In Part 1, I talked about how Second LIfe had become very slow on my laptop. I went through the 1st phase of my search for the reason. Now it is time for phase 2.
So, after cleaning up my laptop as much as I possibly could, I did two more things. I upgraded my hard drive and memory.
Upgrading my hard drive was very simple, thanks to a program called Casper (http://www.fssdev.com/). This program allows me to make a complete image copy of my hard drive to a new hard drive, then just swap out the drive in my laptop. So I got myself a 500 gig 7200rpm 2.5 inch hard drive, plugged it into my usb external hard drive case, and cloned my drive. After the cloning was done, it took me 5 minutes to swap out the hard drives (Thank you Dell, for making a laptop that is easy to work on). BOOM! brand new system.
I also maxed out my memory on the laptop. I had not done it before now because there was some question as to whether our not my model would take any more memory. Dell said no, but many other people said it would. I found a website where someone documented how he upgraded his Dell laptop (same model as mine), and the bigger memory worked great. So I jumped in and upgraded. It's working GREAT! Now I can have Second Life, Photoshop, and my porn running at the same time! (kidding about the porn, you pervs).
So with all THAT done, now it was time to see just how fast Second Life would run.
I blogged a while ago (and yes I am way to lazy this morning to find the actually entry) about Linden Labs making the Second Life Viewer open source, and the impact that it would have on it. That impact is really starting to be felt.
I decided to start looking into them more, because I was reading more and more about them from other users, mostly on Plurk. (http://www.plurk.com)
The thing about viewers, is that they are in my humble opinion, somewhat personal. People talk about "features" of viewers, and I have found that one persons "absolutely have to have, complete deal breaker" feature is kinda "oh, well, sure, I suppose that would be nice" feature to me, and probably visa versa. So I had previously only taken a cursory look at some of the alternate viewers up until now. But I was now on a mission to see if ANY of them helped with my lag problems.
Being a software programmer for many years, and a software tester for many years before that, I needed a way to quantify my testing. This is when I remembered something I had seen in one of the viewers menus a while ago: The Statistics bar (located under the View menu or Cntrl-Shift-1).
This bar gave me a way to quantify what I wanted to see. It was when I brought this bar up that I really saw just how bad things had gotten. I was running at about 2 fps (frames per second), and things were just taking WAY too long to rez. I won't go into all the technical details of frames per second, but if you know anything about gaming, that really sucks.
Now, I looked into more stats. I was not having any packet loss. My bandwidth usage seemed a bit low, given that i was on a 10 meg ISP connection. So I tripled checked that I was getting the bandwidth I was paying for. I use http://www.speedtest.net, and picked a server that was in San Francisco, since that would be close to Linden Labs. Sure enough, I was getting my 10 megs down, and 2 megs up. My ISP was not the problem.
I ran a few more internet tests including a new http://www.pingtest.net by the people from speedtest. No hops that were slow, everything seemed perfect there.
Now there is a LOT of other stats on this information bar, and to be honest, I have not delved into what all of them mean. I really only care about how fast things "work" for me. But these numbers did give me something concrete to compare.
So, I cleaned out ALL of my Second Life Viewers, and started over.
Not only was I watching my frame rates, but also just how long things at my home took to rez. I set my graphics settings to medium, and kept the draw distance down to 96 meters for my testing. I did turn up all the boxes, shaders, reflections, etc, just to see how it would all work.
I also would chat with my friends in IM, to see what the typing lag would be like, while things were rezzing. I have noticed that when things seem to get very graphic intensive, that my typing becomes a real chore. I know typonese is somewhat expected, but it does not need to be THAT bad.
So I tested the current main Viewer, the First Look Viewer, SnowGlobe, Emerald, and imprudence.
I don't want to get into what is in each of these viewers, because there are so many new things, but I will point out a few. The "Worn Items" tab in inventory is great. Nice to see all the attachments that you forgot you had on. Putting the windlight settings in a button on the main screen is great for photography also. Some of the new minimap features are pretty cool too. Each viewer has its own set of features, so you do have to try each one, and see which set of features you like.
The one feature that has been getting a LOT of chatter recently is the new "effects" option. The actual name of it is "Enhanced physics on avatar breasts". My name for it? Jiggly Boobs.
I have been amazed at the chatter that this has caused. What is even more amazing to me is that the chatter is coming from the women, not the guys. I cannot tell you how many times after this feature was released that I would ask a friend what she was doing and the answer would be "standing here watching my boobs jiggle". Swear to god!
Anyway...I did not come here to talk about boobs. I will save that for another day...:)
Back to my quest for speed. I started with the main viewer as a benchmark. My FPS was around 2, but even more so, it was just taking FOREVER to rezz textures and especially sculpties.
I then moved on to the First Look, then Snowglobe. Slowglobe seemed to run a bit better, but my FPS was still around 3, and while it seemed a bit faster, was not significant.
Next was Imprudence, then Emerald. I will admit that I looked around at some of the other new features added, but since it was not my main goal, I did not spend too much time on them. I had to keep looking. Honestly I was getting a bit sad, because nothing seemed to be helping. I was beginning to think I was either just gonna have to bite the bullet on a new laptop, or minimum, try the video card upgrade I have read about on the web. Either way, it was gonna take some work.
I looked at one other viewer, called "Cool Viewer". The original one I downloaded did not seem to make that much difference. I decided to give up for the night, because I was just too depressed.
As I woke up the next morning, something flashed in my memory. I had seen something in my searches, or on plurk about another version of the Cool Viewer. I came back to my desk, and started my search.
It didn't take long to find it. Boy Lane had been working on a version of the Cool Viewer. There was a note in her blog about how there was a problem with older ATI cards that caused them to run slow. She had fixed it in her version. It was not the latest and greatest version out there, but at this point, I didn't care.
I downloaded her version, and I could not believe the difference! My frame rate was bouncing between 6 and 10 (which I know is still slow, but OMG!), but things were rezzing, sculpties were forming....and my typing was not delaying! I just about jizzed in my..um..I mean..I was VERY excited!
I played around quite a bit on it, going to busy sims, some with lots of sculpties, some just with a lot of people. I am sure compared to some of the newer laptops and desktops, I was still very slow, but on my system, Second Life had become completely usable again!
Now for the disclaimer. This version may not help you, with your particular issues. And it does not have all the new features that are coming out now in the Emerald and other viewers, but to be honest, while those features are nice, I would rather be fast.
I have seen this complaint over and over in discussion forums. People screaming at LL to fix the reliability and speed of Second Life, and don't spend so much time on the frivolous new features. I will make the same argument for my use of this version of Boy Lanes Cool Viewer. Speed trumps fancy features.
Now, for my final comment. The fact that Boy Lane was able to find a way to fix a speed problem in the current drivers, makes me wonder how many other “issues” exist in the existing code that would speed the client up? I have a few ideas of areas that probably need some serious work, given the work that I have done on my system. I have looked into downloading all the source code to look around myself, but honestly, I have enough on my plate as it is. So I am not complaining at all about all the work that has been done on the viewer so far.
I just wonder, given all the complaints that people have about speed, if there is anybody out there who DOES have the skills, and the time to work on the viewer, to look into some things that might make the client faster for everybody?
I hope that there is. In the meantime, I would personally like to thank Boy Lane for all her work on the Cool Viewer. She has made my Second Life usable again, and for that, I bow at her feet!
Happy Sunday Everybody!
