Freezing issues after TP (Both SLV and FS)

[Lilyana Muircastle]

TL;DR - like the title says, everything freezes for up to 2 mins after tping after a recent clean un/install on both SLV and FS. Already sent a ticket to LL(Graphics Drivers had been and are updated)

**EDIT** When this freezing occurs, if I am either voice or a video call in Discord it will also freeze.

Buckle up, grab your popcorn, cuz this will be a little long to explain. 

Up until the start of the events for the last 11 months or so SL has been running smoothly for me on high (sometimes between high and ultra) with only a second or two of lag had heavy sims when tping in. 

About 2 weeks ago, friends asked me to watch a movie in SL. I was having problems with the media sound. 'd updated the viewer just before that and learned that a clean un/install was needed to fix the issue. So I did that. The only part I messed up was I never backed up my settings (chat logs yeah of course but not settings). No biggie. I reinstalled and logged in to my Linden Home. And then the freezing started.  Obv, this occurred on both the FS and SLV and no matter where i tp'd the first 2 minutes would be met with stuttering freezing where I couldn't move for multiple seconds each instance. The entire screen seemed to freeze. This happened on empty sims as well. I lowered the graphics down to MID and still got the same thing happening. 

On the advice of the FS group inworld,  I clean un/installed again, whitelisted on windows defender, rebooted, and cycled my modem/router before coming back. No dice, same issue.  I had made a ticket with LL at this point, they had answered and suggested to do all that I already did. 

Last resort, I wiped the drive (it needed it anyway) that it was on, cleaned up everything off the computer, repeated the last steps above and ONLY installed SLV (no FS). Same problems. 

And this is where we are at with me posting this to the forum. Please help!

***EDIT TO ADD***

Second Life Release 6.6.9.577968 (64bit)
Release Notes

Second Life Server 2023-01-20.577734
Release Notes

CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 3600 6-Core Processor               (3950 MHz)
Memory: 32700 MB
OS Version: Microsoft Windows 10/11 64-bit (Build 22621.1265)
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti/PCIe/SSE2

Windows Graphics Driver Version: 31.0.15.3118
OpenGL Version: 4.6.0 NVIDIA 531.18

Window size: 3840x1996
Font Size Adjustment: 96pt
UI Scaling: 1.55
Draw distance: 128m
Bandwidth: 3000kbit/s
LOD factor: 1.125
Render quality: 4
Advanced Lighting Model: Enabled
Texture memory: 512MB
Disk cache: Max size 409.6 MB (100.0% used)

J2C Decoder Version: KDU v7.10.4
Audio Driver Version: FMOD Studio 2.02.09
Dullahan: 1.12.4.202209142021
  CEF: 91.1.21+g9dd45fe+chromium-91.0.4472.114
  Chromium: 91.0.4472.114
LibVLC Version: 3.0.16
Voice Server Version: Vivox 4.10.0000.32327.5fc3fe7c.571099

Packets Lost: 93/462,364 (0.0%)
March 05 2023 19:04:02

Edited March 6, 2023 by Lilyana Muircastle

[Henri Beauchamp]

What is the textures console saying (CTRL SHIFT 3) ?... Bias ?  Bound GL textures ?  VRAM usage ?

This is a wild guess, but it looks like the VRAM getting full and spilling over the RAM (causing second-long freezes).

FS (and LL, for the PBR viewer, at least) recently changed how they account for textures memory usage, but it may cause issues that were not previously seen happening...

Also, try the Cool VL Viewer (it got fixes and different algorithms to work around such issues).

Quote

**EDIT** When this freezing occurs, if I am either voice or a video call in Discord it will also freeze.

There was an issue with some NVIDIA drivers and Discord, but it affected NVIDIA RTX30* cards only, and got fixed in their recent drivers (your 531.18 version should be fine). Yet, you could have a look at the GPU frequency and VRAM usage (per application) when the freezes happen, to see if any similar issue would be arising...

Edited March 6, 2023 by Henri Beauchamp

[Lilyana Muircastle]

3 hours ago, Henri Beauchamp said:

What is the textures console saying (CTRL SHIFT 3) ?... Bias ?  Bound GL textures ?  VRAM usage ?

This is a wild guess, but it looks like the VRAM getting full and spilling over the RAM (causing second-long freezes).

 

I attached an image about these numbers. I have no idea what I'm looking at. Now this was straight after logging in and sitting at my Linden Home.

3 hours ago, Henri Beauchamp said:

There was an issue with some NVIDIA drivers and Discord, but it affected NVIDIA RTX30* cards only, and got fixed in their recent drivers (your 531.18 version should be fine). Yet, you could have a look at the GPU frequency and VRAM usage (per application) when the freezes happen, to see if any similar issue would be arising...

Unfortunately, I don't know how to check any of these things. 

Thank you so much for responding so quickly! 

Edited March 6, 2023 by Lilyana Muircastle

[Henri Beauchamp]

6 hours ago, Lilyana Muircastle said:

I attached an image about these numbers. I have no idea what I'm looking at. Now this was straight after logging in and sitting at my Linden Home.

It shows that your texture memory is under high pressure (bias is very high, at 4.5, for a maximum of 5.0, meaning the textures must be quite blurry since decoded at a lower resolution to fit the 384MB of max bound textures). I would bet this is LL's viewer and its old 512MB maximum for the texture memory setting (which is quite low for modern graphics cards that got gigabytes of VRAM)...

But this is not really a worry as far as freezes are concerned (those would happen when the VRAM is full but here, ”GL free” shows 8700MB, so that's fine).

In conclusion, I doubt the freezes are due to the hypothesis I first made (but you still can have a look at the texture console when they happen, to see if those figures get worrisome).

6 hours ago, Lilyana Muircastle said:

Unfortunately, I don't know how to check any of these things.

From the Windows task manager, you should be able to see the GPU usage figure, per process...

For more detailed info, you could use (from a terminal) nvidia-smi.exe (/Program Files/NVIDIA Corporation/NVSMI/nvidia-smi.exe), which should list the VRAM usage, per application.

 

EDIT: I just saw this article about a bug that could cause high CPU usage in NVIDIA driver v531.18, so you might want to try the former version of the driver, or reinstall v531.18 without the telemetry (which would apparently be the culprit); NVCleanstall can do that for you...

Edited March 6, 2023 by Henri Beauchamp

[JeromFranzic]

Nvidia and AMD have updated hotfixes to their Windows drivers. 

https://www.pcgamer.com/grab-nvidia-and-amds-new-gpu-drivers-here-to-save-your-cpu-and-maybe-even-your-windows-install/

Edited March 8, 2023 by JeromFranzic

[Nalates Urriah]

If this happens again, open the Task Manager. - To open it just start typing Task Manager in the Windows search in the lower-left (Win10) or center-left (Win11) search dialog.

Click on the Performance tab. Look to see what percentage of use your 'C:' drive is getting. Often you'll find it at 100% when you get mini-freezes in the viewer. You can open the Resource Monitor to see what is using the disk.

Search for Win10 disk use at 100% to find various solutions to try. Quite often it is Microsoft's Diagnostic services that are the problem. You can disable them in SERVICES without damaging your system. They serve a purpose. So you want to get the problem resolved at some point. Microsoft is not providing any solution... at least that I have found. I tend to disable the service and leave it disabled. The next Windows update tends to enable the services.

You can try SFC and DISM repairs to see if they help.