Crashing a lot? Maybe some food for thought

[Gryphon Ronas]

I used to crash 25-30 times a day if I was on all day.  Anything might trigger it.  If I stay in one place too long, if I move around too fast, if I did the unthinkable and actually tried to cam on something.  It was bad.  IM's crashed me, opening a group chat sent me to the desktop.

I tried different viewers.  It would get better for a day or so.  Not good, but better.  I tried every PC tune-up and registry trick in the book.  So one day a couple months ago, I carefully backed up everything on my computer that mattered to me and I restored it to factory default.

I still crash. But where it used to be on the average of every 20-30 minutes, it's more like once every few hundred hours of use.  I had been downgrading graphics a bit at a time till I was nearly at basic.  Now I run around with full shadows and everything.  

The lesson learned was, it wasn't LL that sucked - it was my computer.  Maybe we shouldn't be so quick to jump to conclusions.

If you think you have tried everything, and it still just won't run - assuming you are running hardware that actually can run it - maybe the problem isn't where you think it is?  Might be worth a try.  Worst case - you have a clean operating system again.

[Luc Starsider]

Been there, done that I have also had similar experiences. In my case my broadband connection were causing issues that did not show except for when I was in SL.

Gremlins in the system and faulty connections are often the culprit when it comes to SL issues. Not in all cases, but in quite a few more than we think. A good cleanup and reinstall will improve things. Worth doing from time to time.

- Luc -

[Gryphon Ronas]

For sure, a good cleanup now and then makes everything so much better.

You mentioned faulty connections - I think sometimes we forget just how many connections there are between us and the LL servers. Grab the IP address of your sim some time and run a quick traceip on it. That will show how many times each packet gets handed off between you and LL.

One night my ping time to the sim was running about 115, I was like wth? Then I checked and found that for some reason, my ISP (or someone above them) was rerouting traffic - I had 37 handoffs between me and LL. OK, so I guess that nasty ol' 115ms wasn't so bad after all.

So basically - unless everyone in the sim is having issues, don't look to LL for the problem. Look closer to hom. A lot closer...

[Luc Starsider]

There truly are a lot of elements to consider before starting to blame LL for issues. Checking, as you say, whether more people in a sim has the same issues is probably a good first place to start troubleshooting.

I have had ping times above 200 ms at times. Things go slow, but SL is actually usable when this happens.

- Luc -