Reading about all the bugs already found and sometimes dreadfull colors it produces on objects and avatars (I sure don´t like it when my blonde hair turns completely orange in a sunset, not to mention terrible skin colors I have seen already. That will be next hot topic on SL then.....), I would focus on performance first instead of adding more new features. Most users just have an avarage computer and are not willing to invest into expensive gaming computers with the top range graphics cards. I rather choose for performance then pretty clouds in the sky. This also because SL already eats 100% CPU while not even moving in a deserted sim (Compaq 2Ghz P4, 2GB RAM, ASUS FX5700/512). It makes you wonder about the engine....

You will probably find a nice performance leap when 1.17 is out with VWR-364 fixed. And I'm linking VWR-733 here since it is related.

@Lisa: You will find that all 3D games are using 100% CPU, if they get more CPU the will just produce more FPS, that's how it works. However, there's a command line parameter to let the program leave come processor cycles to other apps, i.e. add

-cooperative [ms]

to the command line of the shortcut (and replace a value from 1 .... 999 for [ms]).

• • once more**

I do belive if Linden Labs contenues the way its going with shoving features at us to attract new customers that things will come so bad that SL will die and every one will remeber SL as being the worlds most messed up opportunity

*had to cencor my self

With the latest patch, the client even stands completely, when loading textures or something... for 3-8 seconds nothing moves, the client appears to be frozen, the memory leak does it work, too. I've seen it eating up memory quite fast in the task list... it went up some megabytes a second, and when it reached 990MB, it dropped down to 150MB and then started increasing again, same rate.

I have been playing various PC games for many many years now. ( tries to avoid using the word decades )
The performance of SL has never been even close to "adequate" or "acceptable"

Unlike most other games...upgrading to the latest most powerful computer and video card often results in very little improvement to overall performance with the SL viewer.

I agree with most that LL should focus its efforts on improving the performance and stability of the client. I would love to see updates that only contained fixes and performance and stability improvements. I personally could care less if wind light and or voice never made into the client. I dream of the day that the performance of the client actually scaled with the speed of the computer and video card.

The first Firstlook with rendering pipeline improvements was a baby step in the right direction, but development focused on rendering improvements seems to have ceased since that FirstLook eventually became the release viewer.

I'm sure there are countless more improvements that could be made to the rendering pipeline to exponentially improve its performance. Shame that it doesn't seem to be a priority.

However, Gigs Taggart question didn't receive answer.
So, again: how exactly can this bug ever be closed?
How much performance is enough?

Also, comparing Second Life to PC games doesn't make sense since they work in a different way
Example: Textures download is a main cause of bad performances in SL, but you don't download textures in PC games, they are usually provided on discs.

There has GOT to be a way for you guys to make the viewers take up less processing resources and less memory.
The Mac viewer soft ware takes up twice as much hard drive space then the Windows viewer.

First things First!

No new features that take upen even more scarce resources, first fix the basic user-experience, which is in the first place reducing lagg and server crash issues and viewer stalls and crash issues.

If that things get tackled first and the server configuration is stable and performing well, we can begin to think of adding new features, under the condition they will not re-invoke performance issues or cause crashes.

@Opensource Obscure: A lot of meta-issues probably will never be closed, they're intended to group together things that don't really have a category, and for which it is debatable if there should be an individual category just for them. However, more importantly the meta-issue is intended as an issue that people can vote for to register interest in something, even if there is no one solution that they like. So people can say "I want better performance too" without having to pick a specific issue related to it, maybe they don't understand one solution, or they don't agree with another, but if they still want performance then they can vote for this so that it gets more attention to the issue rather than specifically any one solution.

Perhaps in future this will accumulate so many votes it's always on-top, if that's the case then it can be easily cloned and have the original closed. This would be ideal if significant improvements are made in performance, as people may then wish LL to focus on something else.

In short terms (to make a bugtraker perform better also )
1) having set the looking depth to 128 meters (isn't it the default?)
2) having set all the graphic parameters to comply with each own graphic card/cpu (AKA most of the calcs to the graphic card, not to che main cpu(s))
3) having a "minimum RAM amount" of 1GB
4) having a reasonable (up to 1GB) amount of free HD space to locally swap some graphic objects (cache)
4.a) having the HD's space unfragmented, for the OSes which don't do it themselves (Win...)
5) having each one ISP which performs normally (AKA don't introduce lag, 200 ms of RTD/ping)...
...the reasonable FPS we would achieve is from 20 to 30 in all conditions, even heavy ones.

This may imply a better (and faster) memory handling: I usually start with 720MB of free RAM, with no other task running on my MacBook (just running the system monitor and another little hadrware/software monitor: all two sums in 2-3% of CPU's use and OS+monitor(s) uses 280MB RAM).

Only logging (without doing anything) decreases the free RAM to 300MB or less (caching, rendering and so on) but the worst thing is that, after a sustained client use, free memory drops below 8-10MB... so the OS begins swapping... and all the wonderfull SL experience behave painfull.
Logging out and restart the client only may or may not help 'cause OS tends to mantain the current memory asset (with many OS's parts swapped out).
Reboot all the machine sure helps... for a few time.
I think improving LOD performances may help also because there is a great amount of "unusefull" details which tends to stuck the client while rendering.

As far as measuring performance, 20fps is nice and smooth, if the game could stay above that on typical machines at all times then it would be great. LOD etc should aim for that as well, as below 20-25fps things start to get jittery. Problem is I've been playing SL and you can get 'smooth' 20fps and 'jittery' 20fps, where even though it's the same frame-rate it performs a lot worse than it says, or even the opposite, where it performs better than the FPS would suggest.

But yeah, an aim of 20-25 ACTUAL frames-per-second would be nice.

Windows XP
Pentium D 3.0 gHz
2GB memory
Radeon x1900XTX
Internet connection is not an issue. High bandwidth fiber optic.

Before the voice viewer, there were areas that I was getting an average of 40-50 fps no problem in. No overclocking on any hardware. Immediately following the voice viewer coming around, my FPS dropped down to 10-15 in these areas. 3-5 if there were a lot of people. Through massive overclocking and risk of damaging my hardware I've gotten it up to 15-20 again.

That's half the frames per second with my hardware now overclocked as high as it will go compared to without overclocking before the voice viewer. This is absolutely rediculous. It's something that needs to be seriously looked into. The lag I have post-voice simply did not happen EVER on Second Life.

With a 3Ghz dual core; 2Gb ram; Windows XP pro; ATIXT1550/256 graphics (which I know isn't the best, but way exceeds the SL min spec). I used to get with luck 15-25FPS. the last 6 weeks I have been lucky to get double figure FPS except for early morning SL time, when with luck it may reach 15FPS. that's generally with 250-300ms ping times (Difficult to get under 200 from here in the UK as that jump is inherent at the NY and SF internet nodes). I suppose the packet losses which at one point at the beginning of the month were hitting close to 50% didn't help (that is using the release candidate, where the figure has been corrected), but there again it generally runs 5-10% during peak times. [And no it is not my connection, that has been tested to other east and west coast USA servers, with 0-1% packet loss at the worse times, normally 0-0.2%].

Latterly the performance even on class 5 sims with few main and child agents, has been exceptionally poor, (with object rezzing very unpredictable without constant relogs, and when local parcel teleports can't function without timing out), to such an extent that I have found other games/worlds to play in. If and when LL can get reasonable get speed back into SL so that I am not juddering around all the time but getting smooth movement I will be back, (I used to have no problem with a 2600 Athlon XP machine which now can't even run the game any longer), but until then I will just game the traffic figures overnight until it is sorted.

I upgraded as a last attemp to make SL workable again.

with the last pré-voice version 1.18.0.6 my old hardware ram smooth enough.
AMD Geode NX 1750
Geforce 4 - MX440 - 64MB
512 MB ram

Unbelievable to see that even when setting options exactly like I had with my old hardware or even below,
it is impossible to walk. fly or turn around without very irritating hiccups. (framerates drops to very low)
The viewers just take to much processor power. Why on earth there had to be such an enormous difference in processor power taking, since we had to leave 1.18.0.6 ??????
By the way: I have voice switched off in my viewer and completely in my sim.

This is really no fun anymore.

Mac OS X 10.4.10
Machine Name: iMac
Machine Model: PowerMac6,1
CPU Type: PowerPC G4 (3.3)
Number Of CPUs: 1
CPU Speed: 1.25 GHz
L2 Cache (per CPU): 256 KB
Memory: 768 MB
Bus Speed: 167 MHz
Boot ROM Version: 4.6.8f4
Serial Number: W833584RPJH

GeForce FX 5200:

Chipset Model: GeForce FX 5200
Type: Display
Bus: AGP
VRAM (Total): 64 MB
Vendor: nVIDIA (0x10de)
Device ID: 0x0329
Revision ID: 0x00a2
ROM Revision: 2068

Admittedly even Critical is a push but it really does need to be one of LL's primary focuses, though with the current (and promising) firstlook client I'm beginning to think LL might be getting their priorities back on track again.

I just moved back to the regular viewer. Windlight is pretty, but it's hogging my ram, my CPU core, and my patience. Since running First View I lost about 25% of my FPS. Now certainly, I can get it all back by lowering quality settings to minimum, but then there'd be no point in Windlight in the first place. Three things need to be done to make SL Windlight useful to me.

a) have a slider to set how far someone must be before the Avatar Representation goes into effect. Right now, it's too low and it makes SL resemble Commander Keen from the early 90s. If I wanted a 2d side scroller, I'd have kept my 486. Let us have more control of the feature besides on/off.

b) get rid of all the redundant checking code if those sections are working well. And optimize the code please. You could easily get a 30% speed bump by cleaning up the code some. Test stubs are fine until that section is considered to be stable, after which they should be removed. Surely SOME sections of the viewer are solid by now.

c) Have Windlight run in its own thread. I'd suggest a parallel thread setup where all the IO (disc, keys, network traffic, prim positioning) is handled in thread A and all the graphics routines are handled in thread B. This will give you an instant doubling of FPS of Windlight for those of us with dual or quad cores. Like it or not, the monoprocessor is dead and we will ALL have multicores in a year or two. This would help immensely, from the cheapest laptop to the swiftest Core2Duo.

I also noticed another problem with my viewer. There was one time when I teleported to a place. Then the scene started to load the people and environment, etc... Then suddenly they rendered a wall right in front of my avatar and the wall completely blocked out the stuff which it has previously loaded. Isn't this weird? They should just render the wall in front of me first. Anyone else also has this problem?

its almost more than a year Mac users suffer from the weirdest expierience in sl possible ... you really have to fix that, and pls, don't blame it on a bad Nvidia driver, you are smarter than that !!!

Thread 0 - IO. This starts the other threads and passes data to/from the network and from user mouse and keyboard
Thread 1 - disk/cache. This is the disk storage and ram caching which passes pointers to textures/sounds/animations in ram to requesting routines.
Thread 2 - Sim. This converts the sim's state and generates a circular list of commands for the renderer to generate.
Thread 3 - Render. This creates the 3d graphics and the sound as directed by the Sim from the circular list.

In this way, any blocking caused by IO waiting for input or accessing to and from the drive do not delay the other threads. And since this will max out power of a quad-core but still run fine all the way down to a single core, performance and image quality will improve considerably.

I can confirm right now that the performance issues on SL have little to do with hardware - the only thing in this computer that could be considered low at all is the 256MB of RAM on my graphics card, and I can run extremely hardware intensive software like Crysis, Arkham Asylum, Far Cry 2... hell, any number of resource-consuming games on fairly high settings with no slowdown. Whether or not games are the same kind of software as Second Life doesn't change the fact that they're a good benchmark for hardware performance, and that a computer that can run the most graphically intensive ones available on the market right now should have no issue running Second Life. I can also confirm that it's not an issue with maintenance. I defragment my hard drive weekly, regularly clean my registry, and just do what I can to keep this machine running as well as possible. And as for the major claim, that it's the internet connection... to be perfectly frank, that's insane. I've currently got a connection that regularly gets well over 50Mbps download speed (actual, tested rate, not advertised rate - the lowest I've seen is around 40Mbps and the highest is above 70, so there's variation, but in any case the speed I have is far higher than the vast majority of SL users), and have seen little to no increase in performance from when I'd been using the same machine on a 2Mbps speed (and that IS advertised - on that one, I was actually pulling about 1.4Mbps most of the time rather than the full 2). Despite all of this, decreasing or increasing the graphical and network settings in the viewer does little to change performance in either direction, and even with the setup that I've got I still see drops to less than one frame per second in areas with a lot of objects or a handful of avatars.

With all that said, I'm not sure I understand why people are blaming it on connections and hardware when it's clear what the problems are: Linden Labs and content creators. To be perfectly fair, I can understand that LL can't really prevent users from creating objects or avatars that use a number of entirely unnecessarily high-resolution textures and educating content creators and users about the kinds of issues that doing this causes is definitely something that should be done. However, whether or not that's where part of the blame lies, there's still a huge amount to be thrown LL's way. The client, quite frankly, is terrible. It does a horrible job of handling LOD for nearly everything (textures in particular - if you give it time to and there's enough memory to spare, it'll actually load full-resolution versions of textures at the very edge of your draw distance even though the objects may be barely visible from where you're standing), and seems to actually be fairly bad at rendering all around (one thing I've noticed is that I can often stand behind a solid prim object and stare in the direction of a crowded area, with the result being a massive performance decrease despite the fact that I can't see absolutely anything beyond that prim... meaning that SL's client is still rendering everything I can't see so long as I'm looking in that direction, something it really shouldn't be doing).

I can understand that optimizing a client like this isn't an easy task, but this is an issue that (as far as I can tell) has existed since Second Life's initial release and some of the problems that contribute to it are things that aren't really excusable. It's easy to expect this sort of thing from non-commercial software, but SL is a commercial product that both Linden Labs and many of its users make their money from, and given that fact this kind of issue is just impossible to justify. It harms SL's potential, it harms the market for vendors who set up shop within Second Life, and it needs to be fixed if they ever intend to achieve any kind of real growth beyond what they already have.

Even on snow leopard it's a curse to run.

Oh yes on 3rg grid I can use ultra settings and 512 meter draw distance.

So it sure has to do with slow servers and bandwith.

Dolfke.

The Mac client especially needs optimisation, and while I understand the issues involved with the major performance problems, there is still so little time actually being devoted to them! LL seems to be moving forward (slowly) on tackling simulator lag issues, which might alleviate a lot of problems, but the viewer performance is still pretty poor; lots of things that should be multi-threaded still aren't, which means the viewer can still freeze merrily or chug along as textures load etc. On-screen sculpties seem to be by far the worst.

Occlusion culling still seems to be a fairly ineffectual feature; back when it was being beta-tested it had a far more noticeable impact on performance, doubling frame-rates or better, but mysteriously in the final release that improvement was reduced significantly to be more in the 5-10% range, which I do not understand at all.

Considering performance is the main thing that is going to make an impression with people, very little seems to be done with it. Sure, pretty graphics can have wow factor in screenshots, but if the experience itself is the same speed as a screenshot, then how many people are going to stick with it?

I've been debating on getting CrossFire to help improve my games, including SL. But as I've researched, I came up with all sorts of info saying that SL gets only a 25% increase in performance, if any at all. Therefore, since I'm on SL 75% of the time, CF isn't really worth it.

I've put together a pretty high end computer,2x RAID 0 SATA Drives with 32mb cache, 8GB DDR3 Memory, 1gb ATI 4890 (Overclocked - 950mhz), AMD Phenom II 955, latest drivers and all on Windows 7. I play SL with the highest settings, and can get very high FPS in most sims, but still insanely low FPS in other sims. Of course, most of us understand SL is a very demanding app, but the problem is... Is that SL is barely utilizing a lot of the available resources that could dramatically increase performance, such as 64bit and multi-core CPU's, SLI/CrossFire, PhysX (Client side physics, such as flexi prims) and many other new and old technologies.

If the Lindens add support for some of the mentioned resources, they'd get a big thumbs up from me! Maybe even a high-five! Lol.

PS: I have seen a lot of griefer attacks that exploit the fact SL has poor rendering performance, and use highly complex objects follow the target around, causing them to receive heavy lag, and sometimes even crash them. Even a popular commercial HUD had this attack for a while until LL forced the creator to remove it., since It causes both client and server stress.