Is SL working on making the world less laggy?

[EmilyFletcher]

It seems like everywhere I go on there, I can barely move and I'll get stuck and frozen there for the longest time. I want to be able to go to popular places without dealing with hours of staying in one spot, frozen, and not being able to see anything. I just want to know if L is working on somehow making the world less "packed tight" and making the world easier to move around in. Thanks!

[Rolig Loon]

Yes, indeed.  You wouldn't believe how much better SL is now than it was 2, 3, 5, or 10 years ago.  Reducing lag is an ongoing job.   Having said that, though, there are some things that LL can;t do anything about.  One is the sheer number of avatars and the stuff they carry.  Avatars are the greatest single cause of lag.  The more there are in a region, the laggier it gets.  And it's worst if the avs are wearing tons of high-L.I., high-LOD clothing and attachments.  That's why the most popular regions (like Hair Fair) often have the worst lag.

LL also can't do much about the lag that is produced in your own computer and Internet connection.  That's the second greatest source of lag.  Notebook computers running on wifi connections and Intel graphics chips are just not made for SL.  Systems that are also trying to run 3 or 4 other programs in the background, or have anti-virus routines that examine every downloaded image can slow SL to a crawl.  People who insist on turning their viewers to use Ultra settings and see things two regions away are also going to get very poor performance.  Linden Lab can't do a thing about that.

Still, yes, the Lab does try to do as much as it can to keep improving their hardware and the server software and the physics engine that drives SL.  It is remarkably better than when I arrived in 2007, and getting better each year.

[Lindal Kidd]

In addition to Rolig's comments...

If you are used to the performance of other PC games, with framerates of 60 fps or more, you can forget about SL ever performing like that.

Most games have two things going for them, lag-wise.  They download huge amounts of content to your local hard drive when you're looking at the preview video for the upcoming level.  And their textures and meshes are created by a team of professionals who know all the tricks for optimizing content for fast performance.

Second Life, on the other hand, is mostly user-generated content, and most users don't give much thought to optimizing content for performance.  Moreover, the world has to be continuously downloaded to your graphics card.  Because all of us are constantly changing our builds in world, there's no way to just download a region to your hard drive once and for all.  Lower performance is the price we pay for having a resident-created virtual world.

[Syo Emerald]

Another thing LL can't change is the hardware and internet connection people have. Someone with a fast and stable connection and new hardware aimed at gameing will have a better overall experiance, than someone with older and less powerful hardware or an unstable/slow connection.

Second Life is not a game, but it has a demand like one.