Firestorm Reliability

[mistythunder]

Beginning yesterday I have had repeated incidents where my avatar becomes immobile in my Firestorm viewer. Also no other avatars on screen move about, yet their walk, or run, animations continue to play in my screen. They run in place. This lasts for several minutes. Sometimes it returns to normal and I can move again. Other times I get logged out with that ping sound. It is just like other times when I have lost my Internet connection while logged in to SL. But this current trouble is not due to loss of my Internet connection. I know this because during such times I can browse the Internet with Firefox.

These regular Firestorm failures have become disruptive in combat. What could be causing this?

[Rowan Amore]

3 minutes ago, mistythunder said:

Beginning yesterday I have had repeated incidents where my avatar becomes immobile in my Firestorm viewer. Also no other avatars on screen move about, yet their walk, or run, animations continue to play in my screen. They run in place. This lasts for several minutes. Sometimes it returns to normal and I can move again. Other times I get logged out with that ping sound. It is just like other times when I have lost my Internet connection while logged in to SL. But this current trouble is not due to loss of my Internet connection. I know this because during such times I can browse the Internet with Firefox.

These regular Firestorm failures have become disruptive in combat. What could be causing this?

It still might be your connection TO Second Life.  What is your ping time and packet loss in the statistics floater?

[mistythunder]

FPS  varies between14.6, and 35, FPS. Packet Loss is 0.1%. Ping is 72ms

Edited February 24, 2021 by mistythunder

[Profaitchikenz Haiku]

If you're using Windows have you added the locations of your cache files and chatlogs to the virus-scanner exclusion lists?

Two other things to check are the cache size and chat log files.

In preferences, see what cache size you have specified, then check the actual size on disk of your cache folder in case you're close to the size.

If you're saving local chat, have a look in the chat logs folder and make sure you haven't ended up with a massive chat.txt file.

Edited February 24, 2021 by Profaitchikenz Haiku

[mistythunder]

Quote

CPU: AMD FX(tm)-4350 Quad-Core Processor (2007.35 MHz)
Memory: 32135 MB
OS Version: Linux 4.15.0-135-lowlatency #139-Ubuntu SMP PREEMPT Mon Jan 18 18:18:36 UTC 2021 x86_64
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: GeForce GTX 1080 Ti/PCIe/SSE2
Graphics Card Memory: 11264 MB

OpenGL Version: 4.6.0 NVIDIA 450.102.04

RestrainedLove API: RLV v3.3.3 / RLVa v2.3.0.62831
libcurl Version: libcurl/7.54.1 OpenSSL/1.0.2l zlib/1.2.8 nghttp2/1.25.0
J2C Decoder Version: KDU v8.0.6
Audio Driver Version: FMOD Studio 2.01.05
Dullahan: 1.8.0.202011061705
  CEF: 81.3.10+gb223419+chromium-81.0.4044.138
  Chromium: 81.0.4044.138
LibVLC Version: 2.2.3
Voice Server Version: Vivox 3.2.0002.10426

The Cache size slider is set all the way to the right at  9984 MB. When these failures began to happen I emptied both Cache, and Inventory Cache, and still the failures happened.  The Cache directory is set to .firestorm_x64/cache/. The largest file in that directory is "data.db2.x.1". Its size is 1048576 KB.

I am saving Nearby chat. Everyday it starts a new file. Today's file size, at the time of this posting, is 8.9 KB. The failure has already happened today  twice. The only virus protection I have is that which comes with Ubuntu 18.04.

[KjartanEno]

Going to take a leap here, but which desktop environment? Gnome 3? KDE? What happens if you run a different viewer, like Kokua or Singularity?

Edited February 24, 2021 by KjartanEno
clarification

[mistythunder]

Desktop environment:

Quote

$ ls /usr/bin/*session
/usr/bin/dbus-run-session  /usr/bin/openbox-session
/usr/bin/lxsession         /usr/bin/xfce4-session

 

It is a spinning disk. I do not have any SSD.

I do not have any other veiwer installed. I am reluctant to install another one. I hope this can be solved without testing any of the others.

[KjartanEno]

Trying another viewer could help determine whether it is something specific to Firestorm or not. 

https://sourceforge.net/projects/kokua.team-purple.p/files/Kokua-SL/

http://www.singularityviewer.org/kb/nightly-builds

I had a hunch at first that the file indexing software used by Gnome 3 or KDE might have been affecting hard drive access. It is one reason I prefer Mate desktop.

[mistythunder]

I will look into changing my desktop to Mate. I would appreciate any links documentation about file system advantages Mate has. If it can be easily done, and with little risk to my files, it is likely I will do it. I do a lot of combat, so I am interested in anything improves my system's performance.

But I have been using my current setup for many years without these Firestorm failures. If the problem is the amount of time required to do file management tasks, why would these failures start up only yesterday?

[KjartanEno]

2 hours ago, mistythunder said:

I will look into changing my desktop to Mate. I would appreciate any links documentation about file system advantages Mate has. If it can be easily done, and with little risk to my files, it is likely I will do it. I do a lot of combat, so I am interested in anything improves my system's performance.

But I have been using my current setup for many years without these Firestorm failures. If the problem is the amount of time required to do file management tasks, why would these failures start up only yesterday?

Well, I doubt XFCE is the cause of these issues. Adding Mate to your Ubuntu installation is easy enough, but I don't think you need to do this.

There could be a corruption of data in your Firestorm installation. If your Firestorm installation is in your /home directory, rename it and install Firestorm again from a freshly extracted tar.xz. If you installed it to /opt, then 'sudo mv /opt/firestorm-install /opt/firestorm-install_backup'. Then extract a fresh tar.xz and 'sudo ./install.sh' from within the extracted folder. See if it all works as it should and then delete the backup. If the problem remains, you could use Firestorm's settings backup feature and then delete .firestorm_x64 from your /home directory. Launch Firestorm and restore your settings from the saved location.

As for improving performance, Ubuntu 20.04 includes Gamemode, but I think you need to add a PPA for 18.04. See this article for more information:

https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2019/08/feral-gamemode-ubuntu

Once Gamemode is installed, you can launch the viewer from a terminal using the command 'gamemoderun ./firestorm' from within the directory where it is installed. Alternately, you can create or edit a launcher to do this. My method is to edit the firestorm launch script by adding export LL_WRAPPER='gamemoderun' at line 165 (right before $LL_WRAPPER bin/do-not-directly-run-firestorm-bin "${ARGS[@]}"') and saving the file.

Finally, don't take this as a criticism, just an observation. You have a quad core AMD FX processor. Those are not known to be very efficient or powerful. I'd guess that the GTX 1080 in your computer is not being used to its full potential. It may not be in your budget to do so, but you would see significant performance gains with a newer AMD Ryzen or Intel CPU.

Edited February 25, 2021 by KjartanEno
clarification

[mistythunder]

Shortly before this problem began there was a power failure while I had Firestorm open. It is possible there was file corruption then.

I opened Firestorm and saved my user settings.

I changed the name of my .firestorm directory to one that indicates it is a backup.

I deleted my "/opt/firestorm-install/" directory

I went to the folder in my Downloads directory where I had expanded my Firestorm Installation files and ran the install.sh script as root.

I opened Firestorm where it is in the "/opt/firestorm-install/" directory and restored my user settings.

This did not fix the problem. The lost connection to the SL servers persist. As before, at seemingly random times, my avatar becomes immobile, and a few minutes after that I am logged out of SL.

I know I have an old computer. But because it seems to meet the need I have not seen the value in updating it. I figured to wait for yet another generation of computer hardware to come out (one after the current Ryzen) before updating. I did not know though, that what I have now may not be making full use of my fairly high end graphics card.

Edited February 26, 2021 by mistythunder