Chasing Frame Rate Issue

[Lilly Kiyori]

Hi guys, it's Silly Lilly again 🙂

 

Right now I'm chasing a weird frame rate issue.  I have limited my graphics frame rate client side to 20fps, because I mostly don't want my fans to go nuts when everything goes fine.  In my quarter sim (in which I am aware I am not alone), however, I experience drops down to like 9-13 FPS-ish (as registered by my client). The point is ... I have not the slightest clue how this happens. I have collected and attached a couple of statistics, and mostly cannot find anything wrong there. The server side FPS are fine, there is ample spare time, the graphics card doesn't appear to be at its limit whatsoever ...

Maybe somebody of you can find something that looks suspicious. The only thing that I can find is that I have somewhat large ping times to the server (which occasionally provides me with reconnect problems, avi gets stuck).

Standing at the same spot, facing the same direction, however, I've already also seen frame rates that are much higher (see attached).

I'm not wearing any HUDs. The draw distance is limited to 96m.  What bugs the hell out of meis the variabiltiy of it, when I don't see anything in the values that actually varies, except the apparent display. Walking around is stuttery because of the high ping times, but moving the camera with alt-mouse feels quite smooth. Is it just firestorm that's playing a trick with me here?

 

Best

Lilly

 

 

[Lilly Kiyori]

On second thought ... the swap values are high at times. But I don't see that translated in disk activity. This gets weirder and weirder.

[Lilly Kiyori]

As soon as my ping times come down to around 200ms-ish, and the cache hit rate is constantly at 100%, the fps climb to like 50.

I'll try another RAM chip next week.

Edited May 13, 2022 by Lilly Kiyori

[Lilly Kiyori]

I am quite affirmative that a big part of the solution is to tell Google Chrome to stay off the GPU that the game client is on. Not just memory-wise Google Chrome appears to have a tendency to think it is alone on the machine (I think they call that "grabbing whatever resource is left is good for efficiency"). They just forget to let it go so others can use it too.

[Jenna Huntsman]

4 hours ago, Lilly Kiyori said:

I am quite affirmative that a big part of the solution is to tell Google Chrome to stay off the GPU that the game client is on. Not just memory-wise Google Chrome appears to have a tendency to think it is alone on the machine (I think they call that "grabbing whatever resource is left is good for efficiency"). They just forget to let it go so others can use it too.

FWIW Chrome's GPU usage would heavily depend on the pages you visit - if you're visiting basic blogs, Chrome is pretty much not going to even touch your GPU, regardless of what spec it is as image decoding is pretty well optimized... But, if you're visiting sites that run games, then that's another story. Also, sites like YouTube tend to suck down a lot of CPU and GPU due to the streaming codecs they use to provide stable playback, so while on the surface you might think that they don't take much grunt to run, you'd be surprised.

[Lilly Kiyori]

5 hours ago, Jenna Huntsman said:

FWIW Chrome's GPU usage ...  you'd be surprised.

I'm mostly surprised by what that application does when it is lowered or "in the background" and shouldn't have to render anything..

[Rachel1206]

11 hours ago, Lilly Kiyori said:

I'm mostly surprised by what that application does when it is lowered or "in the background" and shouldn't have to render anything..

Yes, Chrome uses a lot of resources even with only with a single tab open on say www.google.com and where you as user do nothing. It is caused by the protecting "sandboxing" of running processes in Chrome. You see this as multiple running processes in the task manager. Inspired by the very efficient Microsoft solution of handling heap in multiple processes, Google implemented it adapted to Chrome with now less memory usage compared to earlier versions of Chrome.

Alternative browsers like Firefox, Edge use less memory, I personally use Firefox and very seldom have any problems running Firestorm and Firefox at same time, even with typical heavy internet usage in Firefox like watching high definition videos on youtube etc., having several web sites open like Flickr, blogs, news and SL Forums.

It is surprising though you experience such major drop in FPS. Could it be a faulty extension in Chrome?

 

 

Edited May 15, 2022 by Rachel1206
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