Not improved in anyway.

[kevin Jerrold]

I've been using SL on and off for 11 years and still find the viewers so unstable. Most of my time is spent Not Responding. Sort it out Linden Labs. I've changed laptops Internet connections turned everything down to minimum and still get the Not Responding Issue.

We spend good money on SL and still you give us a viewer with lots of buggy issues.

Sort it out otherwise I'm closing my account and will advise others to do the same.

[So Whimsy]

[Coffee Pancake]

This really isn't the experience of the vast majority of SL users.

Do you want to provide some technical details about your setup (laptop, network) and the specific problem you're having, or is this just a flounce ?

Genuinely happy to help diagnose your issue.

[bigmoe Whitfield]

56 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

This really isn't the experience of the vast majority of SL users.

Do you want to provide some technical details about your setup (laptop, network) and the specific problem you're having, or is this just a flounce ?

Genuinely happy to help diagnose your issue.

I love parts of the SL users are always like "IT AINT MY END!" when they finally come up off the ghost and tell us,  9 times out of 10, it is the users issue at hand causing their SL experience to be problelmatic and then us older timers come in shake our canes and get them to adjust settings in hopes we can make it betterish.

[Rowan Amore]

I've even been using SL almost exclusively wireless of 12+ years and really have no issues whatsoever.  In extremely crowded places, of course, everyone does to some extent.  I still manage these places.

[Persephone Emerald]

4 hours ago, kevin Jerrold said:

I've been using SL on and off for 11 years and still find the viewers so unstable. Most of my time is spent Not Responding. Sort it out Linden Labs. I've changed laptops Internet connections turned everything down to minimum and still get the Not Responding Issue.

We spend good money on SL and still you give us a viewer with lots of buggy issues.

Sort it out otherwise I'm closing my account and will advise others to do the same.

The solution to your problem is not to stop using Second Life. It is to use a different viewer.

[Kathrine Jansma]

"Not responding" is either a sign of a really bad application that blocks the application main loop, but typically it is some crappy system environment slowing down system calls that should be rapid. The SL viewer has very few spots during startup that could do that, but once you are logged in, it should not happen, as Coffee said above.

Typical reasons in a system:

• Failing harddisk/SSD that takes forever to respond to trivial requests
• Crappy network, especially DNS resolution or background CRL checks
• AV/Endpoint protection solutions that misbehave randomly, especially the kind that injects code into other programs for security
• Broken network or graphics drivers (but any driver, especially filesystem or network filter drivers can do that really)

Most of those should be ruled out by switching internet connectivity and hardware. But the advice to try one of the TPV viewers for comparision isn't a bad one either, most offer some improvements over the offical client.

[kevin Jerrold]

Computer Specs

Device name    DESKTOP-IT1DP5D
Processor    AMD E-300 APU with Radeon(tm) HD Graphics   1.30 GHz
Installed RAM    4.00 GB (3.60 GB usable)
Device ID    B0157B06-CC93-40D1-8E54-47E4068D28C1
Product ID    00325-80000-00000-AAOEM
System type    64-bit operating system, x64-based processor
Pen and touch    No pen or touch input is available for this display
 

[Rowan Amore]

18 minutes ago, kevin Jerrold said:

Computer Specs

Device name    DESKTOP-IT1DP5D
Processor    AMD E-300 APU with Radeon(tm) HD Graphics   1.30 GHz
Installed RAM    4.00 GB (3.60 GB usable)
Device ID    B0157B06-CC93-40D1-8E54-47E4068D28C1
Product ID    00325-80000-00000-AAOEM
System type    64-bit operating system, x64-based processor
Pen and touch    No pen or touch input is available for this display
 

Better to post the info from Help/About Viewer from the top menu.

[Aishagain]

@kevin Jerrold I am seeing a problem even from those limited specifications you published.  Running a 64 bit viewer with less than 4GB RAM is unlikely to work.  The viewer will try to access a great deal more than 4GB in fairly ordinary operation and it you have ANY other applications running, including but by no means limited to your antivirus application, you will most likely get a "not responding" message from the viewer.  The CPU, with integrated graphics is never going to provide you with more than a basic view of SL but it is the low RAM that is killing your viewer(s).

[kevin Jerrold]

1 minute ago, Aishagain said:

@kevin Jerrold I am seeing a problem even from those limited specifications you published.  Running a 64 bit viewer with less than 4GB RAM is unlikely to work.  The viewer will try to access a great deal more than 4GB in fairly ordinary operation and it you have ANY other applications running, including but by no means limited to your antivirus application, you will most likely get a "not responding" message from the viewer.  The CPU, with integrated graphics is never going to provide you with more than a basic view of SL but it is the low RAM that is killing your viewer(s).

Thanks. This laptop is dedicated graphics. Does that not help.

[bigmoe Whitfield]

48 minutes ago, kevin Jerrold said:

Computer Specs

Device name    DESKTOP-IT1DP5D
Processor    AMD E-300 APU with Radeon(tm) HD Graphics   1.30 GHz
Installed RAM    4.00 GB (3.60 GB usable)
Device ID    B0157B06-CC93-40D1-8E54-47E4068D28C1
Product ID    00325-80000-00000-AAOEM
System type    64-bit operating system, x64-based processor
Pen and touch    No pen or touch input is available for this display
 

That is a bottleneck,  3.6gb useable ram. windows will eat up 1.5 to 2gb on it's own. so that leaves less then a gb of ram to play with, as there are overhead reserves,  even with a dedicated card, that's not going to do much of anything, as you are choking out the processor and system ram, which means everything starts swapping to disk constantly, which means SL is not going to be have at all. 

[kevin Jerrold]

4 minutes ago, bigmoe Whitfield said:

That is a bottleneck,  3.6gb useable ram. windows will eat up 1.5 to 2gb on it's own. so that leaves less then a gb of ram to play with, as there are overhead reserves,  even with a dedicated card, that's not going to do much of anything, as you are choking out the processor and system ram, which means everything starts swapping to disk constantly, which means SL is not going to be have at all. 

Thanks for this answer. Yeah so if I upgrade the memory that should sort the issue out. How comes though at times I get no problem at all and it runs really well

[Henri Beauchamp]

You are using a 11 years old APU (a dual core only, with old AMD HD graphics). What did you expect ?

Mind you, in 11 years, SL has changed a lot: meshes, materials, Bento avatar skeletons (with more joints), animeshes... Take your pick, but the amount of memory and processing power needed today to run a SL viewer are definitely much higher.

If you still want to use this old computer, then I recommend to:

• Buy more memory (8GB is a minimum by today's SL standards).
• Use a lightweight and fast TPV (try the Cool VL Viewer: I still can run it on super-old hardware).
• Try to install Linux (as a dual boot, if you do need Windows for other stuff) and run the Linux flavour of the TPV on it (+20 to +50% performances compared to Windows).

This said, do not hold your breath on it or have too many hopes: you do need a more powerful computer for a decent SL experience.

My recommended minimum for today's SLing would be:

• Quad core CPU > 3.5 GHz (the better the single core perfs, the highest the FPS rate in SL viewers).
• 8GB RAM.
• A discrete GPU (anything as powerful or better than a GTX460 will do).

To give you and example, my third PC (i.e. the PC I was using as my main system 10+ years ago) got an old Q6600 (OCed @ 3.4GHz), 8GB or RAM and a GTX460, and can run the Cool VL Viewer just fine, including with ALM (but shadows off), and with decent frame rates (> 20 fps).

[Jenna Huntsman]

3 hours ago, Henri Beauchamp said:

You are using a 11 years old APU (a dual core only, with old AMD HD graphics). What did you expect ?

To add on to this:

AMD themselves dropped support for that APU back in 2016; so you've had half a decade of no driver or firmware updates to fix bugs and maintain compatibility with modern software (for example, the last driver released for that APU supports Windows 8.1 - We're now on Windows 11) - Even if you're on a 'supported' OS, that doesn't mean that it will still work properly - for example, if you're using Windows 7, that was only EOL'd in 2020 - meaning you've got 4 years worth of updates between the drivers running your hardware and the OS itself.

With that said - bugs are to be expected with 'depreciated' products, so SL crashing due to unpatched driver or firmware bugs wouldn't be all that surprising.

 

(+1 for running Linux in this case, it's probably the only hope for that hardware at this point, even with a RAM upgrade).

[Odaks]

On 3/19/2022 at 5:15 PM, kevin Jerrold said:

We spend good money on SL and still you give us a viewer with lots of buggy issues.

Sort it out otherwise I'm closing my account and will advise others to do the same.

Somebody has got to say this bluntly, so I will! You've got a horse and cart out on the freeway and you're complaining that it's everybody else's fault that it keeps getting run over by the traffic! That really is a bit naughty of you.

Try retiring the horse and bolting a 750cc motorcycle in the draw bars (follow all the advice above) and you might just get a surprisingly useful result. Good luck!

[bigmoe Whitfield]

8 hours ago, Odaks said:

Somebody has got to say this bluntly, so I will! You've got a horse and cart out on the freeway and you're complaining that it's everybody else's fault that it keeps getting run over by the traffic! That really is a bit naughty of you.

Try retiring the horse and bolting a 750cc motorcycle in the draw bars (follow all the advice above) and you might just get a surprisingly useful result. Good luck!

what's actually funny, I got into a group discussion while ago with 17 people in a group voice conference,  9 of those people are still running windows xp on hardware that's almost 15 years old,  they complain too,  they think nothing is wrong with their systems, since they built them to be Gaming systems...   so yeah,  we've got a populace in SL that tries to skip on everything and thinks they can have everything.

[Paul Hexem]

On 3/19/2022 at 2:31 PM, bigmoe Whitfield said:

I love parts of the SL users are always like "IT AINT MY END!" when they finally come up off the ghost and tell us,  9 times out of 10, it is the users issue at hand causing their SL experience to be problelmatic and then us older timers come in shake our canes and get them to adjust settings in hopes we can make it betterish.

I was going to argue and say it's more like 7 out of 10, but here's one of those times where it's definitely the user's computer.

[Coffee Pancake]

23 hours ago, kevin Jerrold said:

Processor    AMD E-300 APU with Radeon(tm) HD Graphics   1.30 GHz

This is a major weakness right here, the viewer will spend excessive amounts of time stuck processing stuff and not responding.

This is a modern day netbook.

23 hours ago, kevin Jerrold said:

Installed RAM    4.00 GB (3.60 GB usable)

Barely enough to get windows booted, you will run out of memory for the viewer pretty quickly and the viewer will crash. This is unavoidable.

The 64 bit viewer might last longer before it crashes, but it will grind to a halt as windows swaps, and then crash.. maybe even take the OS down with it. The 32bit viewer will use less ram and might be more usable while it's running, but it will crash much sooner.

 

You're so far below practical specifications there is little point even trying. I would strongly advise you switch to the text mode viewer Radegast (https://radegast.life/)

 

If you absolutely must run a full fat SL client .. netbook rules apply. Stand on a skyplatform when you can't see anything else, drop your draw distance as low as possible, remove all attachments, disable avatar rendering, disable water rendering, do not run any other applications at the same time.

I would suggest you give Catznip viewer a try, we do test on very low end hardware and have a lot of users who literally can't run anything other viewer, but I can't promise a worthwhile or crash free experience. 

[Coffee Pancake]

22 hours ago, kevin Jerrold said:

Yeah so if I upgrade the memory that should sort the issue out. 

Do not waste money on more ram for this machine (if you even can add more).

You need to be looking for a solution that involves a whole new computer.

[Laylah Yaseotoko]

Something something potato. You are trying to run SL on a severely outdated system, matter of fact it's so old the entire thing should probably be granted the sweet release of tech oblivion.

Just because SL as a platform is somewhat old doesn't mean it has not received patches and band aids to bring it into the modern age. As such your machine can't handle the improvements. You are overdo for a total system rebuild.... And even people with high powered PC's don't have a totally smooth experience in SL but that's to be expected. Especially in crowded areas. For around 500 to 700 you can get a PC that will run it ok, it won't be bleeding edge but more than capable of handling SL with minor hic-ups. Check out places like build a pc on reddit or current deals on budget gaming pc's. You'll be better off investing in that than to add ram to a machine that isn't worth the money the ram will cost you.

[kevin Jerrold]

Thanks everyone..... New laptop it is then. Any suggestions on a cheap secondhand laptop. I've been looking at chrome books.

[Henri Beauchamp]

1 hour ago, kevin Jerrold said:

Any suggestions on a cheap secondhand laptop. I've been looking at chrome books.

Chromebooks might be underpowered. If you want a laptop, your best bet is to buy a laptop from a PC integrator (e.g. an ASUS laptop): they also have the advantage that they can easily have parts added or replaced (RAM modules, HD/SSD).

Do choose a laptop with a discrete GPU (no Intel iGPU, no AMD APU !), the big differences brought by a discrete GPU are the VRAM (while an iGPU or APU must use the CPU RAM, which is slow and reduces the available memory for the CPU), and the much stronger processing power (more CUDA cores or stream processors). Do prefer NVIDIA over AMD (the latter got extremely poor OpenGL drivers that are dead slow when compared with NVIDIA's). A mobile GTX 1050, for example, would be perfect.

As for the CPU, as long as it got 4 cores or more (6 or 8 is perfect: no need for SMT either), and got good single core performances (the SL viewer renderer is single-threaded, even if NVIDIA drivers can be convinced to use a second core), it's all good !

Edited March 21, 2022 by Henri Beauchamp

[arabellajones]

On 3/20/2022 at 12:17 PM, Kathrine Jansma said:

Most of those should be ruled out by switching internet connectivity and hardware. But the advice to try one of the TPV viewers for comparision isn't a bad one either, most offer some improvements over the offical client.

This comparison is why I keep an up-to-date version of Henri Beauchamp's Cool VL Viewer. I am a Linux user, so the usual sensible suggestion trying the Linden Lab viewer has problems

[kevin Jerrold]

someone want to check over these specs for me as i took the laptop back and got what i hope is slightly more indate

Device name    GeoBook_140
Processor    Intel(R) Celeron(R) N4020 CPU @ 1.10GHz   1.10 GHz
Installed RAM    4.00 GB (3.83 GB usable)
Device ID    
Product ID    00356-02403-73234-AAOEM
System type    64-bit operating system, x64-based processor
Pen and touch    No pen or touch input is available for this display