Multiple Viewer's Freezing/Not Responding Randomly.

[Jefe Dismantled]

Hey, wondering if anyone is willing to help me with an issue I've recently been having. Across multiple viewers and multiple separate drives (2 SSD's and 1 HDD) my viewer(s) go not responding for roughly 15-30 seconds seemingly randomly. On highly populated sims, on low population areas, in skyboxes, and on the ground. This has been very annoying for me and I've attempted to install multiple versions of multiple viewers as well as complete fresh installs of these. The imgur link are my PC specs.

Windows 10 Home. GTX 770

[Whirly Fizzle]

In the top menu of the viewer, go to Help -> About Second Life (Help -> About <Viewer name> on a TPV), click the "Copy to clipboard" button & paste all your system information here.

Taking a wild guess before I see your system information, if your system uses Intel graphics & you are using an old Intel graphics driver, some of those Intel drivers had a very bad memory leak which would cause your symptoms.  Updating to the latest Intel graphics driver will fix that problem.

[Nalates Urriah]

What whirly said... But, I'll make a wild guess. You can get the free Memory History app to check. You are running out of memory and the system is page swapping memory. 

If you are using HD Graphics, a significant chunk of memory is taken for video RAM. If you have stuff running in background, those apps are consuming memory. When they need to do something the system will swap them back in and the viewer pauses for a second or two.

With your full specs we can tell if this is likely. But, you can chase this possibility while you wait for us to get back to you.

A number of viewers have memory leaks, depending on your hardware Firestorm is one of those. Memory History shows it consuming more memory over time. If your viewer is confined to 6GB or less of memory you'll run into problems in about an hour... or sooner.

[Jefe Dismantled]

Sorry for the long time to reply. Here is the requested information.

Firestorm 5.0.1 (52150) Dec 10 2016 18:12:53 (Firestorm-Release) with OpenSimulator support
Release Notes

You are at 63.0, 173.7, 1,045.3 in Sea Fortress located at sim10507.agni.lindenlab.com (216.82.52.13:13012)
SLURL: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Sea Fortress/63/174/1045
(global coordinates 262,207.0, 297,134.0, 1,045.3)
Second Life Server 17.03.22.324899
Release Notes

CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-4690K CPU @ 3.50GHz (3499.99 MHz)
Memory: 8098 MB
OS Version: Microsoft Windows 10 64-bit (Build 14393)
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: GeForce GTX 770/PCIe/SSE2

Windows Graphics Driver Version: 22.21.0013.8165
OpenGL Version: 4.5.0 NVIDIA 381.65

RestrainedLove API: (disabled)
libcurl Version: libcurl/7.47.0 OpenSSL/1.0.1h zlib/1.2.8
J2C Decoder Version: KDU v7.8
Audio Driver Version: FMOD Ex 4.44.61
LLCEFLib/CEF Version: 1.5.3-(CEF-WIN-3.2526.1347-32)
LibVLC Version: 2.2.4
Voice Server Version: Vivox 4.6.0017.22050

Settings mode: Firestorm
Viewer Skin: Firestorm (Grey)
Font Used: Deja Vu (96 dpi)
Font Size Adjustment: 0 pt
UI Scaling: 1
Draw distance: 1024 m
Bandwidth: 1450 kbit/s
LOD factor: 4
Render quality: High-Ultra (6/7)
Advanced Lighting Model: No
Texture memory: 512 MB (1)
VFS (cache) creation time (UTC): 2017-4-7T0:15:36 
Built with MSVC version 1800
Packets Lost: 0/134,861 (0.0%)
April 12 2017 20:12:21 SLT

 

Now, as to drivers. I'm not your typical second-life user. I play many, many other PC games. World of Warcraft, Playerunknown's Battlegrounds, League of Legends, DotA 2, Rocket League are some of my most played games. I do not have any memory issues with any of these other games, and my graphics drivers are always updated on the same day that they are released via the Nvidia GeForce application. I generally run manual driver updates via the webpages for my cpu, mobo, and ethernet drivers once every 2 or 3 months. This ONLY happens in Second Life, and it has happened across multiple viewers and multiple versions of those viewers as I previously stated.

[Klytyna]

1 hour ago, jgonzales453 Resident said:

Draw distance: 1024 m
Bandwidth: 1450 kbit/s
LOD factor: 4
Render quality: High-Ultra (6/7)
Advanced Lighting Model: No
Texture memory: 512 MB (1)
 

First thing you do is cut that draw distance down to oh, 128m or 256m, then turn on the advanced lighting, do not use the "one graphics quality slider to rule them all" as it seems designed to turn on laggy junk before turning on the good stuff, and usually sets some settings to insane numbers along the way. With a 1 KM draw distance your card is trying to draw way way too many objects and it's choking up.
 

[Jefe Dismantled]

It's never been an issue before at all. Battlegrounds has much more detailed rendering going on at much further distances and, again, I don't have an issue with that game at all. I tried your suggestions, though, but to no avail. 256 Draw Distance and ALM on (which I've never used before because I don't like it) I'm still having the very same issue as before.

[Nalates Urriah]

Don't try to compare other games with SL. Other games are made by professional 3D modelers. SL content is made by novices. The content is usually NOT optimized and that makes all the difference.

Using a draw distance of 1024m can cause the viewer to draw content from 28 regions, assuming you stand in the center of the region you are in. The number of textures has to be astounding. I doubt there is a consumer grade motherboard made that will carry enough memory to load all those textures.

Make any move or turn and the viewer starts talking to all those regions and you get a memory demand and a mini-freeze. If any of those regions is lagging, you are going to have more lag too. Turn the Draw Distance down. 256m is high. That will have you pulling information from 9 regions. 

Using an LoD of 4 adds to your problems. Turn it down to 2. At four your viewer is forced to load all the mesh LOD models eating more memory, video and system.

If you and I were in a combat game and I knew you were using 1024m draw distance and LOD 4, I would have a friend wear what some would call a graphics crasher, a really complex something with a load of 1024 textures and really complex high polygon LoD models, and stay outside my draw distance (64 or 128m) and inside yours. He would cause you enough lag I could easily own you.

As long as you run with only 8GB of ram you'll likely have this problem. My previous computer was limited to 8GB max. It had 4GB and I had lots of mini freezes and crashes. I systematically went through all the troubleshooting steps trying to find the problem. Upgrading to 8GB of the fastest memory my system supported helped. WHile I had fewer mini-freezes I still had them.

I upgraded to a new computer with 32 GB and the problem is gone. While it may not be just a memory problem in your case, Firestorm does have memory leaks and will eventually start texture thrashing, freezing, and eventually crash.

Get the free program Memory History and see what is happening.

 

[Klytyna]

12 hours ago, jgonzales453 Resident said:

It's never been an issue before at all. Battlegrounds has much more detailed rendering going on at much further distances and, again, I don't have an issue with that game at all. I tried your suggestions, though, but to no avail. 256 Draw Distance and ALM on (which I've never used before because I don't like it) I'm still having the very same issue as before.

Your's is a very common error, see, when you download and install "BattleThug Call of Honor Medal of Duty Ninja Extreme Kill 5 Deathmatch the MMO" onto your PC, you download 20 or 30 gb of "content" specifically made for that game, optimised for that game, and it all sits on your hard drive. 

Then when you play, all the server sends your client is "enemy player dingbat9756 entered FOV: Body 16, texture 4, head 23, texture 14, accessory 5, texture 2, weapon 47 texture 7, coordinates x,y,y", your client pulls the assets straight off your HD, and pop, theres your target in full color all ready to shoot at.

That isn't SL, here all the content sits on the servers, so much content that there isn't a home computer that can store it, and small amounts are downloaded to a temporary rolling cache on demand.

Every time you turn your avatar you are swinging a 1 km long 1 km wide 0.75 km high rectangular cone, and every single texture on every single face of every single component of every single item gets downloaded, live, there and then unless it happens to  be in your cache. This happens for every single frame...

Welcome to SL, this isn't a client side MMO First Person Shooter, and now you are here, everything you *think* you know about "online games" officially means...

SQUAT...

Drop the draw distance drop the LOD, the ALM is optional, personally I prefer normal mapping and specular effects to flat textures with no shaders that look like they came from a 17 year old copy of Quake but hey...
 

[Rolig Loon]

It's very hard to improve on what Nalates and Klytyna said. They have explained nicely why most people do not consider SL a game -- at least in the same sense that Worlds of War and Battlegrounds and your other favorites are.  You can certainly play games in SL, but it was not designed primarily as a game environment.  This is an interactive social world where every resident can be a creator and many creators are rank amateurs.  Even in those parts of SL that have been designed by professionals, the system of real time updates between clients and servers means that you will never see the lightning speed of a simple MMO game here.  There are some great games in SL (Try Linden Lab's own PaleoQuest or Horizons, for example), but that's not what most residents log in for.   When people play them, they are given the same advice that Nalates and Klytyna just gave you:  keep your draw distance and LOD sliders reasonably low and avoid using other options that flood your graphics card with more data than it can handle.

[Madelaine McMasters]

I'll add a bit of texture to the other's already sufficient description of the difference between SL and video games. In the latter, all of the assets are designed by a single team of professional 3D computer game designers. If you watch carefully, you'll see that city scenes in such games are filled with buildings that share common geometric features, such as door styles and ornamentation, and common textures such as brick and weathered paint, in various shades and colors. By artful combination of a small number of geometries and textures, one can achieve a wide range of looks. And this requires storing only a small number of geometries and textures.

A few years ago I watched a friend play an FPS game on his computer. We stopped to examine the details in each scene as gameplay progressed and discovered that all vehicles shared one of four wheel geometries. All building doorways were one of four geometries. All window geometries? One of four! There were four leaf types for all plants and four blade types for all grasses. Dandelions in the sidewalk had the same leaves as the oak trees in in the yards. Lawn grass and palms trees? Same blades.

In SL, there is no professional design team, nothing is coordinated, everything is different. A single creator may save design effort and system resources by skillfully reusing textures and geometry across an object, but there are 40,000 potential creators in-world as I'm typing this. And, if that weren't enough, almost every object in SL can be moved by someone or other. In my friends FPS game, outside of the motions of other players in-game, the only changes to scenes were as the result of destruction of objects. In SL, you can be on a sim where multiple people are editing and moving objects, and those objects can be anything in the scene, including the ground you're standing on and the sky above you.

For these reasons (and more), SL ain't nuthin' like what you've experienced before.

[Rhonda Huntress]

... and then there are single avatars walking around that use more resources than some full games.

[Madelaine McMasters]

11 minutes ago, Rhonda Huntress said:

... and then there are single avatars walking around that use more resources than some full games.

Yep, I imagine there's a limit to objects that can be worn in most games. You can (and if you aren't careful, you will) wear your entire inventory here!

[LittleMe Jewell]

3 hours ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

You can (and if you aren't careful, you will) wear your entire inventory here!

Yikes - back in the day, my inventory was approaching 100k.  That would have been one horrible mistake to have accidentally added all / most of that to myself.

[Nalates Urriah]

@LittleMe Jewell - I think you can still right-click your root inventory and select ADD... The viewer will try to have your avatar wear it all. It is a major pain to undo that mistake. Strip and more stuff appears. Relog and more stuff appears... The fix is to wear the Test Male/Female.

Some time ago there was an inventory change that made this a very common problem.

[LittleMe Jewell]

4 minutes ago, Nalates Urriah said:

@LittleMe Jewell - I think you can still right-click your root inventory and select ADD... The viewer will try to have your avatar wear it all. It is a major pain to undo that mistake. Strip and more stuff appears. Relog and more stuff appears... The fix is to wear the Test Male/Female.

Some time ago there was an inventory change that made this a very common problem.

Major yikes - but thanks for the 'fix' in case I ever do that.  I do sometimes click around so fast in inventory that anything is possible.