share Posted October 31, 2014 I agree with Theresa. It looks like you have Advanced Lighting Model enabled on the Linden viewer but disabled on Firestorm. When ALM is enabled, the scene will not look as "crisp" because it does antialiasing in a different way. If you keep ALM enabled all the time, you get used to that slightly more "blurry" look though. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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