Wednesday 3 November 2010

Phoenix Hour about Lag

On Tuesday we had an office hour where I decided to discuss LAG in SL, Facts, Myths and Misconceptions. For those of you who missed it, you can watch the recording here http://rezzed.tv/2010/11/the-phoenix-hour-2nd-november-2011/.

Many have asked me to provide a notecard or wiki page with regards to the things covered. I will be creating a wiki page in the next day or so and will link to it here once it's done. Many have also asked for the links I referred to during the discussion so I will post them here.
http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Avatar_Rendering_Cost
http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Statistics_Bar_Guide
http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Reducing_lag
http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Help:Lag

Jessica Lyon
The Phoenix Viewer Project

7 comments:

  1. All of the suggestions are useful, but lag is often caused by a lack of bandwidth from Second Life's servers. I can get bursts that might get closer to 1000kbps but mostly it is less than 100kbps - and yes, my connection can and does get far faster speeds from other sites. Your suggestions explain hoe to get the best out of a bad job - if LL provided more bandwidth a lot of the issues would go away. And that is not a myth or misconception.

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  2. Thanks so much for compiling this info! I know I learned a few things - I hope many many people read it.

    Just one comment: 1024px textures - I use them a LOT. If something larger was allowed I would use that - why? because the detail is abysmal if you don't. I realize it causes render lag - but I would much rather have a nicely textured item (especially clothing, skins, and sculpts) then blurry 512px textures. Even with 1024px many parts of the avatar UV only give you 1 or 2 pixels of detail to work with. I only mention this because you stressed using lower resolution textures but that's truly not going to make SL look very good. My vote is for a bit slower and beautiful rather then fast and blurry :)

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  3. I'm just wondering if there would be a way to add P2P sharing of textures, objects etc. (Something like a bit-torrent does) So that multiple phoenix clients could share their texture or object caches to reduce lag caused by the SL servers being overloaded by duplicate requests. (I would think that for torrent like "trackers" a group of av's in a sim could be considered to have similar enough sets of caches that they would make for a good first group to seed on various object searches)

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  4. I recently measured speed of networking at way from Europe to LL. Overseas connection shows aprox 60-70 ms delay, but more near simserver that increased over 200 - 240 ms.

    Had any else have this kind?

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  5. PNG files can also use transparencies, not just TGA files. And it doesn't really matter which you use as all uploaded images are converted into LL's custom JPG2000 format on upload.

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  6. I don't think that 512 pixels is dreadfully low for avatars and their texture-based clothes. You have to get pretty close before the screen-pixels start to look smaller than texture pixels.

    There are places where avatar mesh and UV-mapping could be improved. I doubt we'll ever see that from Linden Lab.

    If you're a content creator, and can't live without 1024px textures, why not give us a choice: two versions of the product.

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  7. Hi I'd like to know why I can't rez my AV is a cloud unless I log off and then back in to SL. Sorry for being off topic if I could get a response in email it would be appreciated email address is His foreverkid@gmail.com

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