Lag Reduction Techniques in High Lag Environments

Advanced and Admin Menus

For many of the suggestions made in this FAQ, you will need access to the Advanced Menu.

This should be visible on the SL menu bar.

Te enable the Advanced Menu, press and hold down the [Control] [Alt] [Shift] and [D] keys together and then release them.

From the Advanced Menu, the Admin Menu can be enabled by [Advanced] [View Admin Options] or it may be enabled through pressing and holding down the [Control] [Alt] and [V] keys together and then releasing them.

These are useful for far more than just this FAQ :-)

What causes lag?

Many things. Prims, textures, scripts, network delays, overloaded computers. Especially other avatars. Some things about lag are very unintuitive. One person walking around in an outfit with a number of 1024x1024 textures, a fancy hairdo, boots or jewellery or even a sim radar can cause more lag than 10 or even 100 other avatars in default outfits.

What can I do about lag?

What follows addresses many of the things over which you have control. You wont be able to remove all lag, but you can reduce the impact of lag on yourself and everyone else by systematically addressing the causes of lag.

Graphics Lag

Draw Distance

As your view distance increases so the number of things your computer has to keep track of explodes exponentially. This means the server has to keep track of more information for you so as to update you when it changes. Then it has to send you more updates. More textures. More information about what other avatars do. This loads the server (affecting everyone), your connection (affecting you), your computer and your graphics card. For an island simulator with a few users a draw distance of 512m is not going to be a problem for somebody with a good connection and reasonable graphic adapter. On mainland it might mean that you never actuially finish resolving. And at a sale, a fair or a butterfly hunt it would prevent you - or anybody else - from moving.

Draw distance is controlled at [Edit] [Preferences] [Graphics] [Draw Distance]

I recommend the following settings:

Advanced Graphics

Windlight, particles, flexis, terrain. All these things make SL attractive, but they also load your graphics adapter. This affects only you, and to fix this lag you can take two steps. First:

[Edit] [Preferences] [Graphics]

Now drag the [Quality and Performance] slider all the way to the left ([Faster])

Select Custom to see the effect.

Other Avatars

You can suppress both body and face lights as well as attached particles, both of which will reduce the load on your graphics adaptor.

[Advanced] [Rendering] [Attached Lights] and click to deselect (uncheck, no cross next to it).

[Advanced] [Rendering] [Attached Particles] and click to deselect (uncheck, no cross next to it).

I strongly recommend disabling attached lights at all times except at performances where the actors use it, as:

• they are massively laggy
• GL (the rendering system for SL) can only render 8 light sources, so face and body lights can totally change how you view scenes even when they are not as bright as lighthouses
• they look totally cheesy

Avatar Rendering Cost (ARC)

For more information on ARC, refer to the wiki entry.

To see the impact you have on others, and that they have on you, SL provides a rough metric called the Avatar Rendering Cost or ARC. Enable seeing it using:

[Advanced] [Rendering] [Info Displays] [Avatar Rendering Cost]

The ARC metric will appear over the heads of avatars in colors ranging from green (very low ARC), through yellow (high ARC) to red (insane ARC). Unless they are really antisocial, people will generally be much more cooperative in reducing their impact on others if they can see their ARC for themselves. So share this trick, but be aware that viewing ARC also imposes a cost on everyone, as the information has to be sent to you to be able to calculate it. So don't keep it on. Turn it on to evaluate a sim or avatar, and then turn it off again.

To minimize your impact on others and yourself, remove all attachments. Shoes, hair, jewellery, shields, huggers, everything. If you want to be extreme, select:

[Advanced] [Character] [Character Tests] [Test {Your Avatar's Sex}]

This will make you into a Ruth - uglier than sin - and reduce your ARC to 1. An alternative is to wear a bodysuit skin, ie one where clothes are painted onto the skin.

An interesting exercise is to use a non lagged sim to try on skins, hair, shoes and outfits to try to find a look that is not totally sucky but which keeps your ARC down in the 100 to 600 range for use when extreme anti-lag measures are not required (and remembering that even when you have a really hot computer, what you wear affects others and they may not be similarly equipped).

Now minimize the impact on you from other laggy avatars by selecting:

[Edit] [Preferences] [Graphics] [Custom] and make sure under [Avatar Rendering] that [Avatar Imposters] is selected (checked with a tick in the box).

Now mute the laggy avatars. (From the wiki on ARC). They will be replaced by an imposter, with an effective rendering cost of 1. Their original rendering cost will still be displayed. This is particularly useful on machines that get poor framerates, you can mute high cost avatars to help increase your framerate in crowded areas.

Additional Graphic Lag Reduction

You can disable many kinds of rendering from the [Advanced] [Rendering] [Types] menu, but it is probably advisable to keep simple, volume characters and surface enabled.

Scripts

In SL the simulator server runs all the scripts present in the sim. Even when scripts are disabled, some scripts will still be running. Scripted attachments create a lot of lag, particularly in overloaded sims. So as an act of kindness, to yourself and others, take them off when in lagged sims. If you absolutely need to use a script while in a no script sim, fly up to 200m and your scripts will run. If it is a no fly sim, enable the Admin menu and you will be able to fly anyway - but you may annoy bureaucratic minded roleplayers when you do this.

Regards

Emilie (In World Hermit Barber)
2009-03-16
----------------------------------

Canonical Names

Canonical NoteCard Name: Lag Reduction Techniques
Canonical Web Page Name: Lag Reduction Techniques in High Lag Environments
Web Page URL: http://emilie.hermit.net/?q=node/70

----------------------------------

Revision History

1.02 Added muting step to reduce ARC
1.01 Added link to wiki on Avatar Rendering Cost
1.00 Initial Release Revision

----------------------------------

Copyright: "Hermit Barber", 2009

Inspired By: "Pannie Paperdoll" Lag Lowering tips (Used with permission).

Licence: Creative Commons v 3.0: For Attribution , Non-Profit , Share-alike