How to reduce lag in second life?

[RobotXx]

Hello,

On my old PC usually i was lagging on sims with many ppl around or with way too many deco items which was normal i think cos it wasnt the best pc and i had it almost 6 years so i was ok with it.

almost a month ago I got my new PC, which is much better than the pc i had before. but it feels like its lagging even more for some reason. when i try to move it has delay and then when i stop moving the animation that im moving keeps going for few more seconds...sims and avatars takes time to rez. and when i open SL even my browser gets slow like it makes my internet lagging or my pc...not sure about it. 

i got my new pc and i thought sl would be awesome but what i see is that its even worst. 

at the start i thought it needed some time to get all the settings and all. but after a month its still the same, i even tried to clear cash or even use an older version of firestorm but still had the same problem.

I tried to make my graphics from ultra to medium or even to low and still the same lag.

i have no idea whats wrong and it makes it so laggy, so if anyone can help would be amazing. 😳

here are the specs from my new pc: 

• Operating System
  •     Windows 10 Pro 64-bit
• CPU
  •     Intel Core i9 @ 3.60GHz    40 °C
  •     Kaby Lake 14nm Technology
• RAM
  •     64.0GB
• Motherboard
  •     Micro-Star International Co. Ltd. MPG Z390 GAMING PRO CARBON AC (MS-7B17) (U3E1)    34 °C
• Graphics
  •     S24D330 (1920x1080@59Hz)
  •     8176MB ATI AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT
• Storage
  •     465GB Samsung SSD 970 EVO Plus 500GB (Unknown (SSD))
  •     596GB StoreJet Transcend USB Device (USB (SATA) )
• Audio
  •     AMD High Definition Audio Device

[Doggart]

 

I did note that the game (SL) was having some "freeze" moments,same time as SSD seems to restart(sounds like)

SSD and HDD drives are fast but virtual RAMDisk results are better/faster with cache.

I did install " ImDisk Toolkit ", made 1 virtual RAMDisk, and choose it as cache location on viewer.(firestorm x64 6.3.2.58052)

Everything seems to run much faster now, for SL is also important how fast your cache can respond and this is the best way to do it ON PC as Notebooks seem to organize better cache.

Hope it can help!Good luck

Edited December 1, 2019 by Doggart

[cheesecurd]

On 11/29/2019 at 2:45 AM, RobotXx said:

well its not network issue cos every other game i play goes super fast. it must be sl or something wrong with it

 

150fps with a ping time of 190+
that’s a network issue, you’re not seeing bad performance you’re just seeing lag 

Could be your end or it could be linden labs.

[Mollymews]

some thoughts and observations

when we know that our hardware and internet connection are good, other games run well, but Second Life sucks comparatively, then what can we do ?

in the OP case the suck is input lag. Slow response by the computer to keyboard, mouse and/or other input controller devices when playing Second Life

this is a balance issue between input and output. Output meaning the screen

when the CPU and GPU are doing more work on creating render frames than the screen can actually output then the time taken to do this reduces the time available to handle the input devices - mouse, keyboard, network card data coming in from the internet, etc

both NVidia and AMD have a VSync (Vertical sync) driver setting for OpenGL render engines. Second Life being on OpenGL. VSync limits the max. number of render frames generated on the GPU to that of the output device (the computer screen). The screen's Hz rate

when our GPU is only outputting frames at the same rate as our screen then it helps to free up computer time to do/provide for other hardware components

the other important NVidia graphics driver setting for my graphics card is: 'Virtual Reality pre-rendered frames'. The AMD equivalent is: 'Flip Queue Size'. This setting is the number of graphica frames to pre-render. The factory setting is 1. Render only 1 pre-frame per cycle

i have a NVidia GTX 1050Ti. My screen is a Samsung 27" CF591 LED, set to 2560x1440 resolution at 75Hz connected via a HDMI cable.

for Second Life (NVdia: Manage 3D Settings) I set my VSync (Vertical sync) to: 'Adaptive (half refresh rate).  What this does is sets my GPU to a maximum of half my screen Hz rate (75hz). So my Second Life slaves to 37.5 FPS. Which I personally find acceptable

the AMD 5700X has a FreeSync setting where we can set the VSync to any frame rate we want. On the gamer boards, players often mention setting their AMD Freesync rate to 2 frames below their screen Hz. 73FPS on a 75Hz screen. 58 on a 60Hz screen

and then they set their AMD 'Flip Queue Size' to 2. NVidia's 'Virtual Reality pre-rendered frames' also to 2. Pre-render 2 graphics frames ahead. I set my Second Life NVidia to 2 also

what 2 does also is balance the CPU and GPU, they slave toward running at the same rate for rendering purposes, which is a good balance for SecondLife as it's OpenGL implementation is CPU heavy relative to some other 3D games

there are a whole bunch of other graphics driver settings as well, but these two I find, and many gamers will attest to also, are the most important

vertical sync + pre-rendered frames means that we can minimize the time needed to get an acceptable to us personally, output on our screen, while maximising the time available for our computer to handle inputs from our keyboard, mouse, network card, etc

we can modify these depending on what we do in Second Life. Like if I was a club host then I would set my screen to 60Hz. So that my Adaptive refresh rate would be 30FPS. If I had AMD FreeSync then I would go down to 24FPS - the TV rate. The least time needed for acceptable output and the maximum time possible for input. As a club host I want my keyboard, mouse and network card to be as responsive as possible, because as a club host we can do a lot of typing in a session

Edited December 2, 2019 by Mollymews
37

[cheesecurd]

1 hour ago, Mollymews said:

when we know that our hardware and internet connection are good, other games run well, but Second Life sucks comparatively, then what can we do ?

As I stated to begin with, SL is just like that. It’s an ancient game built on a mountain of spaghetti code that barely functions. If your hardware is giving you good performance and your network connection to LL is fine, then any problems you get become some very specific types of issues or if it’s on LLs end then it’s a Sim issue and not really your problem.

1 hour ago, Mollymews said:

in the OP case the suck is input lag. Slow response by the computer to keyboard, mouse and/or other input controller devices when playing Second Life

Input lag in that sense is something measured in milliseconds. Input lag is not pressing a key and having to wait a second or two before your character moves. That’s network lag and is a completely different ordeal and has nothing to do with your keyboard or mouse or whatever.

1 hour ago, Mollymews said:

when the CPU and GPU are doing more work on creating render frames than the screen can actually output then the time taken to do this reduces the time available to handle the input devices - mouse, keyboard, network card data coming in from the internet, etc

That is not at all how this works. If I have to actually explain how this works I would quite literally eat an entire max pages length worth of text, so I direct you to google to learn how I/o lanes and controllers work on a processor and motherboard. Tldr You can completely tap out your gpu and cpu and it won’t affect your usb, ps/2, sata, etc I/o lanes. Even when it comes to pcie devices, you have cpu lanes and chipset lanes and each control different things independently and all of it can work simultaneously. You can max the throughout of your chipset pcie lanes for an NVMe drive for example and still get all the pcie performance out of your cpu lanes to your gpu. This applies to every device, your usb or ps/2 ports for a keyboard or mouse are not reliant on the cpu and work independently. A Ps/2 controller in particular will actually halt cpu instruction if it doesn’t get its instruction through quick enough. That halt is literally nanoseconds and you would never notice it but it’s the opposite of the cpu making your input devices wait. USB will allot a device as ps/2 as well and run it over the ps/2 controller even if you don’t have a ps/2 port, so usb does the same things.

1 hour ago, Mollymews said:

when our GPU is only outputting frames at the same rate as our screen then it helps to free up computer time to do/provide for other hardware components

All it does is free up the gpu, the cpu side of game rendering isn’t done on a frame by frame basis. Your cpu is handling things like lighting, shadows, physics, geometry and resource allocation. Most of which is handled outside the gpus rendering pipeline and is simply dumped onto the gpu as it’s handled by the cpu. If you have a theoretical game where all it consists of is a ball falling on a flat surface, regardless of if it’s running at 1fps or 1000fps, the cpu has already done the physics mathematics, geometry of the ball and surface it hits, lightning and shadows for that ball going through it’s entire cycle of falling, and handled the application saying “the ball is falling, the ball has hit, the ball has bounced” etc.

The gpu is just given that information and told to make an image. It works harder if it has to do it a thousand times per second but the cpu doesn’t notice much.

1 hour ago, Mollymews said:

On the gamer boards, players often mention setting their AMD Freesync rate to 2 frames below their screen Hz. 73FPS on a 75Hz screen. 58 on a 60Hz screen

These people are experiencing screen tearing by running their gpu at a rate lower than their screens refresh rate. It’s recommended to ideally run at your screens refresh rate unless you’re playing something where frame times matter and you can hit triple your refresh rate.

You’re just pulling ideas out of thin air here, almost nothing you said here was remotely true or valid in any way. No amount of voting me down makes you factually right.

Research what you want to talk about before you try and respond to a person in the “Answers” section, because otherwise you’re just spreading misinformation.

[Nalates Urriah]

On 12/1/2019 at 2:32 AM, OptimoMaximo said:

SL computes things not using multithreads, so all the data you throw at the viewer goes into a queue, waiting for the previous process to end before it starts a new element in that queue. A higher bandwidth means that both amount of data and the speed of it being added to the queue creates a bottleneck for which some processes hang waiting for something else to complete, in a never ending loop since the bandwidth setting keep throwing loads of things overtime. It doesn't matter how many processors cores there are at disposal, only one at a time does the job. No matter how powerful your gfx card is, it waits for data from the CPU and you'll rarely see the gpu go up in usage. 

Your argumentation about being 2019 holds up just about the connections being better, but the whole SL architecture is from 2000s. 

The render engine is in a single thread. But, more and more of the viewer runs in separate threads.

On 11/27/2019 at 3:23 PM, RobotXx said:

almost a month ago I got my new PC, which is much better than the pc i had before. but it feels like its lagging even more for some reason. when i try to move it has delay and then when i stop moving the animation that im moving keeps going for few more seconds...sims and avatars takes time to rez. and when i open SL even my browser gets slow like it makes my internet lagging or my pc...not sure about it. 

i got my new pc and i thought sl would be awesome but what i see is that its even worst. 

 

here are the specs from my new pc: 

• Operating System
  •     Windows 10 Pro 64-bit

....

If the lag is in responsiveness... it depends on what you are expecting to respond as to where the problem may be.

Use the viewer's HELP->About... to collect the info we need to have understanding of what is going on in your computer. We need driver info and handy details in the Firestorm extras.

If you are expecting a boat or plane to respond then it is very likely a server side issue. Look in Viewer Stats (Ctrl-Shift-1) at Ping, Server FPS, Time Dilation, Scripts Run %, and Spare Time. Recently there have been issues with Scripts Run % being exceptionally low for no apparent reason. Some changes have been to solve the issue and things are a bit better. But, there are regions that abysmal script performance.

At 33% a script only gets CPU time (on the server) every 3rd frame. Depending on how busy the script is there may be considerably more delay in the script getting to the part that processes the key strokes. I've had my sailboat fail to start a turn for 3 ot 6 seconds... I wasn't on a region crossing... then start turning and WAY oversteer.

If it is a matter of the avatar being slow to respond then  Ping, Server FPS, and Time Dilation are the things to look at. Network issues are a well know cause of the problem. A lagging server is another cause. Change regions to see if it is the region causing the problem. If it isn't the region, dig into the network as this is almost always the cause.

If a new computer is performing worse than an old one, you really need to go through the computer's and the viewer's game settings. New hardware runs SL WAY better.

[Jackson Redstar]

like almost every month Nvidia has a driver update for the latest game out there. wouldn't it be cool if Nvidia considered second life a "game" and offered optimization guidelines for Nvidia cards ruining secondlife....

[Mollymews]

On 12/2/2019 at 3:52 PM, cheesecurd said:

Input lag in that sense is something measured in milliseconds. Input lag is not pressing a key and having to wait a second or two before your character moves. That’s network lag and is a completely different ordeal and has nothing to do with your keyboard or mouse or whatever.

If I have to actually explain how this works I would quite literally eat an entire max pages length worth of text, so I direct you to google

No amount of voting me down makes you factually right.

on your first, I wrote: "when we know that our hardware and internet connection are good, other games run well, but Second Life sucks comparatively, then what can we do ? In the OP case the suck is input lag. Slow response by the computer to keyboard, mouse and/or other input controller devices when playing Second Life"

the OP has said that their new computer responds slower than their old computer does even tho their FPS is higher on their new computer than it is on their old. When so, then they can rule out their ISP network connection. When OP has also checked that all their new computer hardware is working as it should then what's left to look at

on your second, I would direct anyone reading to the manufacturers websites. The forums on the manufacturer website have lots of useful information. Both from the technical support people and the users of these products

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/forums/game-ready-drivers/13/

https://community.amd.com/community/support-forums

on your third, I haven't voted your answer down

 

 

 

[cheesecurd]

28 minutes ago, Mollymews said:

the OP has said that their new computer responds slower than their old computer does even tho their FPS is higher on their new computer than it is on their old. When so, then they can rule out their ISP network connection. When OP has also checked that all their new computer hardware is working as it should then what's left to look at

Simply saying something has been ruled out does not mean it actually has.

So, OP has a high framerate. It’s not hardware unless it’s showing stuttering, so a screenshot of the FPS counter would be useful to see how consistent framerate is.

OP also posted an extremely high ping time, wanna take a guess what that causes?

Heres a hint, it’s definitely not framerate lag.

Tada! It’s network input latency. Which once again has absolutely nothing to do with your actual peripherals. Keyboard, mouse or monitor. None of that has anything to do with pressing a key and having nothing happen for a moment, or just having things be delayed ingame. That is all network.

So what could cause that is a variety of things, from network adapter drivers, physical connectivity for network hardware, routers having issues, stuff beyond your home such as local ISP hardware and junction boxes, or most likely it’s just on LL’s end being slow because that happens sometimes.

Being that this is a new computer and presumably nothing else changed then it’s likely the computers network adapter, wether it’s wired or wireless, having some kind of problem. Drivers likely wouldn’t cause bad ping times, hold ups like that are usually a firmware or hardware problem. 

Hypothetical, I have three objects, A B and C.

One of them, B is causing a problem. I have a guy look at it, he says it’s not a problem. So then there’s no problem? 
These three objects together still have a problem, but it can’t be B because a guy said it’s not a problem, so it has to be A or C right? Clearly A or C are causing the problem /s

I shouldn’t have to explain things like I’m talking to a 6 year old on a game populated mainly by middle aged women and teenagers.

 

[Mollymews]

3 hours ago, cheesecurd said:

Being that this is a new computer and presumably nothing else changed then it’s likely the computers network adapter, wether it’s wired or wireless, having some kind of problem. Drivers likely wouldn’t cause bad ping times, hold ups like that are usually a firmware or hardware problem.

if you read back to an earlier post of mine when the conversation was about the hardware of the OP's new computer, you will see that I did mention this exact issue. I wrote:

" ...  look at your network card next.  When I got my computer custom-built they put in a cheap as 10/100 network card. Problems with packet loss not traceable to isp/internet. Updated the driver and no problems after that. SL can send us a lot of data sometimes which can be a bit floody "

Edited December 5, 2019 by Mollymews
tpeo

[Velk Kerang]

Actually a lot of the lag and slow rezzing a lot of people are having is from piss poor coding on the developers part and recent back end changes that phased out older viewers from working. In fact depending on the viewer your using you could take that same viewer and get better performance logging in to an open source grid then you can on the live grid. And before anyone even says well they are coded differently I'd argue so are emulator servers for other mmo's and some of those dev teams do a way entirely better job then a lot of so called professionals. That is neither here nor there really. lol So sadly not really much can be done about it. Due to the pathetic performance of the grid I personally have found myself logging in less and less lately because of it. 🙄

Even more so since I have noticed even Radegast which is a text based viewer seems to load in a lot slower then it used to. I've tested most viewers on at least 3 different OS'es and I have just not been impressed recently. The trick is knowing the difference between grid performance issues vs viewer and if your rig is set up to handle it then more then likely your issues are server side. Just about everyone I have personally spoken with in world all of them have the exact same complaints. In fact the one and only person who claimed not to really noticed much of a difference is sporting an 8 gig video card and only logs in to his MC land to play one of those stupid board games and really doesn't even tp any where so I really wasn't surprised at all when he told me he didn't notice. lol

[animats]

On 12/3/2019 at 1:27 AM, Nalates Urriah said:

The render engine is in a single thread. But, more and more of the viewer runs in separate threads.

Right. The main thread in the viewer is almost always the bottleneck. It's doing almost all the rendering. Other threads manage texture and geometry loading, the texture cache, voice, and media-on-a-prim (which launches an entire web browser, "Dullihan", a headless Google Chrome, for each media object.)

The GPU is rarely the bottleneck  unless something is horribly wrong. You can look at the rendering stats, and rarely is the GPU at 100%.

Texture loading delays are a big problem. The texture loader in the viewer has a loading policy which is way out of date and was probably designed to prevent overloading the sim processes back when they served the textures. Textures now are delivered just like images on web pages, from completely separate servers hosted by AWS and front-ended by Akamai's cache and content delivery network. SL is not going to overload that. But the viewer throttling keeps texture loads way below what the viewer, network, and content delivery network could handle if you have a fast (>10Mb/s) connection. Watch your network traffic as  you go to a new region. It may take a full minute for everything to load, but network bandwidth after the first 10 seconds will be low.

This is being looked at as part of Project Arctan. It's discussed at Creator User Group.

Part of the problem is finding the texture loading policy in the viewer. It's spread all over the texture loading code; there's no separation of policy from mechanism. So it's hard to modify. The system is quite powerful and clever, but way under-commented in the code. Which is why it hasn't been fixed. It' also hard to Q/A; it takes a lot of testing to avoid "it works worse for me now" complaints.

This is one of those places where SL is slow for the wrong reasons. This is really a bug.

Other places like that include the fact that idle scripts in SL use some time on every frame. Not much, about 3 microseconds per frame. But multiply that by 5000 scripts, and there goes most of your script time. You usually have about 16ms, or 16,000 microseconds, of script time per frame. Blow 15,000 of that on idle scripts, and the sim chokes. Again, this is really a bug. Discussed at Server User Group, and understood to be a bug, but hard to fix. It's a problem that requires reworking the script scheduler. It's a huge win to fix, though; for some sims, most of the server time is going down this drain.

The designers didn't anticipate so many objects having rarely-used scripts. That's why things like sit targets are persistent; the idea was that you'd set the sit target once and delete the script. Not install AVsitter.

[Jackson Redstar]

Let's face it SL is like Golf -  if golf sucks for you buying the best golf equipment will at best, only make golf suck a little less!

[cheesecurd]

4 hours ago, OptimoMaximo said:

Not really. If you understood how the thing works, you'd not say that. @Whirly Fizzlecan explain this better and in much more detail, but here is a summary.

SL computes things not using multithreads, so all the data you throw at the viewer goes into a queue, waiting for the previous process to end before it starts a new element in that queue. A higher bandwidth means that both amount of data and the speed of it being added to the queue creates a bottleneck for which some processes hang waiting for something else to complete, in a never ending loop since the bandwidth setting keep throwing loads of things overtime. It doesn't matter how many processors cores there are at disposal, only one at a time does the job. No matter how powerful your gfx card is, it waits for data from the CPU and you'll rarely see the gpu go up in usage. 

Your argumentation about being 2019 holds up just about the connections being better, but the whole SL architecture is from 2000s. 

This would ring true if you were running a sub 100mhz 16 bit processor or something. 10mbps worth of data is absolutely nothing to a processor, anything remotely modern handles way more data than that every clock cycle.

A modern processor runs ddr4 at upwards of 3200 megabits per second, modern drives at anywhere from 500 to 3000 mbps, and handles data over pcie 3.0 (the only interface we can max with pcie) at 

t h i r t y t w o

g i g a b y t e s

p e r

s e c o n d

So in plain terminology, as simple as I can word this. The idea that higher bandwidth = lag for any reason, but especially the idea that the computer can’t handle 10mbps of data transfer on top of the rest of the single cores workload is complete and utter bull*****, a misleading lie perpetuated by people who have no idea what they’re talking about but talk about it anyway because it _sounds_ like it would make sense.

Your processor breathes 10mbps, it *****s 10mbps, it’s on average processing 300-1000mb of data every clock cycle just making sure everything you have running is still actually running. Not once per second, once per clock cycle. Which depending on how many cycles each instruction requires is still in the terabytes per second range. Taking 10mb of data and turning it into Pajeets 2 foot long 1L$ dong is a metaphorical drop in the bucket.

This has never been the case since the dawn of SL and is just parroted bull*****. All it takes a very basic understanding of how processors work to know that.

If I told enough people babies grow on trees I bet i could confuse at least some people and have them believe it and try to convince others.

Edited December 1, 2019 by cheesecurd

[cheesecurd]

15 hours ago, OptimoMaximo said:

I gathered that higher value there does NOT improve network performance, the inverse does. Try lowering the bandwidth setting in the viewer preferences, that avoids bottlenecks

I hate seeing this concept. This was relevant a decade ago, and barely even then. 
Its 2019, SL can eat as much bandwidth as you can throw at it and only runs better with more. Unless you’re in a Comcast monopoly zone and get 1mbps internet this isn’t a problem anymore. 
My little slider is at 10mbps and SL rarely uses it all but if it does it certainly doesn’t show any problems with network performance, quite the opposite.

OP is describing network lag, has a high framerate and good specs. They’re experiencing network lag and that is all. It does not take a genius to figure this out.

And even if they were experiencing framerate lag, any of you with high end hardware would know this from experience, that regardless of how many bungoliomarks your processor or gpu get this game performs terribly. Throw enough avatars and over modeled furnitures at 1-2 cores of any processor and you can watch it chug.

It does take some kind of genius to manage to twist this issue into CABLES of all things, like its 1999 and everything we’re running is still over analog connections. I mean Jesus Christ read what you type before you press “Submit Reply”.

[cheesecurd]

It’s just SL, it sucks like that. This game runs like garbage on anything made since 2007.

 

also why on earth are you running a single 60hz 1080p display with a god damn 9900K and 5700xt?