Firestorm BoM version causing bad lag?

[ClariceRose]

22 hours ago, Erwin Solo said:

I really can't tell the difference between the current and former Firestorm, unless someone is wearing BOM, in which the difference is obvious.

I did a clean install of the Firestorm Bakes on Mesh yesterday and it seemed fine. That may have been the issue, needed a clean install. Will see how it continues going forward.

[LucianoLamento]

On 10/19/2019 at 9:59 PM, ClariceRose said:

I downloaded the Firestorm BoM version a couple weeks ago. Since I did that, SL had become VERY laggy, was freezing up, etc. I thought it was my internet connection at first. I lowered my Draw Distance to 32, put my graphics on low-med and other such things to help, however none of that helped. My FPS had went from an average of 10-15 in busy sims way down to 2-3. I suffered for 2 weeks with it then thought, hmm let me delete this version and go back to the previous one. Once I did that, everything was so much better!

Sadly though I want to have the BoM version and soon it will be the version that everyone has to use. So, should I file a JIRA? Should I got to the FS support sim and ask questions? Not sure how to handle this.

Has anyone else had this problem?

Its a mess! LL and FS combination is KILLING SL! Many of us dont even log on anymore! 

[Willow Wilder]

On 10/19/2019 at 10:31 PM, Velk Kerang said:

That's actually not entirely accurate, Firestorm maintains 5 releases and when a new release is set out they phase the oldest one out. They are set up on their own thing entirely separate of LL's so one really has nothing to do with the other except that they give you a longer grace period before phasing your viewer out. They don't actually have to do it that way, but they have their reasons they do and even though I may not like that it is done that way as I am sure there are those who feel as I do I can respect it. I mean it's their viewer. They made it. So I really don't got any say in the matter. lol

I'm afraid that's not accurate either. Officially, we offer support for our current release, and we keep the previous 2 versions available. Older versions are not phased out, they are blocked from accessing the SL grid. And yes, we have to do it that way, for the reasons given here which includes an arrangement we made with LL  Firestorm Three-version Rule. 

Those who refuse to update for whatever reason, are really making it harder on themselves. The transition from Version 5.1.7 to Version 6.3.2 for example is a very large leap of new features and fixes, and of course, new bugs for some. About 2,266 commits is a lot of code change to adjust to when you leave yourself to be "forced" to update notwithstanding all the warnings and reminders we give. This in turn, increases the demand on our support resources when panic sets in.  😉

There's a lot to be said for LL's auto-updater. As it becomes less buggy and less crashy, I firmly believe it would benefit a lot of our users greatly. 

 

[steeljane42]

1 hour ago, Willow Wilder said:

Those who refuse to update for whatever reason, are really making it harder on themselves. The transition from Version 5.1.7 to Version 6.3.2 for example is a very large leap of new features and fixes, and of course, new bugs for some. About 2,266 commits is a lot of code change to adjust to when you leave yourself to be "forced" to update notwithstanding all the warnings and reminders we give. This in turn, increases the demand on our support resources when panic sets in.  😉

There's a lot to be said for LL's auto-updater. As it becomes less buggy and less crashy, I firmly believe it would benefit a lot of our users greatly. 

Not all of them. Some know what are they doing and don't update intentionally. I did stay on 5.0.1 for over a year, I had literally 2 crashes in all that time with at least 4-5 days a week usage, new LL "fixes" didn't really appeal to me, since it's fix one - break two way, usually. I only did update when it got to the animesh release. Same now with BoM release. Can't say I made anything harder for myself at all. It's the same thing as with all software. I have quite old Nvidia drivers that fully satisfy me performance wise in SL and games I play, why would I update them unless I get a reason for it? Because Nvidia said so or it has optimization for newest CoD, which I will never play? That's a bad reason, they introduce new bugs way too often and some series of drivers are just total disaster for certain series of their cards.

Auto-updater for lazy people is fine, I guess. As long as it can be disabled somewhere in debug settings. Although to be fair all those "blocks" are pointless anyway for those who still want to log with an older viewer for some reason.

P. S.

Didn't noticed any lag in FS with BoM, didn't noticed any improvements either, though. I think some of the rendering changes did cost me a couple of fps here and there, but they are high enough to not care.

Edited October 22, 2019 by steeljane42

[Willow Wilder]

22 minutes ago, steeljane42 said:

Not all of them. Some know what are they doing and don't update intentionally.

I don't believe my post said or suggested all, but if it reads that way to you, I apologize. Everyone wants to be an exception. 🙂  With a combined 8 years of Support/QA for the team, I've been through a few release cycles and I've seen the patterns. The ones seeking help are the ones needing help, generally speaking. 

23 minutes ago, steeljane42 said:

Auto-updater for lazy people is fine, I guess.

I read that and started to think about what programs I have that I manually update, and couldn't think of any (aside from Firestorm). Can you?  I'm curious, and perhaps just haven't had enough coffee yet. 

25 minutes ago, steeljane42 said:

As long as it can be disabled somewhere in debug settings.

No idea. I never tried. The preference settings also help me to determine when I take those updates. 

[Profaitchikenz Haiku]

12 hours ago, LucianoLamento said:

Its a mess! LL and FS combination is KILLING SL! Many of us dont even log on anymore! 

Ah, light at the end of the tunnel, the less people on SL, the less laggy it will become.

[Velk Kerang]

7 hours ago, Willow Wilder said:

I'm afraid that's not accurate either. Officially, we offer support for our current release, and we keep the previous 2 versions available. Older versions are not phased out, they are blocked from accessing the SL grid. And yes, we have to do it that way, for the reasons given here which includes an arrangement we made with LL  Firestorm Three-version Rule. 

Those who refuse to update for whatever reason, are really making it harder on themselves. The transition from Version 5.1.7 to Version 6.3.2 for example is a very large leap of new features and fixes, and of course, new bugs for some. About 2,266 commits is a lot of code change to adjust to when you leave yourself to be "forced" to update notwithstanding all the warnings and reminders we give. This in turn, increases the demand on our support resources when panic sets in.  😉

There's a lot to be said for LL's auto-updater. As it becomes less buggy and less crashy, I firmly believe it would benefit a lot of our users greatly. 

 

First I was to say thank you for elaborating on that and making sure we in fact have the correct information out there. In my earlier post the information I posted which perhaps it is possible I may have misinterpreted was information I had read stated on Firestorms very own web site in fact which was an older FS blog and as the reason I stated earlier it was stated that it was done so in order to give people a longer grace period and at the time of the post your web site was currently hosting 5 active versions of the viewer software which further validated my statements of course in which I am sure you all would provide support for if need be. To do so otherwise at least in this one mans opinion would not reflect well on the positive image the Firestorm teams has built.

However that being said I am noticing the negative trend in SL with that type of thinking in regards to support offered and more often then not residents who have felt the direct result of it have not been left with a positive out look up on those experiences. Whether you choose to use the term phased out as I did or blocked as you preferred it essentially boils down to the same exact meaning given the frame of reference and context of which it was used in.

While I, myself have not ever had a reason to generally bother anyone from the support team I have no doubt things get a bit hectic for you all on that side of the house. It's good to know there are only 3 available versions of FS even though your web site was clearly hosting 5 working viewers at the time of my post. And I do appreciate you clearing that up for us all though as I do not want to provide incorrect information. So thank you very much again for that.

As Steeljane42 previously stated there are a lot for reasons why people do not update. For me personally it is performance reasons. If I find a version of a viewer that performs exceptionally well for me I tend to stick with it until it is naturally phased out over the course of time or I read over the patch notes and see if it is worth it to me to upgrade. I've just always done it that way. I am old school like that. lol Bering a long time gamer I value performance and play ability over all. Those are my first things I grade on with any new viewer I install. If the viewer doesn't perform well the fixes are pointless. It would be like testing an Alpha game. If the game does not run well then the added features of the game and big fixes are lost in poor play ability performance.

On the matter of the auto updater I am not going to chime in on that because I could actually argue both of your points of which you are both valid on and at the end of the day it really depends on what peace of software we are referring to and/or game if we are keeping it game specific. I've seen some mmos where you have to download the update manually and others if not most actually do use a patcher in order to update the client. And in all honesty when comparing this particular mmo to other in my opinion it is very much like comparing apples and oranges. lol  

Now on to the review which is why I originally logged in to the forums today while on my first cup of coffee as well too. Yayyy us!!!! lol

First ladies and gentlemen I want to start off by saying I am a big fan of this viewer. The Firestorm team has time and time again in the past done superb work in the production of their viewer in order to provide us with the most positive SL experience we could hope to wish for. It offers a lot of features you'd be hard pressed to find in any other viewer. One might even say I am at borderline fanboy status of their work and that is ok too. lol  However I would be remiss if I did not give a fair and accurate account of my experiences the first night out testing the Firestorm BoM version. Now I waited until the end of the day before logging out of my old version until my SL wife came home so we could play test the viewer together. I'll give an account of what we have experienced so far.

Now both of our machines are geared towards high end gaming even more so hers and while by any means I do not have a potato machine myself and my SL wife definitely has the better gaming rig between the two of us which I consistently pick on her and give her heck. Especially when she makes it a point to let me know when playing some of our higher end games where I may have to run medium for better fps on games with graphic levels equaled to that of Ark Survival Evolved how beautiful things look on maxed/ultra graphics. lol I'll pick on her and call her bragger, but I do enjoy listening to her because for her this is her very first actual gaming rig specifically designed to run high end stuff and she more then anyone I know deserves to have and enjoy that experience for the very first time as she has worked really hard to get where she is at and I am extremely and exceptionally proud of her for that among many other things.

Anyway getting back on point. lol We had no issues during the install process. Everything went smoothly. First log in everything went smoothly and as with any new viewer you wait for your inventory to load. Now my inventory is exceptionally large and twice if not three times the size of hers. We joke and say I have acquired half of SL in my inventory. lol My experience my inventory loaded with out an issue. Her experience hers loaded without issue however that being said hers took longer for some reason to fully load then mine which I found odd because she has the better internet speed between us both as well.

At this point once we fully loaded we did a relog as we usually do in order to lessen inventory load times. I have yet to be able to get logged back in. In the past when this has happened I have always been able to sort it out without having to clear cache each time I want to log in. So far this time I have not been able to accomplish this. Contributing factors in this could be internet speed as with anything faster internet always equal faster log in's in SL. That being said it has been ages since I have experienced this issue on this level. So after about 20 unsuccessful attempts I decided to log in and old alt which is basically a fresh toon.

So now that I am sorted on a fresh toon we decide to tp out and see how it feels to us. For her regardless of what sim we were on she was frequently mentioning it seemed a lot laggier for her when she walked around in comparison to the old viewer that was just phased out. Trying to be fair I told her it is possible it could a server side issue with the grid as I have had those moments even on our original version of the viewer. It is really hard to tell if it is being caused by the viewer or by the grid and at some points because of SL being a mmo famous for lag issues in the first place it may not be as noticeable. However despite the various lag issues we proceeded on and enjoyed our evening.

By the time the evening came to an end we proceeded home and turned in for the night leaving our avatars logged in with each other as we sometimes do. I, myself put a movie on last that I started off watching and eventually over the course of time it ended up watching me. lol 😜

Now I have done this many times in the past and never had much of an issue with it before. However this time when I woke up my rig was lagged out entirely with resources eaten up to such a degree it was as if I was play testing a bad Alpha game with extremely poor optimization and server memory leak issues. It took me close to 30 minutes of fighting to even be able to perform a simple shut down of the viewer. I've only ever once experience a lag out on one of my machines this bad and it was when I attempted to run Ark Survival Evolved on a laptop in which sadly the processor was not up to par with the video card on it. So one could very well imagine my surprise when I have awoke to this experience re-emulated on my main gaming machine.😲

On the other side of that coin my SL wife upon rushing out in the morning for work did not notice any issues promptly and was able to shut down quickly as usual. Since both our rigs operate on similar specs with the video card being the only major difference I contribute this to her having a new card with more video ram to play around with. We both tested this on a Windows 10 platform with her running between Ultra to High specs in the settings. I tweaked mine down in order to test it on the lowest settings possible leaving only Basic Shaders enabled as not to have distorted looking avatars. Other things we've noticed is Discord seemed to red line a lot. It's hard to say if this was an issue on their end or an issue with the viewer.

Over all so far with what we've personally tested I would say the OP has a valid claim. While I can't narrow down the exact cause of the lag as of just yet the viewer feels very much like playing an Alpha game with a memory leak issue and very bad optimization. It saddens me to say that so far it has not lived up to the expectations of greatness that is Firestorm. Recommendations on this version of the viewer would be to run it on a machine with a minimum of 8 gigs of ram and a video card with at least 4 gigs on ram for semi-decent performance in order to compensate for any potential issues.

If you made it this far ladies and gentlemen thank you for reading my review.

Edited October 22, 2019 by Velk Kerang
Corrections.

[steeljane42]

8 hours ago, Willow Wilder said:

I read that and started to think about what programs I have that I manually update, and couldn't think of any (aside from Firestorm). Can you?  I'm curious, and perhaps just haven't had enough coffee yet. 

It's as many as you make/want it. With an exception of online games that require users to have exactly the same build version for various reasons you're never really forced to update anything. Starting with Windows for example. It's a good idea to at least delay auto updates if not disable them completely and do it manually later. See awful W10 DPC latency issues on original build 1903 for example, which got partially fixed only months after release (1809 is still better if that matters to you, with, I think, 15xx build being last fully DPC latency issues-free one).

GPU drivers - can't say for the AMD, didn't used their cards for over a decade, but unless you install that geforce experience bloatware and won't let windows to update drivers for you  - you have to manually update them too.

Browsers, addons etc - all have ways to enable or disable auto-updates, although certain ones make it painful. Sadly it has been the latest trend when companies think they "know better" and try to force their users to update as much as they want to. Nothing that debug or registry editing wouldn't fix, though.

Don't get me wrong, sometimes updates are a good thing. Even with FS example, some version from I think it was late 2015 or early 2016 was crashing a lot for me, like every other day at empty spot (the few previous ones weren't, on the same hardware/software), I did hit the submit crash report button every single time for a while before rolled back to the previous version and then, next release was as stable as older ones again (again, exactly same hardware/software, with not even a single gpu/windows update in between).

But yeah, I'm very against the approach that big software companies take especially recently, with forced updates. In my opinion it always should be optional and relatively easy to turn on/off (so without need of self-compiling or messing with registry).Newer is not always better, sadly. And it's only more true with so many possible hardware/software configurations as available on PC (more closed environment, like consoles, is another story. although even on those some devs do mess up with patches/updates from time to time).

[Velk Kerang]

7 hours ago, Profaitchikenz Haiku said:

Ah, light at the end of the tunnel, the less people on SL, the less laggy it will become.

Awesome attitude and thinking on your part and eventually when that happens LL will close up shop and shut everything down there by all the money everyone's invested over the years goes poofy now, but hey at least there was no lag. lol So keep having that attitude pal. You were first in your class weren't you? lol Brilliant. Bloodly brilliant. Lmao!!!!

[Qie Niangao]

6 hours ago, Velk Kerang said:

If you made it this far ladies and gentlemen thank you for reading my review.

Turning it into a jira would be quite an undertaking.

I know nothing about Firestorm myself. Maybe Firestorm Support folks collect some viewer reliability statistics. If they do, I bet they study those for each new release, and if so I wonder if they look different for the BoM release.

[Velk Kerang]

2 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

Turning it into a jira would be quite an undertaking.

I know nothing about Firestorm myself. Maybe Firestorm Support folks collect some viewer reliability statistics. If they do, I bet they study those for each new release, and if so I wonder if they look different for the BoM release.

Indeed it would mate. lol That is actually an excellent suggestion neither myself or anyone else had even thought to mention and recommend for everyone to do mate. Very good idea. Thanks for pointing that out. I actually want to test it some more myself personally before I say or do anything further. That's just my experiences with my first preliminary test run out. Enough to validate the OP's concerns and confirm that there is in fact an issue. For myself I generally test software for at least a good one to two weeks worth of a trial run. I'd like to see if I can ascertain the cause of the lag from the user stand point. So I intend to repeat a lot of the same steps I did using various settings to see the effect. I'll probably even stress test the viewer in over crowded and high mesh builds places knowing me just to see how it holds up under pressure in comparison to it's predecessor.

Mostly because I am curious and also if I come across something I think is useful if not helpful it'll be more accurate with a complete over all test. That's just a habit I have from testing Alpha games on Steam and as I said my SL wife and I have similar system specs with the exception of her having a better video card to operate with. I want to put up my settings and see if I have the same effect she did or worse or the same. I would have actually liked to have tested it some more today if I'd had the time, but I actually had some Non-SL projects I needed to focus my time on that I had already obligated myself to. If nothing else my curiosity has been sparked about it though. Anyway that's where I am personally at with it at the moment as far as I am concerned.

Like I said good that is a very suggestion though. The more people that give them information regarding the viewers performance and their experiences the more of an increased chance of them being able to look in to it and possibly narrow down the issue. I would like to think that they read them otherwise it'd be pretty pointless to have it all set up in the first place. Anyway thanks again mate. Good call.

[Willow Wilder]

On 10/22/2019 at 8:41 PM, Qie Niangao said:

Turning it into a jira would be quite an undertaking.

Yeah, no. Also subtle. Please, just no. JIRA is not for reviews and essays of 'what I did this summer'. Bug reporting - that's the ticket.  

Sorry Velk, but I can't even get through a post. 

All that aside, the OP already said she did a clean install and things seem fine. 

[Velk Kerang]

On 10/23/2019 at 11:53 PM, Willow Wilder said:

Yeah, no. Also subtle. Please, just no. JIRA is not for reviews and essays of 'what I did this summer'. Bug reporting - that's the ticket.  

Sorry Velk, but I can't even get through a post. 

All that aside, the OP already said she did a clean install and things seem fine. 

I just saw this and just had to laugh. I sorries. lol No offense taken. You wouldn't be the first to tell me I can write a book. lol *Points at my SL wife.* lol Trust me my Jira would have been way shorter. Cliff notes version and direct to the point even. I missed the part initially where she got sorted so awesome on that. I am personally finding for us the more we've used the viewer the more some of the initial issues have begun sorting themselves out. May be just a case of breaking it in some. What differences I am noticing isn't worth opening a Jira about. I think as long as the person has the rig to run it then they should be just fine. Anyway shutting up now. I shush shush now. Lmao!!!!😁

Edited October 28, 2019 by Velk Kerang
Corrections.