Lag when loading textures

[Kathryn Hijinks]

Hi!

I've been experiencing some pretty terrible lag, and I've tried searching around for any fixes. When I first load into a sim, my framerate drops incredibly low - 18FPS and lower. It slowly will climb up, but even if my framerate is 30, moving is very laggy and almost behaves like I'm at 1FPS. Eventually after I stand still for long enough (sometimes in excess of a minute), everything loads and I hit 80FPS depending on the sim.

 

I've also noticed that if I stand still, hit 80 FPS and turn around, I lag again. I'm assuming it's loading textures now in view again...but everything behind me seems to unload. So if I turn back to the first direction I had been facing...brief lag again.

 

My internet connection shouldn't be the issue. My speed test to Phoenix, AZ is 80Mbps. I've tried setting my bandwidth to 1500, 3000 and 5000...and nothing seems to change. My computer is powerful enough (8700k, GTX2070) so that shouldn't be the issue. I'm using Firestorm right now. My view distance is 128M - which seems to be about normal?

Is there something I've missed possibly?

Edited July 30, 2019 by Sheva Xaris

[Alyona Su]

Set bandwidth down to 500. Try other viewers (Catznip, Kokua, LL Official) to determine if it's a viewer issue or system issue (and start with the default settings on each.) Then you'll know where to begin your trouble-shooting.

[NiranV Dean]

Downloading and decoding the textures is one of the (if not THE) heaviest task in the Viewer, it is completely normal that your framerate drops while the Viewer is doing that stuff. There is nothing you can do about it and setting bandwidth lower will only increase the time it takes downloading textures and items and thus increasing the duration the Viewer will stay in this low-performance area. You are better off maxing the bandwidth to churn through it as fast as possible.

[Alyona Su]

3 hours ago, NiranV Dean said:

and setting bandwidth lower will only increase the time it takes downloading textures and items

Ummm... you dunna-know what that bandwidth slider is for, do you? It is NOT the bandwidth of your connect to the SL grid; it is the connection between your viewer and the simulator software, which was described to me (By viewer dev only a day or so ago) as being the bandwidth through the UDP protocol and since that protocol have been depreciated and almost all SL systems have already been migrated to other protocols, that anything more than 500 on that slighter will actually have a*detrimental* effect. (not to mention textures are on HTTP protocol now, so that siders has *no effect* on texture downloading.) ~snorts~

Though the simplest answer is: try it and see if you like it. Whether anyone else does or not, I know what works for me and could just go about my own way experiencing my awesome SL with no problems at all as described in the OP. I'm just offering some free help. No skin off my nose if it's ignored or misunderstood.

I reiterate: proper troubleshooting procedure is to try another viewer, recommended: LL Official or Catznip (both of these outperform Firestorm anyway) and test them with *DEFAULT* setting (Bandwidth=500, BTW; duh) then the OP will discover if it is a SYTEM or VIEWER issue. There, ahgain, I offer free help to the OP, whereas your comment, @NiranV Dean, offered nothing of the sort.

Edited July 31, 2019 by Alyona Su

[Lillith Hapmouche]

1 hour ago, Alyona Su said:

...whereas your comment, @NiranV Dean, offered nothing of the sort.

... besides the explanation that texture decoding is an intense task for the viewer. But it's only coming from another viewer dev, one with a focus on heavy visual improvements that is, but heyyy... what could they possibly know? 😏

[NiranV Dean]

18 hours ago, Lillith Hapmouche said:

... besides the explanation that texture decoding is an intense task for the viewer. But it's only coming from another viewer dev, one with a focus on heavy visual improvements that is, but heyyy... what could they possibly know? 😏

She made me look through the code.

But an interesting tidbit is that the Viewer internally sets the max bandwidth 50% higher than what you set, it also dynamically lowers/raises it depending on whether you are dropping too much packets or not, up/down to 20% more/less it seems.

@Alyona Su

I also repeated my bandwidth tests and guess what, she's right. Bandwidth ONLY works for UDP (quite an oversight by LL). This means that you should disregard what she said about it since it is no longer relevant, no matter your bandwidth setting, the Viewer will always attempt to download all textures as fast as possible (possibly up to a maximum of 3mb/s if i remember correct). This obseletes what i said before since the Viewer already tries to max its download speed to keep you in download/decoding mode as little as possible.

Also, just as little sidenote, i've set my bandwidth down to 100 and 1 to see whether it makes any difference compared to 3000. It doesn't. Nothing changed, the option is 99% useless and for the 1% is could possibly still matter it clearly makes no difference and whatever you set it to is enough (even 1).

My point still stands though, you should stop telling people to set their bandwidth down if they are having performance issues, you were only prolonging them unnecessarily, the only ever reason you would throttle the bandwidth is if you are sharing your bandwidth with someone and that someone's share is critically important not to use. And no! Don't give me that "but limited bandwidth provider thingy". Look, the Viewer will download everything, no matter your setting, with a lower bandwidth setting it only took longer, it still downloaded them regardless so ultimately you were only prolonging what was going to happen anyway, it wasting your bandwidth.

I'm pretty sure that my technical explanation why you SHOULDNT set your bandwidth down is much better information than what you provided. BTW here goes another round: You won't be able to determine whether it is a system or viewer issue in this case by switching viewers, all viewers drop in performance while textures are downloading and decoding, that is a totally normal thing and no Viewer is different there unless they were to multithread this which no one did so far. All you would be doing is falsely leading them to believe that its a system issue when more than one viewer would show this issue, which will most likely happen given that i've seen people with high end Intel CPU's drop in performance quite hard (this guy being no exception). SO, instead on leading them on false tracks just tell em the truth: This is normal behavior and you can't do anything about it, that's SL.

Edited August 1, 2019 by NiranV Dean