Second Life performance improves, but residents don’t feel it
By Eric Reuters
SECOND LIFE, Dec 18 (Reuters) - In a speech before the faithful at the Second Life Community Convention last August, Linden Lab chief Philip Rosedale apologized for the poor performance of the Second Life Grid and pledged to make reliability his company’s top priority.
While Linden Lab has made incremental gains in performance, statistics released on Monday show most residents have been experiencing a steady decline in the quality of Second Life’s environment since April.
Linden Lab measures in-world performance with three metrics: the frames per second (FPS) a Second Life server delivers, the FPS experienced by users at their computers, and the likelihood that the Second Life software will end abnormally, or “crash.” When FPS on either the server or client dips, Second Life residents experience a “jaggy” effect that can make simple operations like walking or typing difficult.
Server-side FPS, the metric most directly under Linden’s control, has shown a boost in performance in recent months. The percentage of Second Life regions delivering below 35 frames per second, the threshold at which Linden says they become noticeable, has improved from 4 percent in August to 2.5 percent in November.
Servers delivering below 20 frames, regions Linden says are “very slow and laggy,” dropped from 0.9 percent in August to 0.4 percent last month.
But Linden Lab also measures the FPS generated on residents’ computers by the viewing software, and even as servers on the Second Life Grid deliver better performance, for most users the quality of their experience has been worsening. In April the average resident experienced 13.5 FPS on their computer. That number has been declining almost every month to a median 12.3 FPS in November.
The performance of the Second Life client hinges on a number of factors, including both the efficiency of the viewer software release and the capability of home computers. “Upgrading to a faster or recommended graphics cards and system will often result in the biggest improvement to your viewer frame rate,” Linden Lab advises.
While the viewer software has been getting slower, it’s also getting more stable. In November, 21.5 percent of Second Life sessions ended in a crash, Linden Lab’s best month on record. (The
crash rate also measures sessions in which a computer is turned off or goes to sleep without a log-off.) By comparison, 24.4 percent of sessions in May ended in a crash.
Many residents remain loyal to Second Life despite the performance problems. “Without question SL performance, logins and general functionality has dipped,” said avatar Tabitha Oxide, a Second Life user since September 2006.
Oxide, who declined to reveal her real name, said growing pains are to be expected of any service that has grown as rapidly as Second Life. “I’m grateful it actually works as well it does.”
In November, in a post on the official Linden Blog titled “Long Road Behind, Long Road Ahead” Rosedale recalled the rush to get Second Life operational before his startup ran out of venture capital. “We figured (correctly) that this was a very large software project, and that if we tried to carefully design it all up front, we wouldn’t even come close to getting something working before we ran out of money,” Rosedale said.
“Stability is what we’ve got to be all about in the first half of 2008, at the cost of other work,” Rosedale said.
Ok. So Linden Labs continues to blame their users for the current problems with their age old excuse: “Upgrade to a better PC.”
Let me ask this. Are they telling me that the average person NOW has a worse PC than the average person 9 months ago? Because 9 months ago the viewer ran a lot faster according to their own numbers.
I call bull**** on this one.
Wed Dec 19, 2007 6:12am PSTThe one factor most are not taking into consideration: the actual content.
The framerate a use experiences has a lot to do with their hardware capabilities and the requirements to draw the picture as fast as possible.
The unfortunate truth is a lot of people creating the content don’t really understand how to optimize that content for fast delivery.
In most cases, it has to do with oversized, bloated textures that are applied to everything.
Single objects like a table, for instance, might have several different textures applied, and each of those textures is huge - not optimized for the web, much less Seconf Life itself.
Now - add the rest of the kitchen… then the living room and the rest of the house.
A whole house, or storefront, or whatever the user ’sees has to be downloaded and rendered (drawn) on the computer screen - ad fast as possible.
Add to that the settings of the SL viewer. Many residents who’ve been ‘in-world’ for a time will crank the settings up - to get a better picture. So, setting the picture to higher quality also slows down the client.
Hence, 50% of the framerate problems are coming from the residents that do the creating - and another 10% from the viewing resident themselves. The rest i throw into Linden Lab’s lap.
Just my two-cents. heh
Wed Dec 19, 2007 7:12am PSTThe average person NOW may still be the average person THEN. Same people, same 9 month or older PCs.
Not to say that the lindens are free of blame, but some places are laggy because of the content on them (Scripts, textures , huge prims etc) or people having there bandwidth turned up to max or graphics setting etc.
Wed Dec 19, 2007 7:12am PSTheh Daman… just like how stipends wouldn’t pay out on time because of the increase in population. Yeah right…
Wed Dec 19, 2007 12:12pm PSTI always wonder why LL even allows textures larger than 512. It’s not as though that would be difficult.
Wed Dec 19, 2007 2:12pm PSTWe need to recycle our prims and scripts, meltdown the particles, tear up textures, reduce, reuse and re-render until inventories are under 8,000.
…and an ASUS 8600 card doesn’t hurt…an upgrade lifted me above the av. av.
Ari Blackthorne above has it all dialed in correctly. Nothing is initially stored on our computers and streamed. SL is all about textures to “see” the world. Once stored in your cashe you can expect a good increase but the fact remains… Us content creators need to consider a lot of what is and isn’t necessary when creating our textures to be as optimized for the general viewer.
Most in this world are not “gammers” with the uber dualcore or SLI high end card. Its a home PC puchased from wallmart for $500usd.
We need to be focused on that when creating texture content.
-Tabitha Oxide
Wed Dec 19, 2007 7:12pm PSTIronically, most SLers are not going to fit the catagory of “hard core gamers”, so their atitude is going be that of the console players; i.e., turn it on and play. Since most mainstream PCs have either intergrated graphics or cheap, low-end video cards, their owners’ experience in these kinds of graphically elaborate games is bound to suffer when they turn up the settings. The developers aren’t going to be able to get high-end performance out of low end video systems, pure and simple. Heck, even something light like the Sims needs a decent video card to run well. Factor in bandwidth requirements to update movement and position and maps and textures and OS overhead, and CPU power to run it all, and I’m not suprised to see as much user disappointment as there is out there. There actually should be more. (Ok, so my game PC has an 8800GTS card and 2 gigs of Corsair XMS in it
)
Thu Dec 20, 2007 4:12pm PSTIf Linden Labs every wants to grow beyond their very small niche they will have to find a way to lower the hardware requirements. The majority of consumer and business class PCs cannot run Second Life properly and dedicated gamers often already have a specific game in mind when they upgrade.
If the goal is to make content creation available to everyone the optimization needs to be done automatically on the SL servers. Just as photo sharing sites like Flickr resize photos for usability SL should do the same.
Until this occurs the problems will continue and possibly worsen.
Fri Dec 21, 2007 11:12am PSTAs a 3 year resident of Second Life I can fully vouch that the overall performance of the client/servers has increased greatly. I fully stand by the people above who mentioned the content placed within the world being a large cause of the lag. I spend 90% of my time on my own land at 600m with my graphics /bandwidth/audio as high as they can go with probably 5 or so other friends around at any given time and my experience is wonderful. I rarely ever crash (and when I do it’s my PC’s fault) and my client FPS stay around 40.
However, when changing into another complete outfit such as a full prim suit my FPS dips down to around 20 FPS, while when naked it jumps up to nearly 50. This isn’t to say that all of the issues are based on the content that the creators are placing in-world but I do firmly believe that a large portion of it is. Then take into account crapily written scripts(which … we were all new to scripting at some point or another) and the number of said scripts running in the SIM (which currently in my home SIM is around 7k, though in areas such as Toxia can be 10’s of thousands) and accompany that with the number of users in the area… well… you get the idea I’m sure.
While my PC is a nice one (Intel Core 2 Duo, 4GB DDR2 667MHz, Dual nVidia GeForce 8600GT 256mb cards *which SL does not utilize SLI technology so I am technically running one 256mb card*) I still become very laggy in “high traffic” areas, which I generally avoid. I wouldn’t be the least bit shocked to find that a large number of the reported crashes were from users in clubs, camping areas, Malls or other such packed SIMs.
Wed Dec 26, 2007 8:12am PSTThe problem isn’t textures it is the dog slow rendering engine they are using that relies on a poorly designed loop instead of threaded events.
The SL client would be capable of running at over 100FPS on most computers if they would rewrite the engine in such a way that downloading textures and fetching inventory does not slow it down to a crawl.
Most people blame textures because they notice the slowdown when they load them. The problem lies with the poorly written client and rendering engine.
Wed Dec 26, 2007 11:12am PSTAny sim that has mixed set of parcels owned by different people, ie mainland is going to have performance issues. Textures are really only a small part of the problem–it gets a lot more complicated. We have a lot of issues with maximizing look and feel of a sim while making it interactive and we control 100% of our sims. So split a sim up and there is no way to manage performance from either sever side or client side.
Also interesting to look at are LL last set of numbers. We did a little analysis http://www.rezzable/blog . In general trend is not so good atm. We are hoping to hear some positive news from LL about 2008 plans–and not just about stability, but also about commitment to paying customers.
Wed Dec 26, 2007 3:12pm PSTI was one of those that complained on public forums about the lag in SL. I got a memory upgrade for christmas and now I feel rather silly because it was indeed my computers fault. I haven’t lagged once since the upgrade!
I would suggest that LL raise the system requirements or at least make it clear that if you’re playing with minimal requirements you’ll be playing in SL syrup.
Mon Jan 7, 2008 4:01pm PSTI disagree entirely with the texture issue, I know people hate to upgrade their machines so often, but really as fiber optics comes down the pipe and, the current cost, you shouldn’t really bother with this stuff without a good fast machine, I don’t see there being a niche issue here either, I mean over time, machines will get faster, and that’s the bottom line, both bandwidth and machine speed is becoming amazing… I know the engine could be better… but with that said, this is a bit, a bit before it’s time and that’s also… how you get there first… But people can’t complain, they need real computers, in reality, the MONEY saved, shopping online, socializing online and lowered entertainment costs, movies and music and games as oppossed to always running out to do things… it Saves tons of money to be on a machine allot if people weren’t in SL they would be blowing 100 bucks out somewhere else social… so the hardware costs, are just utterly minimal even if you upgraded yearly by comparisson… I just got a new 512 Meg Ati for 119.00 I mean, come on… it’s not that bad lol.
Sat Mar 29, 2008 4:03pm PDT