SL pausing issues

[Landreu Severine]

I'm really confused by this one, so here it goes.

 

Currently when I use Second Life viewer 2, old school or phoenix viewer, my viewer will periodically go from its normal 34FPS to 0, stay there a second and go back. randomly, mostly when I'm doing anything, still often enough to be annoying when I'm just standing still typing.

It seems most frequently when I'm loading my inventory or using a menu. I do not experience any lag, pausing or freezing in any other program while the client is freezing up. I do not experience any issues in other media like portal 2 or WOW, and I've always had my setting turned up very high.

This issue is not remedied by updating or rolling back drivers, turning down any Second life settings or updating rolling back direct X.

This only started happening after I had a GFX issue where my GPU possibly had been running to to little power. I suspected I needed a new GFX, but it is suspect since everything runs fine, except SL. I am wondering, since the issues seems to happen mostly when using an inventory, typing or loading a menu. If it has something to do with loading 2d and 3d at the same time?

 

I'm fairly boggled at the moment, I'll post my computer statistics below provided by CPU-Z;

Motherboard: ASUSTeK M4A77TD

Memory: 4096(DDR3) Dual channels

CPU: AMD Phenom II X4 965

GPU: Radeon HD 5770 (core: 850 mhz) (Mem 1024MB)

 

Also my CPs seems to bounce between 3415MHz and 804MHz during the FPS drop. I assume cause 0FPS isn't processing much, but who knows O_O

I've tried setting the affinity to one processor, enabling and disabling multiple threads, and changing its priority. I'm stumped, at this point I might need to switch out hardware.

I'm more concerned with what might be causing ONLY SecondLive viewers to be having this issue, whene very other graphically intence program I run seems fluid and streamed. I can even run WOW and SL at the same time on seperate monitors and wow will run smoothly while SL freezes up randomly as mentioned before..

This only started a week or two ago.

 

Thanks for the help :D

Lanny

 

 

[Charolotte Caxton]

Hi. Im gonna comment here just so I can keep track of this thread, because you have brought up a very interesting topic. Hope you don't mind.

[Landreu Severine]

Cartainly not, just hoping something usefull will come of this post.

I'd be perfectly happy having an excuse to upgrade my GFX and Power. On the other hand if I do that and SL is still being lame I'm gonna be pretty unhappy, I'd prefer to stabalize whatever the issue is now before I invest in my PC further.

[Charolotte Caxton]

That's totally understandable.

[Void Singer]

is it happening everywhere, or just in one particular area?

unfortunately one of the nasty surprises about SL is that it is largely NOT built by professionals... and even when it is regular users can still take professional goods and misuse them in combination without knowing... this means for the most part that everything else will run better, because the pros know all the shortcuts and tricks to layering in content and still keeping the memory and geometry usage low. there content is also static for the most part, and I'm guessing this is where your trouble is coming from.

I suspect it only happens in certain places, and is being caused by a holodeck style rezzor, using temp prims whith tons of textures, possibly combined with a small cache size. If so, increasing cache size may help a bit.

however since you mentioned the previous hardware problem, you might also want to check and see if there are any perfomance monitor / diagnostic tools for your video card (I'm sure there are I'm just not familiar any more with stuff target at ATI hardware)... a similar issue could be overloading a damaged component causing it to drop out temporarily.

those are only guesses and about the end of my expertise on vid cards

[Landreu Severine]

Yeah, thought that it might be a texture loop or loading issues in SL. I've visited several sand boxes, different sims and such. The FPS will change from 14-30 depending on particles, sculpt and script usage but it still has random drops to 0, tried different accounts, avatars and whatnot. Its just.. Second life, whatever it is that is causing it.

As for diagnostics, I've been looking <_>.. if someone could help me find one that would be super sexy, many kudos. I still suspect a power, or GPU issuem, just dunno why it's only effecting SL, if there is one.

 

 

[Sephy McCaw]

sounds more like a cpu spike more then anything, is your cpu getting enough cool air too it? try cleaning out your fans... is there enough power getting to your machine? i reccomend a 750 watt PSU to be safe.... but the culprit definitely would be a cpu issue since your clocks are dropping from 3.4GHz too under 1GHz

 

[Landreu Severine]

Again, this is only happening within SL periodically. No other program or game is effected.

My PC is new, has an open case. And a http://www.japanese-sushi.net/vornado733bfullsizeaircirculatorfanblack-p-1727.html fan that I bought in japan, circulating air within the case. It is dust free and the CPU fan, GPU fan, chassis fan and PSU fan are all operating optimally. The whole rig minus the massive vaccume of a fan is really quiet. The room it is in is Air conditioned to a cosy 62degrees year around. 

[Dana Hickman]

I've noticed the occasional hitching and 1 -2 second pause also, although the pausing I see seems to be specifically happening when I open sidebar catagories (first time or having not had one open for a while), or when I click the X on a group notification or such. Everything else is fine. I'm using an AMD X2, 4Gb, GTX260, 800watt, and the latest Kirstens.

There used to be a common issue where these kinds of momentary freezes were caused by extremely heavy disk access, specifically when Windows tried accessing the page file when it was set to "let windows automatically manage page file size", or whatever the wording is. Auto was letting the file get too large, or was letting windows dynamically adjust the file size too often, which was causing these hitches. The solution was to set a fixed pagefile size manually, so it could never get too large or ever be resized. That may or may not be related to your issues.. I dunno.