Firestorm: Freezing / Not Responding for like 5-10 seconds at a time

[Nick0678]

1 hour ago, Lyssa Greymoon said:

True, but with shadows, particles and water reflections off, it’s not really ultra anymore. That slider is not super helpful.

Too heavy, hence 10-15 FPS.

[Nalates Urriah]

@Nick0678 Fun cartoon! Thanks.

I've been using Win10 and Firestorm 6.4.21 for months. Everything is nice and works well. I fly at near Ultra with a 512m Draw Distance and way too many scripts on my avatar. And I use a 4 year old computer.

However, the update Microsoft put out in week #5 (end of January) killed my Firestorm, Black Dragon, and SL Default Viewer performance. I saw mini-freezes with every TP to a new region and frequently while in a region. Flying and sailing were out. Walking was hard.

With lots of research and troubleshooting I found the problem is the Win10 Diagnostic Policy Service. It was using 100% of drive C:\ read/write time, forcing the viewer to wait and apparently choking the render pipeline. Disabling that service solved the problem.

I've been playing with the viewers to see if this is the solution. If all is well as I expect it is, I put up an article on it in my blog.

[Odaks]

@Nalates Urriah- From about that same time, I've seen occasional blank screen blips that last only a second or so. This being on Windows 10; same problem? With nothing else running and a fairly decent cpu, maybe my computer deals with it quicker. I'll look forward to reading your blog!

[Johnnycash Stromfield]

12 minutes ago, Nalates Urriah said:

@Nick0678 Fun cartoon! Thanks.

I've been using Win10 and Firestorm 6.4.21 for months. Everything is nice and works well. I fly at near Ultra with a 512m Draw Distance and way too many scripts on my avatar. And I use a 4 year old computer.

However, the update Microsoft put out in week #5 (end of January) killed my Firestorm, Black Dragon, and SL Default Viewer performance. I saw mini-freezes with every TP to a new region and frequently while in a region. Flying and sailing were out. Walking was hard.

With lots of research and troubleshooting I found the problem is the Win10 Diagnostic Policy Service. It was using 100% of drive C:\ read/write time, forcing the viewer to wait and apparently choking the render pipeline. Disabling that service solved the problem.

I've been playing with the viewers to see if this is the solution. If all is well as I expect it is, I put up an article on it in my blog.

VERY interesting. Thank you for this input and I'll be looking into this. We appreciate your feedback 👍

[Johnnycash Stromfield]

So I disabled the Diagnostic Policy Service and although it seems to have helped a little bit I'm still getting the freezing and stuttering. I've tried just about every prefrences combo people have told me about and all the tips and tricks but this is how it looks to me while I'm sailing, just recorded it now. My Disk is at 0% and goes up to 40%+ occasionally, ram never goes over 54% and CPU is always like 15-35% so I really don't know what is causing this issue but I'm starting to give up hope. 

It seems as though it's happening as new land and objects are loading in so it's a choice between higher DD with less popping in but lower FPS or lower DD with more popping in and higher fps.

I don't feel like I can win. Here is the clip, turn sound of as their is mic static and my daughter laughing at TikTok in the background and coughing really loudly on Discord because she didn't know I was recording haha

 

https://streamable.com/w2tvzc

[Odaks]

Some of that freezing might have been due to other avatars arriving/leaving the region? Just a thought.

A heavily weighted scripts avatar can still wreak havoc for a few seconds.

Adnittedly, I didn't see any arrivals on your minimap, having looked again.

Edited February 3, 2022 by Odaks

[Nick0678]

22 minutes ago, Odaks said:

Some of that freezing might have been due to other avatars arriving/leaving the region? Just a thought.

It's not from avatars coming in/out, if you look at his windows mouse pointer it's switching to busy mode (the whole app is freezing). I faced the same problem many years ago (was using windows at the time) but can't remember what i did to fix it and doesn't mean that it would also work in this case. (*If i still used windows i would start by rolling back to an older nvidia driver, though.)

[Johnnycash Stromfield]

32 minutes ago, Odaks said:

Some of that freezing might have been due to other avatars arriving/leaving the region? Just a thought.

A heavily weighted scripts avatar can still wreak havoc for a few seconds.

Adnittedly, I didn't see any arrivals on your minimap, having looked again.

Yeah and although I have my mesh body on I am only 40ish scripts. The HUDS you see I need to sail, Ban Line HUD is important because people like to throw them up everywhere and the others are for my boat. Even on my 1 script test avi I still get the freezes. Nothing on my PC is screaming at me, I have a good internet connection but FS still freezes and gives me those "not responding" moments still for a few seconds at a time. It's so weird, it seems to happen on every viewer to, some less than others.

[Johnnycash Stromfield]

2 minutes ago, Nick0678 said:

It's not from avatars coming in/out, if you look at his windows mouse pointer it's switching to busy mode (the whole app is freezing). I faced the same problem many years ago (was using windows at the time) but can't remember what i did to fix it and doesn't mean that it would also work in this case. (*If i still used windows i would start by rolling back to an older nvidia driver, though.)

Hmm rolling back to an older GPU Driver, I haven't tried that yet. I always presumed having the newest driver was the logical thing to do and I'm worried if it'd mess up my performance on other games but do you think it's worth a shot and if so how far would you roll back?

[Nick0678]

3 minutes ago, Johnnycash Stromfield said:

Hmm rolling back to an older GPU Driver, I haven't tried that yet. I always presumed having the newest driver was the logical thing to do and I'm worried if it'd mess up my performance on other games but do you think it's worth a shot and if so how far would you roll back?

Well when it comes to drivers Nvidia was never the most reliable.. At least while i used windows, driver crashing etc was a common thing.. Not saying this is your case though and can't help you cause i stopped using windows long long time ago, but you got nothing to lose if you try. If it doesn't work you update it again.

Edited February 3, 2022 by Nick0678

[Aishagain]

Just to add my experience of micro-freezes and stutters, it seems that the last 4 or 5 Nvidia GPU drivers have caused a lot of minor but irritating issues in games that used OpenGL graphics so it is very possible that this is part of the issue.

I have stuck at 497.23 which is one of the least "sticky" drivers of the recent batch.  NVidia release drivers with minor tweaks that are intended to improve in-game experience for players but it my experience that they make liitle or no difference to SL.  I tend to think that a bit like LL, they are too interested in the latest "shiny" tweak to bother fixing some of the more difficult failures in their software.

Quite why the recent NVidia drivers have caused these micro-freezes on Win 10 systems I have no idea and I cannot seem to find out either.

Maybe I am fortunate not to have suffered the major freeze/lock-ups described above since a couple of major ones some months ago, but the stuttering is a real pain.  I use a GTX 1660Ti GPU with a Ryzen 3950 CPU and 32GB RAM.

Edited February 3, 2022 by Aishagain
spelling

[Beq Janus]

The video clearly indicates region crossing issues. This is not a viewer issue for the most part, it is a rather sad fact of life in SL that frustrates many drivers/sailors/pilots and one that LL are aware of. That said, the reason region crossings are hazardous is in part because the entire context of the avatars and vehicles crossing the boundary have to be handed over to a new server. The more scripts, more objects etc the larger the handover task so keeping things simpler may help.. 

As has been said, reduce the texture VRAM allocation. The video card has to be able to hold all the other graphical components so you want to try to strike a good balance. The viewer will try its best but forcing it into a corner when it comes to resource management is not advisable. 

The Ultra setting governs many things a number of which you have turned down to mitigate but it still leaves other things higher than your GPU would typically be set to.

You may have mentioned this and I missed it. I would suggest that you ensure that you have your cache directory whitelisted.

https://wiki.firestormviewer.org/antivirus_whitelisting

Flying along causes a lot of churn, if your AV is scanning every file just for fun then your gonna feel it.

(Finally, I'd suggest reducing your LOD multiplier too, but that's more out of general good practice, I don't think it'll make a significant change in this case)

 

 

[Wulfie Reanimator]

9 hours ago, Beq Janus said:

The video clearly indicates region crossing issues.

Are you talking about the recent streamable video? https://streamable.com/w2tvzc

The stuttering is happening in the middle of the sim, the actual region crossing near the end is relatively instant.

I would agree it's possibly related to loading in those new assets in the distance, but the viewer is pretty messy so I can't say for sure.

 

To clarify generally: Region crossings (or other avatar entry/exit) don't cause the viewer/screen to freeze, your inputs just no longer have effect because the viewer is relying on client-side (offline) interpolation/prediction while waiting for the sims to handle the real crossing.

That means you would still be able to observe movement in the world, whether it's avatar animations, the waves in the water, receiving/sending IMs, moving your camera, and so on.

Edited February 4, 2022 by Wulfie Reanimator

[Nalates Urriah]

20 hours ago, Johnnycash Stromfield said:

Hmm rolling back to an older GPU Driver, I haven't tried that yet. I always presumed having the newest driver was the logical thing to do and I'm worried if it'd mess up my performance on other games but do you think it's worth a shot and if so how far would you roll back?

I posted my experience and fix on my blog. I give the details. Since I corrected my Windows problems my experience in SL is very smooth. No more mini-freeze glitches.

While Beq is a Firestorm developer I disagree that crossings are a major problem for most sailors and flyers. They CAN BE. My personal experience is it varies from crossing to crossing. The majority of my crossings when sailing are barely noticeable. Others are barely a blink which may go unnoticed. I sailed through about 100 regions using Topless Cruisers recent route in the Norway area. I got separated from my boat (Bandit 55) once while using USB (Sailor's HUD), add-on Bandit HUD, and Facial Animation HUD. I think I was just under 3mb of avatar scripts.

I am convinced the issue lies outside the viewer and in the local computer. I was updating because my system was getting glitchy while running Firestorm. Running the Win10 updates made things worse. I ran SFC /scannow which in the past has made a significant difference, but did little this time. However there were a dozen so files that were repaired.

Then I looked at the video driver. I had been on 466. The update to 511 made no difference. So, then I was digging deeper. First stop was running MemHistory, a free program. I at most only 64% of my memory was being used When FS is running. So, it wasn't likely a FS memory leak and certainly not too many other apps running. The only thing that stood out was disk use at 100% for extended times. Not good. Which lead to diagnostic Policy as my problem.

Next I would have used HWMonitor (free) to check temperatures to see if a heat sink was clogged with dust or a fan failing.

Packet loss doesn't cause the stutter you see. Like Wulfie writes, that causes loss of control as the viewer projects and prorates to fill in for the lost of information. FS has a setting to control how much of that you see. I find that at login I can have a 2 to 3% packet loss. Packet lost always goes down after I am connected to a region. Using Ctrl-Shift-1 to bring up the viewer Stats I can watch what is happening with the viewer and SL region servers. Viewer FPS, Sim Ping (not the same as network ping from a command line - more an SL server response thing), Server FPS, Packet Loss, Time Dilation, and % Scripts Run tell me whats happening with the system.

Since you are having problems nearly identical to mine, I suspect it is something in your computer. Run SFC (DISM and SFC are on same page and Microsoft says run DISM first - but I often solve my issues with just SFC). If that doesn't solve the problem consider running DISM and then running SFC again.

You can try other viewers and see if you have the same problems. If so, then it is not a viewer issue. If this were an Nvidia driver issue lots of people would be complaining. So, I think that unlikely. Some are knocking Nvidia drivers, but has been a really l o n g  time since I had a problem with Nvidia.

Another possibility is bad sectors on your hard drive, if you are on a spinning disk. Run chkdsk C:\ /F for a general level fix. Or run it with /R for a long more exhaustive repair of the disk, which is good for 4 and 5 year old computers.

Edited February 4, 2022 by Nalates Urriah

[Johnnycash Stromfield]

You don't know how much I appreciate everyone's input. I've read through them and will be not giving up at tackling this. I am almost certain its an asset loading issue as it definitely only happens as new objects or land pop into view.

 

You're all great, thanks so much!

[Johnnycash Stromfield]

On 2/4/2022 at 3:16 PM, Nalates Urriah said:

Since you are having problems nearly identical to mine, I suspect it is something in your computer. Run SFC (DISM and SFC are on same page and Microsoft says run DISM first - but I often solve my issues with just SFC). If that doesn't solve the problem consider running DISM and then running SFC again.

I did DISM and SFC to and it said it found an issues and it's solved it but still getting the terrible freezes when flying. 

I really really appreciate everyone's help but I think I'll just log in to sing then if I want to explore I'll need to find another game as this is seeming impossible to fix.

 

EDIT: Since doing the SFC and DISM it does actually feel like it's lessened the problem. It's still there when I fly over very very object heavy areas but for now it actually seems to have helped a bit. Will continue my whining shortly if anything changes LOL, thanks for being patient with me.

Edited February 6, 2022 by Johnnycash Stromfield

[animats]

5-10 second delays? Check for:

• Being on WiFi causing packet loss.
• Something else running that is using CPU time. You have more than enough CPU and GPU for Firestorm.
• So much stuff open that you're paging to disk.

Try closing everything and make sure CPU usage goes way down. Then run Firestorm.

[Solar Legion]

So, have you actually reduced your minimum VRAM setting from 4GB yet?

[Johnnycash Stromfield]

13 minutes ago, Solar Legion said:

So, have you actually reduced your minimum VRAM setting from 4GB yet?

Oh aye, it's on 1024 now and 10% 10%.

That didn't seem to affect anything but obviously having it at 4gb was silly, I was just trying everything at that point but with these recent disk checks and repairs it feels a bit better

 

Edited February 6, 2022 by Johnnycash Stromfield

[Solar Legion]

10 minutes ago, Johnnycash Stromfield said:

Oh aye, it's on 1024 now and 10% 10%.

That didn't seem to affect anything but obviously having it at 4gb was silly, I was just trying everything at that point but with these recent disk checks and repairs it feels a bit better

 

There's that at the least! It can be a finicky bit of program to use at times.

I'm on a Ryzen 7 2700X and an nVidia GeForce 980 TI and don't get much in the way of stutters (micro or otherwise). Well, not once everything is loaded - which is the rub.

I've got a fair few of the standard page graphics settings maxed at that. Exceptions are a 96 meter Draw Distance for normal movement, Object/Sculpt LOD set to 2.75, Terrain LOD set to 2. I have no fram rate cap set and do use DoF as a matter of course.

Unless in a truly crowded club (usually during an event) the overall performance is acceptable.

ETA: Said 980 TI has 6GB of VRAM. Dynamic settings are set for half of that with ten percent on the extras.

Edited February 6, 2022 by Solar Legion

[Rachel1206]

On 2/4/2022 at 4:16 PM, Nalates Urriah said:

Since you are having problems nearly identical to mine, I suspect it is something in your computer. Run SFC (DISM and SFC are on same page and Microsoft says run DISM first - but I often solve my issues with just SFC). If that doesn't solve the problem consider running DISM and then running SFC again.

For experienced users only

Notice, it is the file SRUDB.dat created by the system diagnostics, which can get corrupted. Your check above with the System File Checker should fix it. It is possible to fix it directly, but requires system administrators rights and disabling Diagnostic Policy Service.

Locate the folder %WinDir%\System32\sru and delete SRUDB.dat. Enable Diagnostic Policy Service again, check if everything is running normal, there are benefits letting Diagnostic Policy Service run and help fixing potential other problems.

If stills problems, disable Diagnostic Policy Service in services as explained by Nalates Urriah.

 

[Johnnycash Stromfield]

37 minutes ago, Rachel1206 said:

For experienced users only

Notice, it is the file SRUDB.dat created by the system diagnostics, which can get corrupted. Your check above with the System File Checker should fix it. It is possible to fix it directly, but requires system administrators rights and disabling Diagnostic Policy Service.

Locate the folder %WinDir%\System32\sru and delete SRUDB.dat. Enable Diagnostic Policy Service again, check if everything is running normal, there are benefits letting Diagnostic Policy Service run and help fixing potential other problems.

If stills problems, disable Diagnostic Policy Service in services as explained by Nalates Urriah.

 

Going to try that now. Just done it and restarted PC. Will let you know. Thank you ☺️

[Nalates Urriah]

I removed the files and started Diagnostic Policy. All seems OK. No 100% disk use. I'll watch it for a day or so.