SL still performs like a SNAIL.

[Solar Legion]

A few things I'd like to point out/correct here: Unless you are paying quite the sum there is no way whatsoever that you've got a twelve megabyte connection. Drake up there has an eight megabyte connection and going by screenshots has the fastest connection speed thus far. See ISPs tend to list their speeds as Mb/s; do note the small letter "b" there, it is important. Mb/s means megabits per second, not megabytes per second; that would be written as MB/s. So no you do not have some suddenly blazing fast Ubernet connection.

Next up is your hardware and OS: Congrats on the specs, funny part of that being that I'm sitting here using a shared rig with sixteen gigabytes of RAM, an I7-4790k clocking in at almost 4 gigahertz with a decent L3 cache, a Zotac branded nVidia GTX 980 AMP and running an Ubuntu distro.

Clint of choice for connecting to SL? 64-bit Firestorm. Graphics settings used? Pretty much every main tab setting is maxed or close to it with draw distance set to one hundred and twenty eight meters and shadows set to optimized.

Performance? Acceptable range (low to mid thirties for FPS in most sims on average with some places dipping briefly or hitting near sixty frames a second).

As was discussed elsewhere there really is no sense whatsoever to aim for or crow about getting much higher than about sixty to seventy five frames a second as neither the human eye sees too much more than that on average nor do most normal computer monitors actually have a refresh rate too much higher than seventy five hertz. If the statistics section within your client of choice is telling you it is hitting above your screen's refresh rate then you need to throttle that down as you're just wasting frame cycles.

Last but not least: If you are expecting triple A class graphics and performance from Second Life I humbly suggest you go look elsewhere or go build your own Grid/Clone and try to populate it with user generated content. I guarantee you will find out quite quickly what allowing user generated content does to performance.

TL:DR version;

1. No, you generally do not have anywhere close to even ten megabytes a second as your download speed.
2. You can have the bestest most awesomest rig in the entire multiverse and still get a performance hit if you are using the default client (currently still a thirty-two bit program) or using improper settings.
3. If you are expecting some useless number of frames per second it is beyond time to get acquainted with how things actually work.
4. Second Life allows user generated content, this is going to potentially cause performance hits. Deal with it.

Edited October 19, 2017 by Solar Legion

[cykarushb]

On 10/16/2017 at 5:08 PM, Monty Linden said:

This linden dev has an HP z600 with a gtx 660 card.  How high do I score?

Mate, ill trade a pair of X5675's for a year of Premium, theyre just sitting in "the box of crap i cant find a motherboard for", lol

But, probably time for an upgrade, just in general. Dual Xeon stuff is fun and all but even a GPU upgrade is probably a must from any 600 series card in 2017. You can grab 980/980ti's on ebay for 300-350$ now, or wait for the next launch form AMD/Nvidia and buy a current gen card that someone drops for the cheap in order to buy the newest gen.  Thats how i got my old 280x's when i still had those, when the 300 cards came out i found 4 of em on ebay for ~100$ each.

Quote

no sense whatsoever to aim for or crow about getting much higher than about sixty to seventy five frames a second as neither the human eye sees too much more than that on average nor do most normal computer monitors actually have a refresh rate too much higher than seventy five hertz

@Solar Legion, nononononono, lets not even get farther into this, i can tell you the human eye can notice the difference between 30, 60, 75, 120, 144, even 240hz. Ive seen that 480hz 1080p monitor ASUS displayed at CEX, even that is pretty noticeable compared to 240hz. That whole "your eye cant see over XYZ framerate anyway" is complete bullcrap, the way your eye perceives things is not like a monitors refresh rate. Also 1080p 120/144hz is becoming more common. Many basic 1080p TV's are even 120hz nowadays.

But just in general to your comment, this goes to show theres a point in SL where performance is going to peak. You have a 4790k and a 980 and youre pushing 30-60fps. I have an Athlon 5350 and a 750ti and im pushing 20-35fps in most places, on mostly high settings just the same.  Though i usually drop advanced lighting when in more populated places.

I imagine going much further isnt going to net much more performance, ive seen posts from those with 7700k's and 1080ti's not even managing 60fps in some sims.

[Solar Legion]

We're going to have to agree to disagree on the entire eyesight/telling the difference in a frame rate beyond a certain point thing Cyka especially considering that I'm talking about the average person and not specific individuals and was not trying to directly compare a monitor to the eye. Going by present information (available with just a quick search) the maximum recorded seems to have been a few thousand frames a second/hertz equivalent. Somehow I really doubt the average person has that level of perception though and the primary point of all of it you seem to have gotten so ...

Other than that thanks for the backup.

Edited October 19, 2017 by Solar Legion

[chardonay Babii]

On 10/17/2017 at 9:08 AM, Monty Linden said:

This linden dev has an HP z600 with a gtx 660 card.  How high do I score?

That would put you about a Megaprim short of a teleport but still an ambient occlusion above a Windlight sculpty.

[acedacid]

On 16/10/2017 at 11:08 PM, Monty Linden said:

This linden dev has an HP z600 with a gtx 660 card.  How high do I score?

you score as: optimal nerd. 

you can use your 'optimal nerd' card with  'responsible tech employee' to boost your level and gain skill in software testing

on serious side, sl hated me on a 2005/2008 pc most - others were consistent in smoth performance without advanced lighting (that's gpu's responsibility) and performance gains happened with internet changes. australia and uk both suffer from old infrastructures and fibre optics just became affordable. for more sl on ultra - that's mostly on your machine's cpu / gpu and memory mix plus how you set it up. 

lindens are like any front end support staff so they'd test things on more standard machine like Monty has. 

my sl been crap 2 years ago due to nightmare of an adsl, it stopped lagging that much on fibreoptic one. machine wise - didn't change for over 6 years for me despite different rigs being updated . the priority is always to make things work for majority of users.

[Emma Krokus]

On 16/10/2017 at 11:08 PM, Monty Linden said:

This linden dev has an HP z600 with a gtx 660 card.  How high do I score?

i used to have that card... and it was pretty good!

my fps used to be around 25 - 30 on average (less of course in very crowded places) - what are yours?

for the last year ive been on a GTX 960  - and getting great performance

(my full specs:

Operating System Windows 10
Processor Brand Intel
Processor Type Core i5
Processor Speed 3.20 GHz
Processor Count 4
RAM Size 8 GB 1600MHz DDR3 RAM
Computer Memory Type DDR SDRAM
Hard Drive Size 1 TB
Hard Disk Technology HDD 5400 rpm
Hard Drive Interface ATA
Graphics Card Description NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 2GB DDR5 Graphics Card
HDMI
USB3.0
120GB SSD
24x DVDRW Drive
500W PSU)

ETA: i mostly use the current alpha build of the BENTO enabled singularity viewer (cos i like the V1 interface) - and occasionally the official SL viewer

Edited November 17, 2017 by Emma Krokus
viewer used

[Hoshi Kenin]

On 10/16/2017 at 11:08 PM, Monty Linden said:

This linden dev has an HP z600 with a gtx 660 card.  How high do I score?

Well....'eyes widen in surprise'!  Although, I do recall seeing a Linden - once, in all my SL years - actually inworld, about 6-7 years ago, so wonders do happen. 

You score low, to answer your question.  Are you really telling me, the PC's Lindens run day to day at Linden HQ are that spec? Somehow, I do doubt that.  I probably been in this game longer than you, methinks.  BTW, doesn't the HP z600 have two quad-core Xeon CPUs (the server equivalent of i7 chips)?  What would you say is an average rig for the average user......in europe?  The place where we pay over the odds for all things high tech?

[Drake1 Nightfire]

10 hours ago, Hoshi Kenin said:

Well....'eyes widen in surprise'!  Although, I do recall seeing a Linden - once, in all my SL years - actually inworld, about 6-7 years ago, so wonders do happen. 

You score low, to answer your question.  Are you really telling me, the PC's Lindens run day to day at Linden HQ are that spec? Somehow, I do doubt that.  I probably been in this game longer than you, methinks.  BTW, doesn't the HP z600 have two quad-core Xeon CPUs (the server equivalent of i7 chips)?  What would you say is an average rig for the average user......in europe?  The place where we pay over the odds for all things high tech?

these are my specs.. i have no issues running on high or even ultra, if i am taking pictures.. Why would you score this as low? 

CPU: AMD Athlon(tm) II X4 645 Processor (3099.99 MHz)
Memory: 18432 MB
OS Version: Microsoft Windows 10 64-bit (Build 15063)
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: GeForce GTX 650/PCIe/SSE2
 

[Love Zhaoying]

On ‎10‎/‎14‎/‎2017 at 9:54 AM, Drake1 Nightfire said:

To truly find out how well SL will perform you, need to run a speedtest to Tuscon AZ.. http://tucson.speedtest.net/ That is where the servers are. Just click on the preferred server, not the recommended one. The recommended one is the one nearest you. 

 

I can't wait to try this at home!

[animats]

The delays are definitely server-side. I can teleport to a new sim, or fly over terrain, and wait tens of seconds for the geometry and textures to come in. I'm seeing CPU utilization of about 20% on my machine, network utilization around 10% (of 30Mb/s), low disk traffic, and no shortage of free RAM. Plenty of local resources. The delays are coming from the server side.

Are the servers still in 32-bit mode? By now, they should be 64-bit machines with lots of RAM.

[Jerilynn Lemon]

On 11/17/2017 at 5:09 AM, Emma Krokus said:

i used to have that card... and it was pretty good!

my fps used to be around 25 - 30 on average (less of course in very crowded places) - what are yours?

for the last year ive been on a GTX 960  - and getting great performance

(my full specs:

Operating System Windows 10
Processor Brand Intel
Processor Type Core i5
Processor Speed 3.20 GHz
Processor Count 4
RAM Size 8 GB 1600MHz DDR3 RAM
Computer Memory Type DDR SDRAM
Hard Drive Size 1 TB
Hard Disk Technology HDD 5400 rpm
Hard Drive Interface ATA
Graphics Card Description NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 2GB DDR5 Graphics Card
HDMI
USB3.0
120GB SSD
24x DVDRW Drive
500W PSU)

ETA: i mostly use the current alpha build of the BENTO enabled singularity viewer (cos i like the V1 interface) - and occasionally the official SL viewer

Thanks for posting those specs. I'm looking to replace my current laptop for a full tower desktop. Those specs I can use as a guide.

I've seen plenty of puters offering 3.20G speed and 8 GB RAM (expandable to 16). I've also read plenty of good things about NVIDIA GeForce cards. Just a matter of deciding what machine I choose.

[MaximusBond]

2 hours ago, Jerilynn Lemon said:

Thanks for posting those specs. I'm looking to replace my current laptop for a full tower desktop. Those specs I can use as a guide.

I've seen plenty of puters offering 3.20G speed and 8 GB RAM (expandable to 16). I've also read plenty of good things about NVIDIA GeForce cards. Just a matter of deciding what machine I choose.

Regarding the video card the 960 was/is a good gaming card if you´re not aiming for a resolution higher than 1080p because of the limited VRam. 2GB is definitely on the lower side. Maybe take a look at the newer 1050ti which performs close to the 960 and should be around the same price range. There is a non-ti and a ti version. The non-ti is subpar to the 960 so. Be aware to look for a card with the TI Chipset on and not just being called TI.  If you have the cash to spare take a look at the 1060 or even 1070 Nivida cards. It seems that AMD is catching up in that area, but I am not sure how well they perform with SL. There have been driver issues reported back then, not sure if those are fixed yet. So can´t comment on that.  

What really boosted my SL performance was the SSD card. Moving the Cache to it made loadtimes a lot faster. Granted this only counts if you frequent the same places regulary and have the size set reasonable large, but it is a noticeable improvement. Not sure how it will effect the longevity of the SSD so, but that´s a bullet I am willing to bite. I probably wouldn´t recommend installing the operating system and important documents on the same drive as the cache so.  

[Nova Convair]

57 minutes ago, MaximusBond said:

What really boosted my SL performance was the SSD card. Moving the Cache to it made loadtimes a lot faster. Granted this only counts if you frequent the same places regulary and have the size set reasonable large, but it is a noticeable improvement. Not sure how it will effect the longevity of the SSD so, but that´s a bullet I am willing to bite. I probably wouldn´t recommend installing the operating system and important documents on the same drive as the cache so.  

A SSD gives a major boost, yes. 

I have 2 SSD's in my system and one of them does all the heavy work (including SL cache). Since it only contains expendable data I could easily replace it but it runs for 2 years now with no sign of problems.

[LittleMe Jewell]

8 hours ago, Jerilynn Lemon said:

I've seen plenty of puters offering 3.20G speed and 8 GB RAM (expandable to 16). I've also read plenty of good things about NVIDIA GeForce cards. Just a matter of deciding what machine I choose.

If you tend to run lots of things at the same time as SL (email client, browsers, picture editing software, etc..), opt for the 16 GB if you can afford it.  Prior to my memory upgrade, I often noticed things bogging down if had too many things going on at once.  I don't notice any degradation now though.

Edited December 17, 2017 by LittleMe Jewell

[Monty Linden]

On 12/12/2017 at 8:05 PM, Hoshi Kenin said:

Well....'eyes widen in surprise'!  Although, I do recall seeing a Linden - once, in all my SL years - actually inworld, about 6-7 years ago, so wonders do happen. 

You score low, to answer your question.  Are you really telling me, the PC's Lindens run day to day at Linden HQ are that spec? Somehow, I do doubt that.  I probably been in this game longer than you, methinks.  BTW, doesn't the HP z600 have two quad-core Xeon CPUs (the server equivalent of i7 chips)?  What would you say is an average rig for the average user......in europe?  The place where we pay over the odds for all things high tech?

Build a japanese-inspired region and I will visit.  :-)

It's true, most of the young nerds like a high-spec machine but I'm a contrarian.  I don't code randomly so continuous compilation isn't required and I like old hardware to fly the flag for residents.  It's just a bit painful at times...

[animats]

Sometimes lag may just be a bug. Vallone, which usually has zero or one avatars in it, has a huge lag every 10 seconds or so during which the frame rate drops to zero. I have a lag meter on the corner. It's just Vallone; Kama Center, the next sim over, has an identical lag meter, and theirs doesn't show this. With one avatar on the sim, the lag is much worse. (It's not just me; I've had others come over for test purposes.) Walking around, your avatar stalls totally during those periods. Vehicles are even worse. 

I put in a support ticket (#204301), and the sim has been restarted twice, with no effect. Izzy Linden looked for the problem, but couldn't find it. Somewhere on Vallone, or possibly on the machine hosting it and other sims, something is using heavy simulator resources. Ot hasn't been found yet. Most of the sim is for rent or sale; there's not much going on there.

Anyone seeing this elsewhere? It's really obvious if you have a lag meter column - it stays green most of the time, then drops all the way to zero, going red at ground level, then comes back up.

[animats]

21 hours ago, animats said:

Sometimes lag may just be a bug. Vallone, which usually has zero or one avatars in it, has a huge lag every 10 seconds or so during which the frame rate drops to zero. I have a lag meter on the corner. It's just Vallone. Kama Center, across the road, is fine.

With broken Vallone sim to test on, I've been logging and recording video of this. What happens is that, about once every 10 seconds, Vallone sim stops sending object update messages. You can turn on a feature in the viewer (at least in Firestorm) where little squares appear above an object as updates for it come in. During these stalls, those totally stop.

Sims don't send object position updates if the object is moving with the same velocity (both linear and angular) and acceleration as previously sent. Viewers extrapolate from the last update when no updates are coming in. This works great when updates are coming in on time, and terribly when they're lost or sent late.

Lack of an update causes velocity interpolation to extrapolate from the last frame, which, if the object is doing anything interesting like turning, extrapolates too far and is usually bogus.  Velocity interpolation knows about "sim running slow", and the sim slowdown factor is applied to velocity interpolation. But that only works if the sim is consistently slow. The viewer finds out about intermittent lag too late, after the lag is over. The update message after the lag has a slowdown factor update. This class of lag is the cause of most bogus motion not near a sim boundary.

I'm looking at this in detail because I've been working on that section of code in the Firestorm viewer, improving region crossings. There are viewer-side workarounds which could make things look a bit better. If no packets are coming in from a sim for any object, assuming the sim is running slow or there's packet loss is a good guess. I'm reluctant to put that in, though without coordination with the LL sim side. It's guessing in the absence of information, after all. All the viewer can do is turn a sim stall into a visible stall. It can't fix the lag.

Edited January 20, 2018 by animats
Clarify

[Theresa Tennyson]

4 hours ago, animats said:

With broken Vallone sim to test on, I've been logging and recording video of this. What happens is that, about once every 10 seconds, Vallone sim stops sending object update messages. You can turn on a feature in the viewer (at least in Firestorm) where little squares appear above an object as updates for it come in. During these stalls, those totally stop.

Sims don't send object position updates if the object is moving with the same velocity (both linear and angular) and acceleration as previously sent. Viewers extrapolate from the last update when no updates are coming in. This works great when updates are coming in on time, and terribly when they're lost or sent late.

Lack of an update causes velocity interpolation to extrapolate from the last frame, which, if the object is doing anything interesting like turning, extrapolates too far and is usually bogus.  Velocity interpolation knows about "sim running slow", and the sim slowdown factor is applied to velocity interpolation. But that only works if the sim is consistently slow. The viewer finds out about intermittent lag too late, after the lag is over. The update message after the lag has a slowdown factor update. This class of lag is the cause of most bogus motion not near a sim boundary.

I'm looking at this in detail because I've been working on that section of code in the Firestorm viewer, improving region crossings. There are viewer-side workarounds which could make things look a bit better. If no packets are coming in from a sim for any object, assuming the sim is running slow or there's packet loss is a good guess. I'm reluctant to put that in, though without coordination with the LL sim side. It's guessing in the absence of information, after all. All the viewer can do is turn a sim stall into a visible stall. It can't fix the lag.

If you watch the statistics bar you'll notice that Vallone normally runs about 100% of the scripts in every frame, but every so often you'll notice that this figure drops dramatically, meaning that more scripting wants to be run, and these increases in script time coincide with the drops in simulator frame rate.

You'll also notice a couple of lots that have build turned on for everyone and no auto-return set.

And this is why we can't have nice things.

[animats]

6 hours ago, Theresa Tennyson said:

If you watch the statistics bar you'll notice that Vallone normally runs about 100% of the scripts in every frame, but every so often you'll notice that this figure drops dramatically, meaning that more scripting wants to be run, and these increases in script time coincide with the drops in simulator frame rate.

You'll also notice a couple of lots that have build turned on for everyone and no auto-return set.

And this is why we can't have nice things.

I've been looking around, and I can't find anything exciting on the lots that have build turned on for everyone. No signs of squatting or dumping.

What may be causing the peak load is unwanted synchronization. If you write a task that uses shared resources, then waits for N seconds, and run a lot of copies of that, all the tasks will sync up and try to run at the same time.  (This is a classic result from operating system theory.) So maybe somebody has a lot of objects with a script with a 10 second wait in it.

I just spent an hour peering into everything in the sim, all the way up to 4096 meters. Found nothing that could explain the lag. There's a nice garden that has animated leaves falling and butterflies, but those seem to be looping animations, not active scripts. Saw various sky boxes, sex rooms, and abandoned builds, but nothing that looked like it did anything. I peered inside the three parcels that have ban lines, and there's nothing there to cause lag. I was looking for something like a store full of identical forgotten vending machines, all trying to phone home to some defunct web server. The statistics window shows huge amounts of "Pump IO" when the sim is lagging. But no.

Are there any tools to help with this? Per-parcel statistics?

[Theresa Tennyson]

6 hours ago, animats said:

I've been looking around, and I can't find anything exciting on the lots that have build turned on for everyone. No signs of squatting or dumping.

What may be causing the peak load is unwanted synchronization. If you write a task that uses shared resources, then waits for N seconds, and run a lot of copies of that, all the tasks will sync up and try to run at the same time.  (This is a classic result from operating system theory.) So maybe somebody has a lot of objects with a script with a 10 second wait in it.

I just spent an hour peering into everything in the sim, all the way up to 4096 meters. Found nothing that could explain the lag. There's a nice garden that has animated leaves falling and butterflies, but those seem to be looping animations, not active scripts. Saw various sky boxes, sex rooms, and abandoned builds, but nothing that looked like it did anything. I peered inside the three parcels that have ban lines, and there's nothing there to cause lag. I was looking for something like a store full of identical forgotten vending machines, all trying to phone home to some defunct web server. The statistics window shows huge amounts of "Pump IO" when the sim is lagging. But no.

Are there any tools to help with this? Per-parcel statistics?

Here's an older thread that appears related:

Another thing I noticed about that region is every so often I was given a notification that said something about downloading a file which isn't supported. This was just when I was walking around and not doing any conscious interaction with anything.

[Whirly Fizzle]

1 hour ago, Theresa Tennyson said:

Another thing I noticed about that region is every so often I was given a notification that said something about downloading a file which isn't supported. This was just when I was walking around and not doing any conscious interaction with anything.

That will happen if there's shared media in the vicinity that requires flash & your system doesn't have the flash plugin installed.

[Chroma Starlight]

While I'm sympathetic to what sounds like a frustrating experience, at five years old, my i7-3820 system is no spring chicken, and newer GPUs like the GTX1070 can lap my GTX970 (and hell, it ran satisfactorily on the GTX460 I pulled when I upgraded). My ADSL2 connection has a latency seizure whenever there are more than a few packets on the wire, which is about 6mbps down total. Despite all this, I find that most content on SL loads quite quickly, and I'm satisfied with the frame rate. None of this is intended to invalidate what you're reporting, but rather to give you some hope that there can perhaps be a remedy to the problem that you're experiencing.

Edited January 21, 2018 by Chromal Brodsky

[animats]

I was thinking vendors, too. I was expecting to find some abandoned store with a wall of dead vendors. But no.

[Perrie Juran]

On 1/18/2018 at 6:48 PM, Monty Linden said:

Build a japanese-inspired region and I will visit.  :-)

It's true, most of the young nerds like a high-spec machine but I'm a contrarian.  I don't code randomly so continuous compilation isn't required and I like old hardware to fly the flag for residents.  It's just a bit painful at times...

We appreciate this.

One of my comments in times past about certain new features and / or other development decisions was that they were being made by people who obviously did not have a Second Life.  And I can point to specifics to back that up.