Help! Lag will be the death of me

[kaity Ametza]

Hello, i've been playing secondlife for a good 5 years now and I don't want to stop now. 

Recently a couple months ago my computer started to slow down and thus, crashed a lot . So I did a complete reboot on it, either times Secondlife was incredibly slow and laggy but it never crashed. It still doesn't, it's just awfully laggy. 

My computer info: Computer

Viewer: Firestorm w. Havok x32

I'm not sure if that's enough information to identify the source of the problem. But I have one graphics card in right now, as the other three have died on me. I've read a lot online about it could be the CPU usage, and I need to buy a new CPU or new graphics cards, but i'm not sure if I should. I don't want to waste money on something that wouldn't help.

I've also tried doing step by step tutorials on reducing lag in Secondlife, and none of it worked. I don't have much of anything downloaded onto my computer but Skype, Sai and a tablet driver (of course Firestorm). It has never done this to me before, but i've been without Secondlife for a couple months now and I can't handle it anymore. Looking for answers but not finding any, so I need help and advice on what can I do, to make my game not lag as bad!

The lag is so bad, to even move the game freezes for 2 minutes then resumes. It's not the region, because I managed to go to several other's with less particals+scripts and to no avail.

 

Advice please??

[luna Datura]

hii sense no one has answered yet ill take a stab at it. looking at you compy the only thing i see thats in your way is the 2gb of ram. im running with 3 and barly making it. and I had to scale it down low graphics, no particles and 94 in draw distance. i need more ram and i think that may be your problem too. hope it helps. btw im running duel cores too and a midline nvida and im barly there. and changing over to singlarity helped too. less cpu usage

[kaity Ametza]

Thanks, I was thinking it had something to do with that too. Considering I did have 3 graphics card sticks and when I got down to one is when all the problems started up. I tried doing low graphics ect and it still didn't help lol.

[luna Datura]

ya i gotta break down and buy more ram, lol

 

[SaraCarena]

Totally agree that 2more gigs of ram would be a big help, your processor isn`t too bad and exceeds the recomended specs for sl.

I`ve got 8gigs of ram and all viewers use about 3.7 gigs on my win 7.1 system.

There`s a good guide to using open hardware to see what resources your comp`s using here;

http://www.atob.ws/CTLViewerLag.aspx

Provided by Ohjiro Watanabe a regular contributor here.

Also if you start firestorm without logging in and click the help/ about button it`ll show what graphics card you have. Copy and pasting that info here could be useful.

Good luck :smileyhappy:

 

Edit: Think you might have got graphics cards and memory sticks a bit confused. Normally you would only have 1 graphic card. In most systems you can have between 1 and 4 memory sticks.

[Perrie Juran]

What graphics card/chip do you have?

Would be better to launch the viewer (you don't have to log in) and from Help>About  copy/paste all the info from there.

[Theresa Tennyson]

---

kaity Ametza wrote:

Hello, i've been playing secondlife for a good 5 years now and I don't want to stop now. 

Recently a couple months ago my computer started to slow down and thus, crashed a lot . So I did a complete reboot on it, either times Secondlife was incredibly slow and laggy but it never crashed. It still doesn't, it's just awfully laggy. 

My computer info: 

Computer

Viewer: Firestorm w. Havok x32

I'm not sure if that's enough information to identify the source of the problem. But I have one graphics card in right now, as the other three have died on me. I've read a lot online about it could be the CPU usage, and I need to buy a new CPU or new graphics cards, but i'm not sure if I should. I don't want to waste money on something that wouldn't help.

I've also tried doing step by step tutorials on reducing lag in Secondlife, and none of it worked. I don't have much of anything downloaded onto my computer but Skype, Sai and a tablet driver (of course Firestorm). It has never done this to me before, but i've been without Secondlife for a couple months now and I can't handle it anymore. Looking for answers but not finding any, so I need help and advice on what can I do, to make my game not lag as bad!

The lag is so bad, to even move the game freezes for 2 minutes then resumes. It's not the region, because I managed to go to several other's with less particals+scripts and to no avail.

 

Advice please??

---

Okay, from the description it sounds like what you're calling "graphics cards" are actually memory modules and they seem to be failing. Usually computers need to have memory modules set up in a specific configuration and the one you still have in may not be in the right slot and if they were all installed when you got your computer in the first place the one you still have in may be failing too - in any event they shouldn't be failing at all. You may need to take it in for service.

[Ohjiro Watanabe]

You should think about how old that PC is and when it would be due for a replacement. Upgrading old PCs is usually not cost effective unless you can do it on the cheap some how (second hand etc).

This is something you could consider for keeping you going while you save up your pennies: http://www.firestormviewer.org/firestorm-on-sl-go/

 

[Sassy Romano]

That almost certainly sounds like memory thrashing (swapping to disk).

One completely free thing that you can try is to go into the viewer settings and set MaxHeapSize to something like 0.5.

I've had varying success, sometimes it seems to honour it, sometimes it doesn't.

[kaity Ametza]

To everyone's request for the other information ON the actual viewer: 

 

And okay sure, I got mixed up between "Graphics card" and "Memory stick" but I know at this point it's not my memory stick, because I added another one which as of now I have two. It helped reduce the lag the slightest bit, but for some reason over the course of days it returned to the old lag. 

Yes i've done disc clean up, defragment, disc check, restart, ect. I also decided to get AVG as well, which obviously didn't help either.

[Sassy Romano]

If you're using the 64 bit version of Firestorm, it will happily take more than 2GB alone, the 32 bit one will typically take up to about 1.7GB.

If the machine still only has 2GB, I'll wager that it's still swapping like buggery, you'll notice this by looking at the hard disc light.  There are other ways to help with this too.  Go to Task Manager and paste a screen shot of the "Performance" tab please.

(Did you try my suggested debug setting to set MaxHeapSize to something such as 0.8 yet?

[kaity Ametza]

 

Yeah, I just did try changing the maxheap thing, but my "lag-o-meter" thing in the top corner of the viewer was still flashing like crazy to red, my movements were smooth but there also was very little scripts around me and nobody around. 

Also I am using 32 bit version of Firestorm.

[SaraCarena]

So you can see from those graphs that your memory is maxed out more than your cpu, though leaving task manager running for longer and moving your av around will show a lot of peaks an troughs in cpu.

Have you tried setting windows for best performance? Saves quite a bit of memory.

 

To adjust all visual effects for best performance:

1. Open Performance Information and Tools by clicking the Start button , and then clicking Control Panel. In the search box, type Performance Information and Tools, and then, in the list of results, click Performance Information and Tools.

2. Click Adjust visual effects.  If you're prompted for an administrator password or confirmation, type the password or provide confirmation.

3. Click the Visual Effects tab, click Adjust for best performance, and then click OK. 

 http://windows.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/optimize-windows-better-performance#optimize-windows-better-performance=windows-7

 

Disabling voice in preferences saves on memory if you`re not using it and disabling avatar physics can help with fps

[Sassy Romano]

What else is running on that PC, what did talk manager look like on that screen without SL?

 

The PC is trying to use nearly 4GB of RAM on a system with 2.

 

It is most definitely overcommitted in RAM and is swapping too much. There's only so much you can do with a 2GB system but unless you've got a gig to spare before SL, it's not really going to end well.

[kaity Ametza]

Nothing else is really running, all I had up was a page from chrome when I ran the task manager. Secondilfe wasn't even up at the time.

[kaity Ametza]

I hadn't had secondlife up at the time of running the task manager, but I did as you said. It still didn't seem to help but make everything quite ugly lol.

 

Big question is what I could do to bring the memory down.

 

This is what it looks like now, with no other programs opened and with the settings set to 'best performance'. Also come to find out, it's not only effecting my experience with Secondlife it's also my computer over all. Like taking a long time to load something or open a tab, or just over all freezes for 2 minutes then resumes. 

I will have nothing up during night time, and my computer's fans will begin to go crazy fast. 

 

[Sassy Romano]

---

kaity Ametza wrote:

 

This is what it looks like now, with no other programs opened. Also come to find out, it's not only effecting my experience with Secondlife it's also my computer over all. Like taking a long time to load something or open a tab, or just over all freezes for 2 minutes then resumes. 

---

Lack of available RAM will affect everything as the machine has to constantly swap physical RAM to and from disk.

Now click the "Processes" tab and if the column for "Working Set" isn't listed, go to the View, Select Columns and add Memory - Working Set, Memory - Commit Size and "Memory - Non-paged pool".

(Click the head title "Working Set" to sort it largest at the top down and re-post a screen shot of that page)

Working Set, is the amount of physical memory being used by each process so you'll get an idea there as to what's consuming memory but to be blunt, you've only got 2GB to start with so things like FlashPlayer plug in is 222MB on mine, Dropbox is 117MB, Firefox when open with a few tabs 685MB and i've just opened a blank Chrome window for a mere 140MB.

You're going to struggle unless it's totally stripped down.  What you can try though is before running SL, identify the large memory consuming processes and right click them and choose to "End Task" (there are better ways long term!) and see what you can free up.

 

[kaity Ametza]

Okay, I did that and the ones that seem to pop up are 

In which, a couple seem to be from my tablet which I will more likely uninstall. I put another stick of 2gb ram into my computer, although it seems my computer isn't reconizing it completely even though, 

[Sassy Romano]

Try again clicking the working set column, you have it sorted lowest first, need to see it largest down.

[kaity Ametza]

I also just uninstalled my tablet driver and AVG

[SaraCarena]

http://lifehacker.com/the-complete-guide-to-avoiding-and-removing-windows-c-1630577558

[Sassy Romano]

Close chrome browser to free up the most memory in one go there.

[kaity Ametza]

This is with nothing up.

[kaity Ametza]

When I run JUST SL and nothing else, it looks like this:

Without SL or any other additional programs:

[Sassy Romano]

You still have a load of memory gone to Chrome when you say you have "nothing up".  316MB of your 2048MB and with nothing else running, that's about as good as you'll get. 

You have 2GB... there's only one real solution.  Add more or change PC.

(Well there is a second route which is to downgrade to Windows XP which has a much lower memory footprint but it's an obsolete operating system or you could install Linux but I get the impression that isn't an option.)