Grid stability in Second Life and how it affects the music scene.....

[Funkyfreddy Republic]

Hi, I wanted to start a chat about the stability of Second life and how it might affect the music scene. I've been noticing more and more instability on SL lately.

Many folks are experiencing serious lag lately......  Often just doing simple things like posting notices to groups and teleporting to shows have been  frightening experiences the past few weeks for yours truly :(  What scares me most about this is I think a lot of the casual music fans aren't going to bother much longer with SL if things don't improve soon. 

 

[Darren Scorpio]

Most of the time lag is client side. PC performance tends to degrade over time and thus we notice it when using SL. Most of the time we don't notice this unless we are using graphics and cpu intensive programs such as SL is.

- Make sure you stay up to date with your windows updates.

- Also defrag your HD regularly.

-Run a virus scan regularly and also make sure you run a deep scan every once in a while. If your antivirus allows you to run a deep scan while on a safe mode boot then do so.

- Most people will recommend you to never do a registry clean/repair but sometimes it helps. Use CCleaner where you can make a backup of your registry before you do a clean.

- Disable any services that are not necessary. Over time due to things we download and install the amount of running services at startup increase and some we really don't need.

There are plenty of things you can do to increase the performance of your PC. I know it is hard for us to accept that it is our machines and not SL but just give it a try you have nothing to lose. Good luck.

[Shockwave Yareach]

SL is slowly dying for a number of reasons.  People are abandoning islands and throwing them away because nobody wants to spend 4 figures for a videogame anymore -- particularly when they don't get to own it.  People are walking because previous administration ran SL like a penal colony instead of a recreational entertainment system.  The current bad reliability pales compared to what we used to experience daily, but new users may not know about that.  But as landowners leave, there are fewer people willing to buy the land from them - so SL shrinks.

SL is an optional entertainment system.  People can quit it at any time.  The only reason they don't is because they have fun in SL (in spite of LL's best efforts) and they have communities of friends here.  As the fun dissipates and the communities whither away, there is less and less reason for people to remain.  Over a year ago, concurrency was over 58000 all the time.  Today it is 50000 and threatening to sink into the 40s.

[Gypsy Quixote]

I agree with Darren, and good tips, ty.

I've been at plenty of shows recently where there were 30-50 avs in attendance, and while my old PC may have been lagging, others were zipping around the sim and having zero issues. SL performance ebbs and flows but not enough to worry me, I always assume there is work being done to improve stability and have seen some progress in my time here.

And the SL music scene is very strong and growing, not dying .. in fact, it is so strong that if LL closed the doors it would simply move, not disappear. And the truth is, live concerts with strong attendance are always going to test the strengths and weaknesses of both client side and server side performance in any virtual world, been to inworldz lately? Concerts really are the ultimate testing grounds for virtual gatherings. The combination of many avs wearing who knows how many scripts, stream running, group chat and notices, spinning, twirling dancers, particle blasting tipjars etc. It's an environment that will always test your system.

And to my knowledge the platform dictates that it will always be so, show me a world where more than 50 avs can hang together with no lag and I'll not only sign up, but give you all my $L too!

[Funkyfreddy Republic]

Darren, I'm on a mac, not a windows machine and i regularly maintian it since I perform often in SL. Many folks involved with the music scene in SL have noticed the same things I have.

At this point I'm looking forward to a software that's designed specifically for virtual concerts

[Darren Scorpio]

Well I don't know about Macs but I still maintain that most of the time lag is client side. It also varies across OSs, for example I get double the FPS when I log in to SL while on Linux than I do when I'm on Windows, both OSs which are on the same machine so the only difference is the OS that is running.

[Alazarin Mondrian]

SL may be dieing but it's still better (ie: more reliable and with a wider selection of goodies) than any of the alternatives. A decent selection of anthro avatars might tempt me to think about relocating. The ability to port my content from grid to grid without having to resort to using a copybot viewer would help. Until then I'll stick with SL. It's less hassle and has the advantage that most people in RL have heard of it and can find it easily if they're really so inclined to attend one of my shows.

[Grace Jovinavic]

I agree with Freddy that the lag is often very seriously.

However, I don't feel that people will stop bothering to listen. If you see how many people are involved in the music scene, this is the thing people all over the world want. And if SL doesn't get it's act together and finds a way to fix the instability issues, people will find a different place to do just what they're doing on SL right now.