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I've been having a range of issues on my M1 Mac Mini since upgrading from Big Sur to Monterey. One was severe, caused by the new feature 'Virtual Private Relay'. Though that was resolved by turning the feature off, I've still been plagued by severe lag. In fact, it goes way beyond lag and can't be blamed on the viewers (it is affecting the official Linden viewer, Firestorm and Catznip, and as you'll see probably any and all others as well). What happens is that the viewer starts to take more and more memory, indicating a memory leak somewhere, and then the dreaded Kernel_task kicks in. This is part of the operating system, designed to protect the hardware from excessive load. But it effectively freezes the viewer and you find that you can't type, teleport, walk, sit - do anything. The best and often only way out is to quit the viewer. It's much worse in busy sims, as you would expect. I've finally come across some information which points to a fix, and it is working so far for me: https://eclecticlight.co/2021/11/15/montereys-memory-leak-and-how-to-avoid-it/ The post explains how a new feature in Monterey - the ability to resize, recolour and customise the mouse pointer (sometimes referred to as the 'cursor') - is creating memory leaks especially in apps where you frequently shift back and forth between the pointer function / icon and the text insertion function / icon. Browsers, for example. Or SL viewers. We're doing this ALL the time. Wave the pointer around and it changes to the hand icon and back to the arrow again and again and again. No wonder I was having issues! This may not affect you at all. If you haven't customised the pointer, you're fine. Just remember not to do so until the bug is squashed. Here's the fix, from that website: You can keep an eye on the kernel_task using Activity Monitor (a built-in tool) or 3rd party tools such as iStat, which comes with a handy menu bar thingy, so you can keep track of things while in full-screen mode. Basically, as a rule of thumb, if the kernel_task is using more CPU resources than your viewer, then you're in trouble and likely to experience a freeze or complete lockdown. Please pass this information on to other Mac users. For more on the virtual private relay issue, see this thread: https://community.secondlife.com/forums/topic/480358-macos-viewer-issues/#comment-2386374

Due to Firestorm being extremely buggy and laggy on macOS as of late (I'm guessing it's due to all the latest server-side changes, or something like that, and Firestorm is not on par with Linden Lab's latest performance improvements - But I'm eagerly awaiting an update, as I love Firestorm's features), I've been using the Default Viewer a lot lately - It has epic performance in comparison to TPV's (Nearly double the FPS, and zero lock-ups or crashes. on Firestorm, by comparison, I have to completely disable ALM for barely tolerable performance.) but unfortunately, despite the great over-all performance of the default viewer, it falls short when it comes to texture rendering (probably due to its hard-coded 512mb texture memory limit). I'm attempting to take pictures for various projects including snapshots for my new Second Life related Blog but It's a real struggle on the default viewer with textures going blurry at random. I would be focussed in on the perfect shot and then suddenly, one of the objects in the scene would go blurry right as I'm about to take a snapshot. On rare occasions, I manage to catch everything in full resolution for a second. It's mostly a waiting game, sitting around for 10-15 minutes for every snapshot, waiting and hoping for all objects in the scene to render at full resolution at the same time, and hopefully hitting the screenshot button at the right moment, before something goes blurry again. Sometimes it happens, other times it feels like it's never going to happen. Is this a macOS-only issue? Or is this a general Default Second Life Viewer issue? Or is this a me/my system issue? I've tried to increase the texture memory of the viewer through the debug settings to the same value that I use when running Firestorm (1024), and I do not experience this problem on Firestorm, but due to FS's recent performance issues, I'm sticking to the Default Viewer until there's (hopefully) a Firestorm update that fixes the performance and stability issues. Regardless of what value I enter in the default viewer's texture memory debug setting, it always defaults back to a maximum of 512. Now I'm wondering, is there a way to force it to a higher value? Or is there another debug setting that I'm unaware of, that I could change, to stop textures from constantly going in-and-out of focus? There must be a way around this. Please help! Here are my system (potato?) specs for reference: (iMac 4K, Late-2017 - I'm still saving up for a new M1X MacBook Pro)

Hi guys, I love driving around in SL and I've recently started getting into transport related games such as GTFO, BelliBins, BBB Passport travels, etc. It's great, except for one very annoying issue that's been driving me mad; road vehicle camera mode bugs during region crossings. In most road vehicles using the driving scripts created by karyn.vaher, the following happens: I drive in 'FollowCam' mode, via the vehicle menu > Options > Camera > Cam Type. This is my preferred way of driving, and also appears to be the default, until I cross into a different region. Then the camera jumps to what appears similar to the "SportCam' mode, where I am unable to see the vehicle, and the only way to get it back to the FollowCam mode is to ctrl+option cam away, so that I can see my vehicle again, touch it to open its menu, and then go to Options > Camera, and click the "Cam Type" button twice, then it finally goes back to the usual 'FollowCam' mode. This happens every time, at every region crossing, in every vehicle that uses the same creator's scripts, which seem to be most road vehicles. Most seem to be using the same scripts from the same creator, and they all do this for me when crossing regions. Is there any way to prevent this from happening? I'd like my vehicles to stay in 'FollowCam' mode, and not switch to what appears to be "SportCam" on every region crossing - Even though the menu still shows that I'm in FollowCam Mode, I have to push the Cam Type button twice to get the cam view back to where it's supposed to be. How can I prevent this from happening? I would also like to know if anyone else is experiencing this issue, or if anyone can recommend a vehicle creator that does not use karyn.vaher's scripts (preferable a GTFO-compatible vehicle creator). This cam issue is driving me insane and I would really like to know if there's a way to fix it, or if there are alternative vehicles that I can use that don't make use of these Cam-Type scripts that seem to break on every region crossing. Please help!

Hi all, First of all, thanks for second life, it is great! Below questions are both relevant for the SL viewer as well for firestorm. On my MacBook pro, 2017, i5 2.3 GHz, 8 GB Ram, AMD Radeon Pro 580 OpenGL Engine (eGpu, temporarily borrowed), i have bad frame rate. Typical fr is below 10 with settings reset to default. Apperently, the openGl implementation on the mac is sub-optimal, so maybe there is a fundamental cause that is difficult to solve. The eGpu works, MacBook air cooling is almost always off now and fr is independent of screen size, even 4K works with the same fr as VGA. So something is right. However, if I use reasonable graphics quality setting, fr is below par. If I go to Iow graphics I maybe get 20 to 40 fps outside crowds, but rendering is bad, my own av looks very flaky then. In all settings, if I am in a ‘crowd’ of > 5 av’s, fr drastically reduces to very low levels. In default (mid / high) to 3 or 4, in low to below 10 fps. Strange is that reducing the max complexity does not help, looks like jellies take up as much time as fully rendered av’s. Sometimes, in low settings, I get 10 fps, but the av’s only update once a second (which may be a local problem at the PC of this av). Which brings me to my network. I think network is OK, I have a fiberglass connection and also tested the bandwidth. But I did not look into this deeper, the firestorm lag meter is almost always green for network, although in crowds I sometimes get a warning about large ping times. I need a new desktop for linux, so I’m thinking to get a more high-end config with also windows and use that for SL. But that will set me back a couple of bucks extra and I would like to know if that is worth the money. So first, I would like to further trouble-shoot my MacBook, but I’m clueless at the moment on how to proceed. Would it be possible to use Mac steam? I saw something about SL also being released for steam, but if not for the Mac it would not help. Sorry for the long post, tried to keep it as short as possible. Thanks! Bart.

I can see all internet content (like YouTube) now inworld. Unfortunately Twitch does not work on my Mac but on a PC. Any Ideas?

Apple has declared that they are deprecating OpenGL in this years MacOS update. This means they will not be actively supporting OpenGL anymore and will probably remove support all together after a couple of years. Will this mean the end of the MacOS viewer in SecondLife? OpenGL, OpenCL deprecated in favor of Metal 2 in macOS 10.14 Mojave - APPLE INSIDER