Lag meter always in the red at home plot

[Sorciaa]

I have noticed these last few days, when I am at my home plot my meter is red and high red, like its always loading something. When I am at another sim, its low green, unless someone is loading into the sim. When I click the meter, it will say all is normal and green. I don't seem to detect any new lag and the frame rate has not dropped that I can tell.

  Can this be a problem? I have a week of rent left and I dont want to pay another month if the sim I am on is going to be a lag fest.

[Alyona Su]

1 hour ago, Sorciaa said:

Can this be a problem? I have a week of rent left and I dont want to pay another month if the sim I am on is going to be a lag fest.

Try turning down you draw distance to a crazy low number, like 96 or less. Try again. It sounds like there are some badly-built objects or badly-textured objects within your draw distance and your viewer is downloading it all when you get there. Like switching on a firehose.

Edit: turning down draw distance is to *test it* - not as a permanent solution LOL If the firehose shuts off (or does not appear) then you have the answer. But that's the only explanation I can think of at this point.

Edited July 1, 2019 by Alyona Su

[Chic Aeon]

1 hour ago, Sorciaa said:

I have noticed these last few days, when I am at my home plot my meter is red and high red, like its always loading something. When I am at another sim, its low green, unless someone is loading into the sim. When I click the meter, it will say all is normal and green. I don't seem to detect any new lag and the frame rate has not dropped that I can tell.

  Can this be a problem? I have a week of rent left and I dont want to pay another month if the sim I am on is going to be a lag fest.

Have some friends test too -- maybe some using different viewers and see if the problem is there for them also.  I have one area in my Bellisseria kitchen that has a collection of heavy mesh with big textures (something I usually stay away from). I know it is there in that one spot but I haven't noticed and FPS changes.  I don't even have the lag meter on, so I am not sure what the difference is between that reading and the actual FEELING of lag. I have a fairly hefty computer and maybe you do to. It could be that the lag meter is looking at texture loading and such and not FPS.  

 

Sure some techie person has the answer for you. But having others test would be a good start. Any new NEIGHBORS nearby? Any new PURCHASES you added to your plot?   I bet @animats would have an idea for you.   

[Sorciaa]

I will try that, I think its set at 256 now. I did crash a few days ago and had to reset all my firestorm settings so that may be part of it.. Also the neighbors set up some fountains and I notice it spikes up when I look at them.

  then again, my FPS went up to the mid 30s from the mid teens after the crash so it might not be a bad thing.

[Fritigern Gothly]

35 minutes ago, Sorciaa said:

Also the neighbors set up some fountains and I notice it spikes up when I look at them.

Most fountains use particles to simulate the water spray and many older graphics cards will take quite a performance hit when there are many particles in the scene.
So you can go to Firestorm's quick settings and turn the particles way down or even completely off and see if that helps anything.

Also reducing your draw distance from 256 to 128 could help, but that was already suggested 🙂 

 

[Prokofy Neva]

I have dealt with these issues for years and I always chuckle to myself when a tenant IMs me angrily that "my land is lagging them out"  -- and I fly in and find Ma and Pa sitting on the porch with their loaded shot-guns, in rocking chairs, with 20 breedables aimlessling wandering and colliding, a security orb, a badly-scripted locking door, temp-rez flowers, a beer dispenser, and much more.

It's like the old Pogo cartoon, "We have reached the enemy, and he is us!"

I stopped fussing about scripts and lags years ago when the Lindens changed the way they did servers -- they slowed everything down and forced doors to close more slowly for the sake of the whole sim, which was its own annoyance.

But I also found much of the time when a sim was always in the red, dropping to its knees on FPS and TD, that was because it was being shared on a server with another sim that maybe had a club on it with 44 avatars in bling packing it. When you file a ticket about these kinds of chronic problems, the Lindens often inform you they have moved the sim to another server. There used to be a resident who published the "secret sim sharers" so you could tell who you were sharing the server with and complain if it were a club or mall, but now either he got bored with the project or LL doesn't reveal that data any more.

Recently, I became more aggressive about trying to solve a sim's chronic stall problems and filed a ticket, and a Linden told me once again that she had moved the sim to another server, and gave me the long lecture about FSP and TD and seeing these numbers with ctr-shift-F1, which of course I heard 15 years ago, and 10 years ago, and I should even send her the longer and more complex version of that lecture I got from a Linden at one of their office hours. Truly, we get it, guys. Once the famous Lee Linden told me laconically about a certain sim that was always lagging that he was seeing that it was humming along like a Swiss watch. I pointed out to him that it had no avatars on it, not even himself, as he was viewing it from a master panel. And that's just it: Linden Lab's sims work best when we are not there. "The World Without Us..."

So more practically, I finally went and got one of those scanners. I have had several, and they work with varying degrees of accuracy and helpfulness. The free XOPH scanner seems to be the best but try all the free and low-cost ones.

I began flying around in earnest and found the Ma-and-Pa problem is still really the best explanation -- those complaining the most about lag have the lagging craziness right on their own parcels.

Breedables are often big laggers, but security orbs are the worst -- likely because they are constantly scanning and listening for certain avatars on the list. It's worth going around with the scanner because you find things you can get rid of, like high-script fish, or invisible sliding windows you didn't realize had escaped, or wearables from rezzers that didn't get deleted, etc.

But ultimately, after removing 400 scripted items from a sim, and trying to police all the high time eaters, I was not that much better off, the "spare time" hadn't changed that much. It's true that it's more about the accumulative power of many scripts, rather than a few high items.

 

Edited July 1, 2019 by Prokofy Neva

[Sorciaa]

if it is the fountains, will derendering them fix it or should I look at other options ?

[Sorciaa]

here is what I am getting on my property

 

https://gyazo.com/9d93e6538f01154560e2185ddd2555cf

Edited July 1, 2019 by Sorciaa

[Whirly Fizzle]

Can you post a SLURL to the location?

[Sorciaa]

15 hours ago, Whirly Fizzle said:

Can you post a SLURL to the location?

where would I find that ?

[Whirly Fizzle]

Go to the place where you are having the problem.
Open the world map: CTRL+M
At the bottom right of the world map, click "Copy SLURL" button.
Paste the SLURL in a comment here.

[Sorciaa]

http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Vanilla Skies/75/213/31

this is my plot

[ChinRey]

Those fountains certainly do add noticeably to the load but they can't be the only reason.

But then there are three of these:

and 15 like this:

It adds up to quite a lot of load, especially since they're all so poorly made you have to set LoD factor to 4 to see them at all.

But it still shouldn't be enough to cause serious lag problems on their own and the rest of the objects on the veranda the SLURL linked to seemed to be reasonably low lag.

However, there was a lot of heavy objects scattered around the neighbour parcels too. Two seriously heavy boats, a texture heavy set of living room furniture somebody had dropped off in the open, a lot of old sculpt vegetation, a 48 sculpts sim surround landscpae, some houses like this with a whopping 205 MB VRAM (and it wasn't even the heaviest):

There aren't many objects in the sim but there are several very heavy ones. Add a heavy mesh avatar or three and you may well run into serious problems. That's the only explanation I can think of.

That being said, I didn't notice any signs of critically high load there myself, neither in performance nor in any of the data readings. Heavier than ideal. yes, but I've seen much worse.

You can definitely reduce the load a lot by reducing the draw distance and that's the first thing I would try.

Edited July 3, 2019 by ChinRey

[Sorciaa]

I have had those items up for quite a while, the lag meter going constant red has only been int he last few days. I talked with my neighbor and they said pretty much the same thing. They were wondering if LL was having a problem as well.

 Thanks for having a look as well. I still don't really understand what causes " lag " on a sim. it does not " feel " laggy but friends have said its taking longer for things to load and of course my lag meter burning red all the time now.

Edited July 3, 2019 by Sorciaa

[ChinRey]

44 minutes ago, Sorciaa said:

I have had those items up for quite a while, the lag meter going constant red has only been int he last few days. I talked with my neighbor and they said pretty much the same thing.

Yes. As I said, although the build is on the heavy side, it's not extremely so. But it was the only even remotely plausible explanation I could think of.

 

46 minutes ago, Sorciaa said:

friends have said its taking longer for things to load

That may not be related. I've heard others say the same about other sims but I'm not sure if it's lwoer performance in general or just a coincidence.

 

1 hour ago, Sorciaa said:

and of course my lag meter burning red all the time now.

I'm not too familiar with the Firestorm lag meter but I think it only measures client side lag, so server performance shouldn't matter at all.

[Mollymews]

when our FPS is stable and our Lag Meter is in the red then it indicates that there is a lot of data being sent to our viewer from the server. Typically scripted objects that are changing position and/or appearance on a fast timer

[Coffee Pancake]

OH DAMN

I swung by ... 

That is exceptionally bad.

Set lighting to midnight, then Pressing SHIFT+CTRL+ALT+U to show updates to objects source of the problems becomes very clear. 

The fix is simple.

Have the estate owner (the person you rent from) come deal with those, or move house .. probably just move.

 

[Resi Pfeffer]

@CoffeeDujour

What does the blue and red color indicate?

[Qie Niangao]

2 hours ago, Resi Pfeffer said:

What does the blue and red color indicate?

Per the wiki:

Quote

The update indicators show you when packet data is being utilized -- typically, when an object makes an update to the world. Each color has a different meaning:

• Red: Indicates a full update, such as the creation of a prim. This is a relatively large data packet sent to your computer. If you see objects that are showing a constant stream of red, they're contending for your bandwidth, which may cause other things in the area (like textures) to load slower. If the object is made up of many pieces, the packet is larger.
• Blue: Indicates a partial update, such as a change of position or color for a prim. These are always smaller than full updates. However, the same rules apply as for the full updates. If you're creating content, it's a good habit to make sure it's not updating many times per second. Changing colors, textures, shape, or particle parameters several times per second causes partial updates that contend for your bandwidth.
• Green: Indicates an ending update, such as the deletion of a prim. If this packet gets lost on the way from the server to your computer, the object becomes a "ghost" -- your viewer still renders it, but you can walk through it, and when you edit it, the Creator field is blank because the object no longer exists on the server.

 

[Zoya McDonnagh]

@CoffeeDujour & @Qie Niangao

So I tried SHIFT+CTRL+ALT+U  and was looking around myself to see what was out there.

Then I TP'd home and panicked LOL

/waits for things to rez in and settle down

Ok, Whew. I did find a few offenders and removed them. Surprised that what I thought would be bright red, was actually not at all.

[Qie Niangao]

1 minute ago, Zoya McDonnagh said:

Surprised that what I thought would be bright red, was actually not at all.

It's pretty impressive what visual dynamics the viewer can do with persistent prim properties such as texture animation and particles. Some such effects can end up hitting the viewer's local performance even when there are no updates and not even a script remaining in the object that's emitting all the excitement (so no sim or network lag).

[ChinRey]

7 hours ago, CoffeeDujour said:

OH DAMN

I swung by ... 

That is exceptionally bad.

Ah that explains it. I didn't notice because I have limited my own bandwidth to 600 and only got around 400 from that place. Limiting the bandwidth may actually be a solution, it's not as if you really need all those constant data updates from the fountains anyway.

[Sorciaa]

those are the fountains. I tried to de-render but it seemed to not help much, dropping the draw distance way down so that half of the sim did help but eh.

  I have been looking at other plots but I am kinda picky about the land facing, Soo I may send an IM to the land lady and see if she can do something.

[Sorciaa]

Decided I am just going to look for another place to rent. Not sure how much having all that stuff is affecting me but still, $70 a month I should not have to deal with it.

[JuliVelden]

Using the nifty tool of Ctrl Alt Shft U, I've noticed that some sims in SL have great explosions of red object update indicators below the water often at the corners.  Can it be that the off-sim environmental surround features?  Are we seeing their object update indicators on-sim at that edge and way down deep before the water?

Three shots of Lehela, SW corner.  Shot 1, you see the off-sim features. Shot 2 the cam from same side is swung down far below the surface looking upward at a slant.  Shot 3 it rises just below the surface to show depth and is in wireframe.  Any suggestions what this is?  I know other examples than this one.