User:Jaszon Maynard/Jaszons sandbox Performance

I'm currently developing this article and will probably eventually publish it to the wiki

Second Life is very demanding on most computer systems. Due to the unusually dynamic, user-modifiable, constantly changing nature of the Second Life world, you may never see it display as smoothly as you would in your typical 3D computer game. However, it can be well-enjoyed nonetheless.

Performance in Second Life is primarily affected by your computer and the speed at which it is capable of drawing the world that is Second Life. It can also be affected by other factors, such as the quality of your Internet connection, as well as problems occurring on the server computers that are running Second Life. Performance can be improved by changing settings in Second Life, though in some cases you may not achieve satisfactory performance without hardware and software upgrades (new computer, or new CPU, memory, graphics card, newer drivers, etc).

Types of Performance Problems in Second Life

Low Framerate (FPS)

The Second Life program may be asking your computer to do more than it can handle, and if your computer hardware is not powerful enough, or not setup correctly, it cannot draw the Second Life world very quickly. This will result in a low framerate (also called low FPS, frames-per-second) and your view of the world will be jerky and stuttering, more like a slideshow than a movie.

Framerates tend to worsen when you are near a crowd of other avatars, or in a region with a large number of objects.

While it would be terrific to get 20-30+ FPS in-world most of the time, many residents do not achieve that, yet can still enjoy Second Life quite well. Linden Lab keeps track of average resident framerates here, and generally 1/2 of the residents have less than 15FPS.

Lag

If your Internet connection is not good enough, or if the Second Life program is overwhelming your connection with the amount of information it is trying to download, you may experience various kinds of Internet-related lag. What is happening is that information flowing between your computer and the Second Life server computers is making that trip too slowly, possibly with data getting dropped (lost) and needing re-transmissions. This often results in events being delayed in Second Life. For instance, you may try to make your avatar walk, but it may take a long time for it to respond to your attempt to make it walk. Then, when you attempt to stop walking, your avatar continues walking longer than you wanted it to. You may type some chat text but it doesn't appear on the screen right away. Or someone may reply to a question of yours but you don't see the reply for a long time after they wrote it.

Short Guide to Improving Performance

You do not have to complete all the steps in this quick guide to improving performance. Simply go through it, step by step, and when you've had enough, or when your performance has improved enough, you can skip the rest of the guide, or come back to it another time.

This short guide will not cover in-depth diagnostics, analyzing server performance, diagnosing your system's weaknesses (so you'd know if a simple memory upgrade would help), or any steps that would require you to install additional hardware or software. It should be applicable to all supported operating systems.

settings packet loss disable voice

Full-Length Guide to Optimizing Performance

expanded lag meter the sim system bottlenecks