http://secondlife.com/support/?questionID=3886
http://secondlife.com/support/?questionID=4209
http://secondlife.com/support/?questionID=4207

To overcome this I installed an Nvidia GeForce 8600 pci express card. This helped a bit but the pc crashes after running Second Life for about 20 mins. The crash can either be the pc freezing completelly or automatically restarting. The CPU usage can be erratic when Second Life is running but wether the usage is high or low doesn't seem to affect when the pc will crash. Other in game factors also don't seem to make a difference, such as if there are a lot of people in the sim at the time or if the sim is empty, what huds I am wearing etc etc, so it doesn't seem to be a lag issue.

I downloaded and tried Active Worlds to see if the problem was specific to Second Life, and if anything the problem seemed worse on Acrive Wolrds, with things taking forever to rez, and the pc crashing before the rezzing had completed.

Your problem seems similar to mine in some ways. I am not very technically minded but I have assumed the problem is either a configuration issue that I can't track down, or the motherboard is a piece of cheap junk, but this is a guess as much as anythign else. If there are any solutions staring me in the face that can be pointed out to me I would be interested to hear them.

I am now able to avoid crashes. I keep the Window Task Manager open and I am also alert to momentary mouse movement pauses. If the mouse is showing symptoms sure enough the CPU duty cycle is maxing out. A quick minimize, then shift focus to another window, then maximize SL and the problem is gone for a while.

Second Life Server 1.22.3.89352

YES, Problem gone.!!!

Unrelated item. When using a dual screen you can't enter your First Name. After the 4th character it resets.
You can enter your second name and password.
I was able to enter it by moving SL to the home screen, entering the first name, then moving back to the second screen.

The First Name entry problem appears to be related to the virgin start of the RC. Having once logged in it remembers the name and the problem goes away.

OK after all that my freezes may not have been related to CPU usage percentage. Since the freezes would melt with time it seemed like constipation and with CPU usage hovering around 100% it was not an unnatural assumption that they were related.

However on 2 runs with 1.22.3.89352 I have frozen after about 5 minutes running and the CPU usage was less than 50%.
So far I can not correlate the freezes to any activity in the viewer. They appear totally random. With this RC, I did not get the mouse hesitation clues that in the past indicated an impending crash and allowed me to move out of focus and avoid it.

I will add any clues here if I find them. I have to post these between crashes or start over
Please let me know if there are any parameters I can monitor or tests to make.

Why did the first three logins freeze? Did having the patience to sit it out until it thawed get rid of the problem?
No more updates here unless the freezes recur.

Re-opened this bug. Now having the same problems on RC1.20 but not as serious as it was on 1.19

Normal CPU usage running SL is about 20 to 50% depending on activity.
Normal CPU usage with SL minimized, about 10 to 14%.

With no apparent activity to trigger it, CPU usage shoots up to 100% and computer freezes.
If you wait 3 to 5 minutes it will thaw a little but still running at 100% CPU.

With experimenting I found that if I stopped editing a 23 prim object, CPU would go back to normal%. Start editing, back to 100% -> Repeatable -> BUT after losing focus to enter data in this JIRA, and returning to SL I could no longer reproduce it.

On a freeze a little later I had the following that may be helpful:-

This time the left hand CPU shot up to 100%, right hand one at about 50% but computer operation was severely handicapped. Mouse interrupts about every 4 seconds. With SL minimized the partial freeze continued. I managed to switch to Processes on the WIndow Task Manager and found:-

SL 12% (Normal for minimized)
taskmgr.exe 20%. (Extremely high for this process)
Idle 68%

It seems like SL was having trouble requesting an external process.
Normal status could not be restored until I closed SL.

There is no doubt that the freezes are associated with 100% CPU duty cycles.

I had to close SL using the Windows Task Manager. I had 2 open scripts that SL would want to ask me if they should be saved. That would have taken 15 minutes for the conversation at the slow processing rate during the freeze.

BUT there was an interesting result.

After SL shut down it still took a number of minutes to thaw! This suggests a constipation on the operating system side of SL.

I have no hard evidence but I think the freezes are associated with client side calls using llTargetOmega and llSetTextureAnim. I seem to have a lot of freezes when working with these.

I get the feeling that the requests are being made faster than they can be processed and the task manager is tying things up handling the growing stack. With zero knowledge of how these work, it seems that instead of issuing an animation call to the video processor and allowing it to process the request, it is bombarding it with (perhaps unnecessary) requests. So even after shutting SL down it took a while to clear the backlog even working at 3,000,000,000 cycles a second.

I kept logs of 3 short sessions. These are all using RC 1.20.11 (90229)
For these sessions I TP'd to a deserted field on SLVEC Island, well away from my own scripts at home and any activity.
I removed every attachment except my hair - I never go out in public without my hair.
Here are the logs of 3 sessions. I do hope this helps.

Session report 1.
Sitting for over 10 minutes CPU 90%. Move focus out, 13% Move focus back, 90%.Repeatable.
Stand up/sit down no change. Rotated camera 360 degrees, no diference.
Stood up. Started walking in a circle.
CPU dropped from 90 to 80 for20 seconds then went to 100% and froze for 60 seconds.
After 60 seconds, CPU 9% stuck walking continuously now 500 meters out of the sim over water.
All controls except turning are disabled. Logged out.

Session 2.
Arrive back in SLVEC in flying mode.
CPU 9% out of focus, 18% in focus, repeatable.
Exited flying mode, CPU spike to 99 and 100% and stays there while in focus.
Sit down, CPU Dropped to 19%. Went out of focus dropped to 10%, back in focus up to 98% again.
In/Out of focus repeatable 99/10 %
Rotated camera continuously while sitting, dropped to 80% in focus, 70% out of focus (not rotating since out of focus).
Camera not rotating, 99% in focus, 70% out of focus.
Stand up 99% in focus, 70% out of focus.
Walking in circles, hovers right at 100%.
flying in circles, 80%.
Stop flying, stays at 80% but lose focus 70%, back in focus it shoots up to 99 to 100% freezing. Shut SL down.

Session 3. Logged back in after RL visit, Logged into SLVEC vacant lot again. In focus, doing IMs, 47% out of focus 9%
Walking in circles 28%. no problems.
Flying in circles oscillating between 20 and 40%.
Stopped flying 53% in focus, 11% out of focus. Sat on ground same. NOW THIS IS HEALTHY LIVING> BUT>
Stood up, 100% an minor freeze. Immediately took OUT of focus, Spiking between 60 and up to 100% about once every 4 seconds (not uniform) with minor freezes. Mouse interups down to 3 per second. Difficult typing this.
After about 120 seconds of freezing and out of focus, it suddenly dropped to 11% and freezing stopped.
In focus, about 48% (what I call normal).
Sat on the ground again 50% for 10 seconds, then 90%. Out of focus, 10% in focus, stand up = 50% for 10 sconds then 90% for 10 seconds, then 100% and freezing again.

I may as well move back to RL, I don't need to come here for aggravation

Horizontal time frame is condensed in freeze zones since graph was not updating while frozen.
10% idle and 20 to 50% in focus appears to be normal. Entering a freez session always seems to be triggered by activity but no particular action. Exit from freezing seems random but appears to be delayed from its trigger by how long it takes to remove a giant stack of system requests.

edit: Got to add that I'm NOT crashing. "Just" my client is freezing any time I got a new 100% CPU usage and continues to run o.k. afterwards.

I've solved the problem somewhat. I use two computers. Work on one for 5 minutes until it freezes, then lot out and leave it to thaw for 5 minutes while I use the other computer. By oscillating between the two computers I get my on-line time up to about 75%. I can reset the computer and re-log but by the time you wait for XL to load and establish the communication it is simpler to just let it sit idle and thaw out.

Unfortunately you can't just log out and log back in to SL because even after exiting SL, the freeze continues for about 5 minutes.

Second Life 1.20.12 (90824) Jun 27 2008 21:30:48 (Second Life Release Candidate)

You are at 260273.7, 230371.9, 40.2 in Whanganui located at sim4819.agni.lindenlab.com (63.210.159.215:13000)
Second Life Server 1.22.4.90499

CPU: Intel Pentium III/Pentium III Xeon (0.25 micron process) with external L2 cache (2982 MHz)
Memory: 3326 MB
OS Version: Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 3 (Build 2600)
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: GeForce 8600 GT/PCI/SSE2

I have gone back to 1.19.1. I can usually get an hour or two there and move focus when I see it is about to freeze.

1.19 and 1.20 both appear to have a "normal" CPU activity in the range of 20 to 50% and both unpredictably shoot up to and hover around 99% where a small overload can cause a freeze.

Using RC20 which was failing in 1 to 5 minutes earlier today.
At my sim, CPU is running 85 to 100% with one CPU flatlined at 100%.
TP to a rock concert with 50 to 60 dancing people. CPU rapidly drops to an average of 45%!!!
TP to SLVEC - no activity, no avatars, no detailed graphics - CPU back up to 90+.
Back to concert CPU again drops below 50%.
Tried 4 other sims - all no avatars - varying amounts of graphics - CPU back to 90+%.
Back to the Concert. OOPS Concert is now over. Only about 15 people left. CPU SHOOTS TO 98%.

CLUE?? The more the lag the lower the CPU overload????
(I tried different settings on download bandwidth in preferences but it only slowed the rez time, not CPU%)

WHY does it change? Nothing is different. Same location, same Avatar, same settings similar activities,

After 3 or 4 days of getting work done it was freezing within 5 minutes tonight. Same location, same functions, same conditions. Why I don't know. The freezes this evening were locked up so tight I had to reset the computer each time.

Another thought. There are times when SL works fine with anywhere from 20 to 50% CPU Duty cycle. There are frequently times when within a few seconds of starting SL the right CPU flatlines at 100%. Tonight, after starting SL, for the 5th time, I removed focus and just let it sit. I was thinking that it may freeze, not when SL has a problem, but when XP decides to do some trash cleanup. On top of the SL constipation that causes the freeze. So I figured to let it sit for 15 minutes out of focus so XP could remove the constipation without freezing. It seemed like that worked to some extent. The right CPU was no longer flatlined but jiggling up and down at 98% and I was no longer freezing.

Is SL slowly accumulating garbage that XP has to collect and XP doesn't get to clear it? It would have to be disk related trash since the problem continues after a hardware reset and RAM usage is always less than 50%.

There is no disk activity when it freezes.
Disk files corrupted by the hardware reset, and "repaired" on restart appear random, sometimes an SL file, sometimes not.

But I had some total freezes again today requiring hardware reset.

Despite all my attempts at analysis I can find no identifying symptoms for the changing level of occurrence.

SL has not frozen significantly for a couple of weeks.
Tonight it started freezing within average 20 seconds of starting, sometimes immediately on entry, sometimes a minute later.
It had worked fine all day.
WHAT CHANGED?
What changed is I installed the paint.net artwork program. Installing it also required installing Microsoft.net Framework 3.5 SPI.
Paint was running the first time it froze. Reset computer, tried without Paint.net - still froze.
Reset and uninstalled Paint.net - still froze.
Reset and uninstalled Microsoft.net Framework - still froze.
Reset and used the XP restore to backup to yesterday morning - NO MORE FREEZES.

After struggling with it for over a year, checking drivers, applying stress tests, testing every viewer release, extensive testing to find related factors, replacing the video board, cleaning the registry, moving everything to a new disk, new RAM, more than one JIRA here, the only symptom that correlated with the freezes and crashes was ping time.

The problem only occurs when running Second Life.

My route to SL goes through about 12 hubs. Under the best of times, the lowest ping time is about 85 mSec. It typically runs twice this and as ping times get longer, freezes increase. These correspond with busier internet traffic times.

My diagnosis as viewed from someone who has been an assembly language programmer for 50 years (started on UNIVAC III in 1959) is that during long ping turn around times, the SL viewer is not releasing an interrupt until it gets a response of some kind. While the operating system is waiting for SL to release, background jobs start to pile up. When SL finally releases, there is not enough time to clean up the tasks so CPU duty cycle reaches 100% and causes freezes that can last from a fraction of a second to as long as 20 minutes or require a hardware reset.

If I can manage to get to Windows Task Manager and shut down SL as freezes are building up, it recovers rapidly once SL shuts down. It is a high level interrupt that is locked, presumably a communication routine. It freezes everything including mouse, sound and even the clock.

Although others have experienced this problem it is not prevalent enough to deserve LL time to investigate so I found an elegant solution. I purchased a new computer. No more freezes, no more hardware resets.

If LL wants to investigate it further, there is a compatibility problem specific to that hardware with the specifications on the computer listed above. I've demoted that computer to doing accounting, it works fine so long as it doesn't have to run SL. It was all top of the line equipment and actually far better on paper than the computer I bought to replace it.

I'm going to try setting the affinity to a single cpu, and remove other traffic from it. That way I can get more recordable behavior, but im crashing at a horrific rate

What I have found is if you set Priority on the SecondLife.exe process to HIGH it is much more stable. It will still slow down but so far I've not had it crash, even when ping times are showing over 3 seconds. Perhaps there is a way to have it start in High priority but I have to do it manually each time SL is executed.

Have a look at VWR-5574 and see if turning off the NVIDIA controlpanel-setting "Threaded optimization" makes a difference for you.
It's in the 3D-settings section.

Graphics chip was overheating. Problem got worse as the cooling fan deteriorated and finally quit.
The symptoms of the whole computer freezing including the clock were due to hardware freeze caused by the over temperature graphics chip either intentionally shutting down with temperature sensing or just failing at high temperature.