screen freeze

[Elyjia Baxton]

Hello,


Before I explain my problem, I have to say that this only happens in crowded places like clubs.
I don't have any problem elsewhere.

As soon as I go to a place where there are a lot of people (clubs for example) my screen freezes after a few minutes and does not respond for several minutes and it is impossible for me to stay there. Often I have to close the viewer (in this case firestorm).

This started with the updates (the last one from firestorm and maybe the Windows 11 update) I can't say exactly which one is creating the problem since I did the 2 almost at the same time.

Usually my graphics are at Ultra and my max complexity at maximum. Only, in clubs I have to lower my max complexity to less than 40 000. I tested with the graphics at low and ultra in the clubs, I realize that it is the max complexity that causes a problem. It's not very interesting to go to a club and not see anyone.

I have whitelisted folders and files in my antivirus. I reinstalled the viewer properly. The problem persists. I see the memory saturated until it does not respond anymore.

Here is the information of my computer;

CPU : Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-9700 CPU @ 3.00GHz (3000.01 MHz)
Memory: 16300 MB
OS Version: Microsoft Windows 11 64-bit (Build 22621.1413)
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Ti/PCIe/SSE2
Graphics Card Memory: 6144 MB


For several weeks now, I've been testing with both the viewer and windows.
I just can't find it. So if someone has an idea, I'm interested.

I'm looking forward to it. Thank you!
 

[Rowan Amore]

1 hour ago, Elyjia Baxton said:

Hello,


Before I explain my problem, I have to say that this only happens in crowded places like clubs.
I don't have any problem elsewhere.

As soon as I go to a place where there are a lot of people (clubs for example) my screen freezes after a few minutes and does not respond for several minutes and it is impossible for me to stay there. Often I have to close the viewer (in this case firestorm).

This started with the updates (the last one from firestorm and maybe the Windows 11 update) I can't say exactly which one is creating the problem since I did the 2 almost at the same time.

Usually my graphics are at Ultra and my max complexity at maximum. Only, in clubs I have to lower my max complexity to less than 40 000. I tested with the graphics at low and ultra in the clubs, I realize that it is the max complexity that causes a problem. It's not very interesting to go to a club and not see anyone.

I have whitelisted folders and files in my antivirus. I reinstalled the viewer properly. The problem persists. I see the memory saturated until it does not respond anymore.

Here is the information of my computer;

CPU : Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-9700 CPU @ 3.00GHz (3000.01 MHz)
Memory: 16300 MB
OS Version: Microsoft Windows 11 64-bit (Build 22621.1413)
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Ti/PCIe/SSE2
Graphics Card Memory: 6144 MB


For several weeks now, I've been testing with both the viewer and windows.
I just can't find it. So if someone has an idea, I'm interested.

I'm looking forward to it. Thank you!
 

You can adjust you Ultra setting for clubs and save it in Firestorm.  I run with higher complexity yet turn draw down to under 100 and shadows off.  That should make a big difference.  There are lots of little tweaks to graphics setting instead of just ticking Low or Ultra.  Try different combos.   Draw distance and shadows will have the most impact, however.

[Elyjia Baxton]

15 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

You can adjust you Ultra setting for clubs and save it in Firestorm.  I run with higher complexity yet turn draw down to under 100 and shadows off.  That should make a big difference.  There are lots of little tweaks to graphics setting instead of just ticking Low or Ultra.  Try different combos.   Draw distance and shadows will have the most impact, however.

Hello and thank you for your answer.

However, this has been tested.  In Ultra I have a very good FPS, over 80 in crowded clubs. This is not a problem.  As soon as the max complexity is over 80,000 whether I am in low or ultra, my screen will freeze.

I also tested by removing the shadows, with a draw distance as low as possible

Edited April 5, 2023 by Elyjia Baxton

[Ardy Lay]

I sometimes experience some discomfort when the viewer is working on removing objects and avatars from the scene, as when I run away from a crowd but do not leave the region.  It stalls, blinks, coughs, sputters sometimes the window even goes black.   Just about the time I suspect it's about to crash, it will start working normally again.  Parcel music plays fine during this fit.  WEIRD.  I get the impression that deleting data is hard.  This does seem to be a recent development but since it is so sporadic, I can't say which Second Life Viewer version started it.  If people are experiencing the same on third party viewers, then this malady is apparently contagious and has been around a while.

[Nalates Urriah]

@Elyjia Baxton Check your Windows installation. Open a Command Line window (CMD) as an admin and run SFC /scannow. If Windows has damaged files this will repair them.

The other possibility is high disk use. Open the Task Manager the next time you are freezing up. On the Performance tab, look to see if any of your drives are at 100% use. If so that is likely the problem.

In crowded regions, your viewer is throwing a lot of data into the cache, making for lots of disk writes. If some other app is hogging the disk, the viewer has to wait. You can run the Resource Monitor to see what is using the drive.

While in the Respouce Monitor, look in the memory section to see the rate of Page Faults (memory swaps to disk - a painfully slow task). If this is high it can be the cause of your freezes. If this is a problem, the solution is to run fewer apps and use less memory or buy more memory for your computer.

[Ardy Lay]

Oh, and maybe check that viewer logging isn't set too verbose.  That can be a lot of that disk I/O that Nalates is talking about.

[Henri Beauchamp]

20 hours ago, Ardy Lay said:

I sometimes experience some discomfort when the viewer is working on removing objects and avatars from the scene,

When objects get removed from memory because you changed region, several things happen:

• The regions you left behind get disconnected and removed from memory. In all, but the Cool VL Viewer (which uses a staged removal, at a rate of one region removal per second), this is done in one go (all regions removed at once), which may incur a large ”hiccup” of dozens to hundreds of ms (one smaller hiccup per second and region for the Cool VL Viewer, until all regions are removed).
• The objects which were present in the removed regions got their data written to the object cache, on file (one file per region). In all, but the Cool VL Viewer (which uses a write thread for the objects cache), this is done synchronously by the main viewer thread, and incurs another ”hiccup” (from a few ms to a couple hundreds ms, depending on how many objects are written and how fast are your OS and disk).
• The objects in every removed regions are then removed from the objects list. Here again, it is done synchronously (by the main thread), and here again you can get a ”nice” hiccup for each region.
• The textures that were used by the removed objects and are no more used by newly rezzed objects get in their turn removed from the texture list: this is done progressively, a few seconds after the last usage of each texture, and as a result the memory gets freed (which may cause newly rezzed textures to get more space and be re-decoded at a higher level of detail), and the texture list gets smaller, which increases the speed of its periodic refresh, causing a progressive increase in the frame rate.

To the above, you may (this is not systematic) also see other things happening as new objects rez in the region you entered (and possibly neighbor regions that just got connected):

• The texture cache may get full, and the viewer will then enter a cache cleanup (oldest cached textures will be removed until enough room is made in the cache). In all, but the Cool VL Viewer (which uses a fully threaded texture cache), this is done in either one big wipe (= large hiccup), or several small ones (= a few hiccups during a few seconds).
• The assets cache may get full, due to newly rezzed meshes. Normally, all viewers should now clean up that cache asynchronously (in a thread), but the resulting file I/O concurrency may still cause hiccups whenever the main viewer thread attempts a synchronous file access while your disk (or OS) I/O queues are saturated.

There are also other sources of ”hiccups” while moving around on the grid (such as object cache reads on already visited regions connection, or slow DNS replies on region connection or on first access of an HTTP capability you just received from a rezzing region).

Quote

as when I run away from a crowd but do not leave the region.

This includes just ”turning around while staying in region”: objects also get removed from the objects lists (since no more in your camera FOV), textures removed later, caches possibly getting full with new meshes and textures being rezzed, depending on your position and draw distance, neighbor regions getting connected.

It is alas not currently possible to remove all the hiccups (even if things could be improved, like I did with my viewer); with a threaded Vulkan renderer, however, we could well see those hiccups disappear in the future...

Edited April 6, 2023 by Henri Beauchamp

[Elyjia Baxton]

21 hours ago, Nalates Urriah said:

@Elyjia Baxton Check your Windows installation. Open a Command Line window (CMD) as an admin and run SFC /scannow. If Windows has damaged files this will repair them.

The other possibility is high disk use. Open the Task Manager the next time you are freezing up. On the Performance tab, look to see if any of your drives are at 100% use. If so that is likely the problem.

In crowded regions, your viewer is throwing a lot of data into the cache, making for lots of disk writes. If some other app is hogging the disk, the viewer has to wait. You can run the Resource Monitor to see what is using the drive.

While in the Respouce Monitor, look in the memory section to see the rate of Page Faults (memory swaps to disk - a painfully slow task). If this is high it can be the cause of your freezes. If this is a problem, the solution is to run fewer apps and use less memory or buy more memory for your computer.

Thanks for your help Nalates Urriah,

I used the command to check my computer, it fixed some things.

I went back to a crowded club afterwards. After a computer reboot. The only thing open was firestorm. I watched my task manager during this time. Still in low graphics, draw distance at 32 m. As soon as I increase my max complexity a bit, in this case 80 000 my screen freezes. And my memory is only used at 65%...
 

[Rowan Amore]

15 minutes ago, Elyjia Baxton said:

Thanks for your help Nalates Urriah,

I used the command to check my computer, it fixed some things.

I went back to a crowded club afterwards. After a computer reboot. The only thing open was firestorm. I watched my task manager during this time. Still in low graphics, draw distance at 32 m. As soon as I increase my max complexity a bit, in this case 80 000 my screen freezes. And my memory is only used at 65%...
 

Have you tried increasing your complexity before entering the crowded place?  

[Elyjia Baxton]

7 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

Have you tried increasing your complexity before entering the crowded place?  

yes I tried again to test my higher max complexity before entering a club, after 3 or 4 minutes my screen freezes.

[Nalates Urriah]

@Elyjia Baxton When observing the Task Manager look at the Performance tab -> CPU.

Notice if the CPU is running at its max frequency. In the image in the upper right you can see my CPU is an i5-6600 @ 3. GHz. But at the moment it was only running at 3.25MHz. Also, I overclock and run at a max of 4.17GHz. So the CPU is currently 0.92GHz below its max speed. If you see the numbers showing a 100% use and running at the CPU's max speed, then we know you are CPU bottlenecked, then we start figuring out why.

The rest of the panel can give us clues as to what is happening.

The other parts of the computer can give us a clue as to what is causing the bottleneck.

The Performance Monitor is for a detailed examination. The Resouce Monitor will show if there is something hogging a part of the computer and causing the Viewer to wait.

I suggest you open the Resource Monitor and look at the Memory. There is a column listing the Page Fault Rate for each process. This is often the cause of mini-freezes. Run the viewer for a bit and the monitor will show average page faults per second. When other apps cause the fault the viewer usually does a mini freeze. When it is the viewer causing the fault then the viewer has longer freezes.

When I first land at Peak Lounge my CPU hits 100% and the camera is jerky. I see heavy network traffic and high CPU use as loads of textures and mesh items are downloaded and decoded. The more stuff I have running in the background the worse it is. In a few minutes, it passes.  I do think this is more of a problem than in the past.

On average I have 140+ processes running in the background. I could improve performance by looking at those and figuring out which of those I could shut down. For a time the Microsoft Diagnostic services were hogging the C:\ drive and bringing my computer to crawl. I would shut them down and things were good again.

Since only a few people are having a problem, this is likely something in the local computer. Otherwise, thousands would be screaming.

Often Windows decides it has to do maintenance and the Diagnostic Services start using 100% of the C:\ drives bandwidth causing a flood of mini-freezes. So... watch for that. This usually happens when you power up the computer. If you launch the viewer before the computer completes its self-checks and updates the viewer will have problems. Depending on the computer that can 10+ minutes.

 

[Elyjia Baxton]

https://gyazo.com/0dfb8129690a5629a8d5e98d0db9ce1c

 

I went to the Peak, precisely, the place of my tests
Here is the result of my performance when I started to feel my screen freezing.

 

[Kathrine Jansma]

If you really want to dig deep into that kind of hiccups and slowdowns, on Windows, you can unleash stuff like ETW and WPR/WPA.

https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2015/09/24/etw-central/ has a few fairly deep dives into Windows System profiling. This kind of analysis shows all the interactions between system components like network and filesystem. SL Viewers lack the necessary ETW trace points to really hook into that system.

Usually for the viewer one can use the Tracy profiler to get some insights, but that stops at the process border basically, only looking at the GPU too. If one hooked up ETW, it would allow a deep dive from network driver through virus scanner and filesystem driver right into the GPU parts. 

Most games do not have such a fat/intense network and disk activity for streaming and discarding random new content. So pure game profilers might fall short for general effects.

 

[Henri Beauchamp]

1 hour ago, Elyjia Baxton said:

Here is the result of my performance when I started to feel my screen freezing.

Your computer memory is almost full... That's the problem (at this point, Windoze must be swapping like mad).

What is the settings you are using in the viewer for the texture memory ?

With only 16GB of RAM available, you should not use more than 2GB of texture VRAM or so (maybe up to 4GB, if you run the viewer alone), to avoid filling up your computer memory to the brim (for each texture held in VRAM, two copies, one ”raw” and one decoded, exist in RAM).

You could also try the Cool VL Viewer and see how it fares on your system (I optimized it to properly size the texture memory to available RAM and VRAM, and keep everything in line).

Also, you should configure Windows with a fixed size swap file, so to avoid seeing it reallocated each time Windows wants to grow it, causing freezes, slow downs or even crashes (Windows returns NULL pointers (out of memory condition) for malloc() calls, when they happen at the very moment it resizes its swap file, and programs do not like that...): a 8GB swap file should be more than enough.

Here is where to set the swap file size:

Edited April 6, 2023 by Henri Beauchamp

[Elyjia Baxton]

18 minutes ago, Henri Beauchamp said:

Your computer memory is almost full... That's the problem (Windoze then must be swapping like mad).

What is the settings you are using in the viewer for the texture memory ?

With only 16GB of RAM available, you should not use more than 2GB of texture VRAM or so, to avoid filling up your computer memory to the brim.

https://gyazo.com/9602f90fe9f3f101dfbb2a10a237dc9d

is that right?

[Henri Beauchamp]

6 minutes ago, Elyjia Baxton said:

is that right?

Nope... Uncheck ”Activer la mémoire de texture dynamique”, and instead use the slider above (that will get enabled) to set it (the maximum is already 2048MB, which will be fine).

Edited April 6, 2023 by Henri Beauchamp

[Elyjia Baxton]

9 minutes ago, Henri Beauchamp said:

Nope... Uncheck ”Activiver la mémoire de texture dynamique”, and instead use the slider above (that will get enabled) to set it (the maximum is already 2048MB, which will be fine).

ok I deactivated and I'm at 2048MB