Knowledge Base

I have a lot of lag. How do I stop it?

Since no two people refer to the same thing when they refer to "lag," let's try to identify what's actually going wrong.

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The video is jerky or stuttering, pauses for long periods of time, and everything stops moving (including my avatar).

This type of "lag" -- known as low framerate -- usually indicates that your computer is having trouble drawing what it sees. There may be too much detail in the scene you're looking at, you may have your graphical Preferences too high, or something else might be taking up a lot of your computer's processing time.

I sit in a deserted lot on SLVEC, no graphics, no motion, no detail, lag meter shows green, green, green. CPU% will set at about 18% for 5 minutes (average) then for no apparent reason will shoot to 98+%, mouse response will slow, I have a bout 20 seconds to exit or minimize SL before the whole computer feezes and requires a hardware reset.

First, make sure you're using a compatible graphics card. While some non-compatible graphics cards might work, they're likely to have much greater problems drawing the Second Life world. Make sure you're using the latest drivers as well.

I'm using Graphics Card: GeForce 8600 GT/PCI/SSE2 by NVIDIA with latest driver. Best I could get without auctioning off one of my kids.

Second, while your computer may meet the Minimum System Requirements, it's best to exceed them to prevent bottlenecks. (The Minimum System Requirements are the minimum hardware required to run Second Life at all.) A slower processor (under 2GHz), older video card (any nVidia Geforce older than a FX 5200, or ATI Radeon older than a 9700), or low memory (less than 512MB if you're not running other programs) can contribute to low framerates.

Processor Intel Pentium III/Pentium III Xeon (0.25 micron process) with external L2 cache (2982 MHz), FX8600, RAM Memory: 3326 MB DDR, nothing else running (escept Windows Task Manager) AND no indication that framerates are low until it freezes.

Take a look at the settings in the Preferences window if you haven't already. The easiest settings you can change are Draw Distance and Object/Tree/Avatar Detail.

Draw distance and resolution details at minimum or maximum makes no difference.

Check to see if your hard drive light is showing a lot of activity. If it is, then your system may be running low on memory and using hard drive swap space instead, which is significantly slower.

No disk activity. Windows Task Manager shows:- Memory available 2.5G. Commit Charge 712M Peak 726M Limit 5.3G. Kernel Memory 89M Paged 71M NonPaged 18M. The only thing that changes when it feezes is CPU usage goes to 100%

You might need to turn your bandwidth settings down in the Preferences window if your computer is receiving more network data than it can handle.

There doesn't appear to be any difference between min and max, and sitting in an empty lot with no activity should be nearly zero bandwidth requirements.

Try teleporting to a quieter area, or one with less objects, to see if the situation improves.

Tests were done under these conditions, and on a sim with no other avatars or high load processing.

You might also read our Statistics Guide to verify that the problem is low frame rate (Basic FPS in the Statistics window).

Try deselecting Avatar Vertex Program in the Advanced Graphics tab in the Preferences window. It says "(faster)" behind it but it's been verified to slow down at least one ATI card, so it may be causing Second Life to run slower for you.

These make no difference.

With my limited and dangerous knowledge it seems like something in SL is making client side system calls unnecessarily and faster than the O/S can respond so it is accumulating a stack of unprocessed calls. If you exit SL just prior to a total freeze, it can take a minute for the CPU% to drop to zero suggesting that it is still cleaning up a stack of orphaned requests. Eventually this overloaded stack starts to slow the system down and you have a domino effect with the CPU doing massive overhead and little processing. I cannot find any "activity" that makes it worse or better, it seems to be random. Always after running for a while, sometimes only a minute and sometimes not for 20 minutes with an average of about 5. The severity of the freeze does seem to get worse with any type of load - inventory processing - compiling/saving scripts, and I think client side graphics animations - but these are probably marginal increase on top of the 98% that tip it over the 100% more frequently.

Before a freeze, I can do complex graphics, masive download flying across sims, complex client side animations, high lag sims, and the CPU% will range from a low of about 18% to a high of about 52%. This appears to be a "normal" and not unexpected working range. When the domino freeze failure kicks in, the CPU suddenly climbs to 100%. Minimizing SL for 5 minutes if it didn't freeze completely will restore "normal" operation.

Here is the CPU usage graph. SL is maximized but out of focus, zero activity, all textures downloaded. CPU oscillates between 2% and 100% every minute of so:-