Billy Daxter

Gracie, I would go with the latest drivers for the OS that you are using. From there all you should have to do is use the space navigator defaults in the viewer and it should work. I have had problems in the past with the drivers requiring me to uninstall and reinstall the drivers. I would not recommend using the older drivers. Just get the new ones from the site and see if that works for you. Sometimes it takes a little tinkering but it will eventually work for you. One other thing. If you have one of the wireless ones. Don't try to charge it and use the wireless receiver at the same time. It tends to bork the driver.

Even more powerful than removing the ages from our profiles. When you see someone new give them a helping hand. Even small stuff can help people out greatly and help them learn some of the stuff that took us all years to figure out. Don't forget this is a social platform. Being social to people (even new people) helps immensely.

No offense was intended. I'm really sorry that you viewed it that way. My assumption was based on the general experience that I have had in my many years on Second Life. Most people don't dig into things or ask for help. I applaud you for doing that and hope that you are eventually able to figure out what's causing the trouble. It's also important to keep in mind that one experience does not describe the experiences of thousands of other people. I never noticed the event that you described and all of my regions have plenty of idle time to spare. Does my individual experience represent everyone? No. Does yours? Unlikely. Please also don't draw the conclusion that my assumption is that you are "doing something wrong". From what you have described you are doing the right thing getting the right people involved. All I'm saying is I don't have the same problem. Is this because I'm lucky? Is it because I dig in and know what scripts are running? Who know's for sure. There's no data to back any real conclusion. At the end of the day I replied to this thread to try and be helpful and share the experience I have had working through the same performance issues many describe here. There's no magic button to be pressed just standard resource management like with any other resource. If you have X resources available stay under that threshold to avoid issues. Prims are easier to manage of course as there's a limit to them. Perhaps if we scream louder and make more accusations the Lindens might adjust the Land impact score to help us manage our resources better? I have a feeling that's not what we really want in the long run. In any event. It's been a lot of fun but I don't see a lot of value in this thread anymore. Since I have managed to offend someone it's probably best I bugger off somewhere else.

I never noticed this myself on my land... What would be interesting is to compare the time frame against the release notes of what ended up going out that changed this. You might have some objects that worked well on on one version and then have a serious performance penalty on another. You could probably identify the offending objects by looking at their script use and then either shutting their scripts off or eliminating them all together. In a "user created world" some scripters are better than others and of course everyone's mileage varies depending on what they have rezzed out. I once had a similar situation happen to me. One day I had tons of idle time and the next day it was gone. Took me a while but I eventually found an offending door script on a boat that I had rezzed that was eating up a ton of physics time. The tools provided aren't the most user friendly out there but they do work if you take the time to try to understand what they are telling you. The important takeaway here is all of our sims are different and it's impossible for content providers or the Lindens to know about performance issues that we are seeing unless we tell them and are able to back our "it's laggy" claims with hard data. This is sometimes difficult even for people like myself who know exactly what's going on with their sim performance but it's a much better way at pointing the right people at the right problem.

That's really the question. Think for a moment though through your assertion. "since I changed nothing". Are you sure? Not a single new object rezzed that contains scripts? Perhaps you actually do have a completely static unchanged environment but that's in most cases the exception rather than the rule. The problem is that most sims tend to change over time. That change tends to be the addition of more scripted objects. As well. Objects themselves are not a static thing that remains constant. Content creators are making more capable products that do more things and thus as a result use more script time. This is why I only buy copy and mod products so I can turn many of these "features" off. We can all get out our pitchforks and complain. It certainly feels good but accomplishes very little. How many people have actually gone through their sims and have done something to turn off scripts that aren't being utilized? I have done this many times before and have managed to gain a lot of idle time as a result. Some good candidates for script killing color change scripts landscape season scripts door and window scripts in builds that don't need said doors or windows opened or closed regularly Sit scripts in objects that aren't used for sitting light switch scripts when you leave the lights on all the time Any script used "occasionally" that can be turned back on when you want to make a change. Avatars also have many of the same scripts inside them and they come and go into our sims. They also have the same level of script bloat that grows over time. How many scripts does your avatar have in it that aren't being used at all? Do you wear your alpha hud 24/7 or do you make copies of alphaed bodies and save them as outfits with the clothing? Firestorm has some really good script diagnostic stuff built into it and also the ability to turn off scripts for objects. Explore that scripts pie menu sometime when right clicking on objects. What I'm getting at is that we are also part of the problem here. There's stuff that we can actually do that will make things better in the short term on our own. The sim I am on right now has 17ms of idle time.

Some food for thought... As mentioned previously in this thread lots of services have been migrated away from the legacy UDP style way of transferring content and is being handled differently. They are also doing some other stuff with all of the cloud things we all have been buzzing about. This would give them more capacity in their datacenters rather than less. The hardware is there. It makes little sense to try to do more with less when they have more than enough hardware laying around doing nothing. Datacenter space does not just shrink or expand on demand so increasing the sim/core ratio would not benefit them with all the spare cores sitting idle. The hypothesis does not make a lot of sense when you consider all of the costs it takes to operate physical datacenters. How exactly does that work? Pay for the hardware and the space and then let it sit idle to save a few cents on electricity? What? How does that benefit them? I'm with you here. I think that people who think they are stacking more sims onto the same amount of cores is way off base. They have put some significant effort into a lot of recent changes we have seen. For a 15 year old product that's pretty amazing. Why would they put forward that engineering and developer effort only to try and pull something sneaky that would ultimately make things worse? For those of you complaining for the love of all that's good in the world learn to use the estate management tools and get rid of those resource robbing scripts sitting there doing nothing on your sims. Rather than conspiracy theories which aren't going to improve your performance spend that time actually optimizing your sims. The edit tool and Firestorms Script Info tool is amazingly useful for identifying useless scripts and turning them off. Scripts aren't the only game in town either for improving performance. Render lag is a thing too. I once went to a region with gatcha vendors that had so many poly's that it made my 5ghz gaming desktop take notice.

I could certainly see that. Especially the longitudinal study part. The only problem is that there's the assumption that the sim remains the same over time which is very much not the case. It's almost always a moving target. People regularly add more scripted objects over time which themselves could be the very cause for the perceived performance decrease over the timeframe. It's really difficult to determine the difference between performance impact that's self inflicted and performance impact that's from outside sources without a reliable and repeatable form of data and comparison that remains constant.

Here's the fun part. It "could" be any number of things. Most sims aren't carbon copies of one another and use different objects all scripted by different people with different abilities in LSL coding. Comparing any one sim to another really is an apples to oranges comparison considering that they are completely different. The only way you could really compare reasonably without just it being a wild guess would be to have two completely identical sims. If they aren't identical there's no telling what's actually causing issues without looking and quantifying it. Think of it this way. You want to benchmark some desktop computers. You have the same OS on both machines but one machine is loaded with spyware and viruses and the other one is a blank install of the OS. Which do you think is going to perform better? While spyware and viruses is a pretty extreme case it's not really too far from the truth with some of the poorly written LSL I have helped friends remove from their sims. Remember. It's a user created world. Some of us are idiots. I certainly am at times slinging out thousands of poorly scripted items that's tanked my performance. I learned a lot from being an idiot though and have nice smooth running lag free sim's now just by taking the time to understand "what" I am rezzing and how to diagnose issues when I create them for myself.

I use them all the time to keep my script time in check. They work ok and you can sort by CPU time and by memory use. You can also look at individual objects and use firestorm to show script use. You just have to invest the time and dig a bit. The information is there if you know what you are looking for and how to interpret it. If you don't understand what the numbers mean there's a lot of resources out there that can help. There's room for improvement of course but it's pretty useful to me as is.

I'm not seeing this on my regions to be honest. Nearly full of objects with 15ms of free time. The estate control panel offers the top scripts window that you could use to debug and find out what's consuming all that time.

I have one of these myself. They can be a bit flakey at times. Here's what I generally do when mine acts up. -If you have one of the wireless ones unplug the USB dongle and plug it back in. -If it's a wireless model you can't have it plugged into a USB port at the same time. -Power cycle the controller. -Kill the running software and restart it. -Toggle it on and off in the viewer and reset it to defaults. In most cases this gets mine back to life. I have had to resort to re-installing the software on very rare occasions. Despite the flakiness this is the single most wonderful thing you can have on SL. I use mine exclusively to control the camera. I don't find the avatar moving or building options useful. Reach out in world if you like. I would be glad to chat with you and answer questions. I use mine on my PC but I'm also a Mac user.

I agree on the lowering of prices. The funny thing is some careful price lowering might actually stimulate growth. Many sim owners if they had a better deal might be tempted to tack on an additional sim to their creation. Land owners who rent whole sims might be tempted to take on some new sims to meet demand. I'm glad to see them already taking steps to accomplish this on the Mainland and hope that it makes it to the Islands eventually. As for the Lindens when they are in world I saw this happen myself on my own island. I actually sort of felt sorry for them trying to keep up with local chat with lots of people excited to see them. Despite this they were amazingly polite and seemed to put in a huge effort to keep up with the local chat until they moved onto another sim. I wanted to clarify my original post as well. This is my wish list. Obviously the platform works and is healthy despite the minor hiccups that happen with any type of service. There's always room for improvement and those were the things I certainly hope can be improved upon. Second Life despite it's age is quite amazing and people are quite passionate about it. In regards to the Hardware specs that Klytna commented on. I realize most people are using older systems to get onto SL. This is a reality I deal with even with my sim's design trying not to create huge render lag. There's no reason why both can't exist. The settings allow users with older systems to dial back the eye candy so their systems can keep up. What I'm hoping eventually happens is that support for higher end machines becomes a priority. I'm quite fortunate and my machine that I access second life with has a graphics card with 11gb of video ram and lots of horsepower to go with that driving a 4k monitor. It would be nice to be able to take more advantage of the additional hardware my machine has available. While not everyone has a system that's powerful there are a lot of people with gaming PC's that have quite decent specs that they also use for second life. Getting these people some additional performance using hardware that they already own would only improve things and perhaps get more engagement in the platform. I understand of course there's a lot of legacy stuff in the viewer that prevent this and viewers like Black Dragon already exist so this may not be a priority. It would really be nice though for sure. A wish for the wish list. I do agree with Klytna though enforcing minimum specs would be a step in the wrong direction and possibly take Second Life away from engaged residents who don't have big bucks to spend on hardware. I would certainly not want to enjoy a performance increase at the cost to someone else. As for Product Managers. I deal with this perception a lot in my day job. Product Managers fill a unique niche in many businesses. Some are classical manager types that Klytna describes but others "speak both languages" with a technical understanding and an understanding of the business that drives success for customers and the company. As well if there's a Linden Lab product manager out there steamed that I said "get REAL" Product Mangers my apologies. As a user I have virtually no visibility into anything and that's just my perception. I'm sure that things look very different behind the scenes.

Oh wow. Just stumbled onto this treasure. Where to start? 1. Sim Backend Hardware Refresh - Get the hardware up to the standard that they are running on open sim. More memory and faster CPU's with more than one core and get us some SSD's. For what we are paying we deserve nothing less than the best hardware available and for that hardware to be regularly refreshed. While I know a lot of this is going to EC2 don't cheap out on the provisioning there either more memory more cores and more disk I/O. PERIOD! This also goes for all of the other services that SL provides such as login servers and other services that make the platform work. 2. Major viewer refresh - The only decent viewer out there these days is Black Dragon to be quite honest and they are running into platform limitations with being able to improve further. This is the major limitation of the platform. Even old video cards with 4gb GPU's sit idle because the viewer can't utilize the hardware. 3. Update Limits to more modern standards - Many of the limits put into place were quite reasonable when things were put into place but letting them stagnate without revisiting these has only harmed the platform as a whole. Change with the times rather than falling back to outdated limitations. Take a look at Opensim and their 100,000 prim sim's for a good idea of where to start. 4. Update Pricing to more closely match the market - Currently for the money I spend for my two sims on Second Life I could have 64 Opensim sim's. So instead of a tiny island I could have a small continent. If the Lindens are worried this would crush the Linden economy then give us some pretty massive performance and capabilities in return. 5. Kill off Sansar - Too late to market, Still in it's infancy with competing products that are actually usable. Sansar is still relatively unknown in the market and you have a HUGE mountain to climb to even get it on the radar. Put all these developers to work on your known platform that people actually use. While yes Second Life will always have some Legacy Cruft involved due to it's age, it's a mature platform that does not have to suffer the way it does due to the neglect that it's seen. And if you think that Second Life users are all going to one day "see the light" and throw away decades of their efforts in your old platform and move to the new one you are SADLY mistaken. When we see you building a new platform on the backs of all of our efforts on SL and abandoning us by poorly maintaining SL all it accomplishes is to make us angry and abandon your company. Why invest time in Sansar when it's going to be the next SL only to be abandoned when you build the Sansar replacement? 6. Get some REAL product management for SL. As a creator and sim owner I see tons of threads about useless new features like animesh and bake on mesh that only add a tiny bit of functionality to the platform with what seems like a great deal of developer time behind it. I see these pet projects developers are spending time on while ignoring bugs and issues that would actually help improve the platform as a whole. You guys HAVE to prioritize where you are spending your developer resources. I'm a PM IRL and you guys should be glad you don't work with me because I would require at least 5 major bug fixes for every single new feature I approved for release and even then I would require some real world use cases to justify your pet projects. Stop chasing the new shiny and fix the bugs. 7. Get involved in the community again. Meetings about feature releases are held on the beta grid and cryptically referenced in the forums. In a "real company" you don't whisper in the elevator that you are going to have a meeting about something. You put effort in to make sure people are aware of the meeting. It's painfully obvious you don't really want the community input. Meetings like this should be held on the main grid and open to anyone. Yes it's painful at times to get non technical input from the unwashed masses but that's what Product Managers are for. 8. Be realistic and honest with yourselves. I see Linden's constantly seek the praise of users introducing niche features while ignoring real issues brought forward by other users. It's really easy to get sucked into the praise you get by introducing new stuff is easier to deal with than "this is broken fix it" which often are big issues that will require lots of effort to fix and get no "you are wonderful and so smart" in return. The problem of course is many of these big issues have the potential to kill the platform. The exodus of users is slow but it's happening and they aren't migrating to Sansar. I admit none of these are easy. Despite it's problems however there's nothing like Second Life out there. It's simply an amazing platform that if someone actually invested a bit more time and effort in could still compete with the likes of Virtual Reality and all the new upstarts. Despite the new technology and features what they don't have is the user base and the rich content that Second Life has. The users created what makes Second Life special over decades of hard work. What I see slowly happening is kind of tragic.