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sim restart i recorded the sim id and ip address as reported by help about second life by doing this i confirmed that after every restart both the sim id and ip address did change there had recently been some conjecture that user initiated restarts did not move the sim to a different server but these tests prove that sims do in fact move when restarted by residents note that i did not restart either sim between tests 3 and 4 as indicated by the raw data this way when you look at the last empty test results test 3 and compare them to the first with objects results test 4 you know that any difference in score is due to the object script placement not a change in server neighbors in one case my regular sim actually jumped to a different co location facility i confirmed this by doing a tracert on the old and new ip addresses this was very surprising and isn t necessarily good news for estate owners with lots of adjacent sims as border crossings between sims in different co location facilities can be painful the regular sim tests did not indicate any major issues related to external factors server neighbors as there is rarely as much as 6 seconds of variation on the score for any individual test the difference across test passes was more pronounced with the openspace sim the shortest test pass was almost 17 minutes shorter than the longest one which may indeed confirm the theory that openspace sims are more likely to suffer the effects of laggy server neighbors the additional script load on the full sim during the with objects tests had only a trivial impact on the sim the average total test pass for the full sim was only a minute longer when the sim was populated with objects this is in stark contrast to the nearly 300 performance hit the openspace sim took under the exact same script load even though the openspace sim scored significantly more poorly on the with objects tests than the regular sim its dilation was generally 0 99 1 0 sim fps was routinely 44 45 and the sim was easy to navigate with my attachment less test female avatar this is good because it means that while script performance in a given openspace might be sub par the sim itself can still be perfectly usable so long as script responsiveness is not a major factor in one s enjoyment conclusions based on the final results i believe we can safely conclude the following since an empty openspace sim actually performs a little better than an empty regular sim on the script benchmarks it appears that openspaces are tweaked to allocate more processing power to scripts to make up for their inadequacies when running under a normal script load based on a sample of currently in use openspace sims script performance of a class 5 openspace sim is nearly 1 3 the performance of a regular sim hey it could be worse since the with objects tests barely affected the full sized sim s results while they profoundly affected the openspace sim s final numbers it s clear that full sized sims have a lot more headroom for script processing these tests didn t even touch a regular sim s threshold unless the large discrepency with test 5 on the openspace sim is attributable to some other factor running on newer faster hardware than the other tests the influence of server neighbors other sims residing on the same physical server seems able to have a non trivial effect on openspace sims while the interference appears to be less marked on full sims performing a user initiated restart on a sim openspace or full does land the sim on another physical server most if not all of the time and may even land you in another co location facility even though the openspace sim scored poorly compared to the regular sim once scripted objects were added to the mix the fact that sim fps and time dilation remained admirably high shows that an openspace sim can still be perfectly usable and otherwise healthy even as script performance begins to suffer work remaining these tests primarily focused on raw script performance and the influence of server neighbors and did not cover things like intensive physics operations or anything related to avatars i am not personally equipped or motivated to investigate these avenues but i hope someone else out there is winks posted by wildefire walcott at 8 27 am 2 comments labels real estate technical monday july 07 2008 buying or upgrading a computer for second life it seems like every couple of days someone s posting on one of the second life forums asking one of the following questions my computer runs sl very poorly what can i do to speed it up i m planning on buying a specific model of computer for playing second life will it be fast enough i hope to answer those very questions here before we continue i would like to note that your overall experience in second life is governed by many things and only some of them are under your purchasing control the health of the sim you re connected to if the sim you re currently in has a bunch of laggy scripts or is overcrowded with a bunch of avatars you re going to experience classic lag a delay between what you do in sl and when it actally occurs the current load on the second life infrastructure every time an object or an avatar rezzes the sim has to contact the asset servers to load any texture script and prim information when second life is very busy all the sims all over the grid are slamming the asset servers constantly and this can result in laggy often unbearable performance the connection between second life s servers second life is a network of computers spread all over the united states and some parts of europe if there are issues on the internet backbone that connects those various locations there will be crummy performance in world your isp and service plan broadband service providers offer a number of different plans that determine your top networking speeds and various limitations your plan and the overall quality of your isp s service can affect your experience the connection between your computer and the sim you re on this is often called your ping time and can be affected by general network conditions hardware in your isp s infrastructure your own networking hardware cable modems routers wireless cards etc and more your computer s configuration the operating system drivers services and applications running in the background all play a part in how well your computer behaves during gaming sessions your computer s hardware this has to do with the actual physical components of your pc this article primarily focuses only on hardware why performance matters the most obvious benefits of having a fast computer are that it enables you to have a smooth gaming experience at high screen resolutions with all the fancy graphics effects turned on there is another more fundamental benefit however that has to do with how games are designed most 3d games have a main loop which is a constantly repeating piece of code that performs the most important parts of the game many times per second drawing the screen checking for mouse and keyboard input moving your avatar etc if your computer gets overburdened performing any one of these tasks most notably drawing the graphics the entire game suffers for example on a really slow system even typing in chat can be painful on second life because it takes up to a second for any letter you type to even show up on the screen hardware components that affect gaming performance here are the basic computer components that have a direct impact on gaming performance display adapter also called the video card or graphics adapter this is the part of your computer that generates graphics on your screen most computers in the world have so called integrated or on board graphics which are not designed for 3d gaming because they steal memory and processing power from your system instead of doing it on its own all true gaming pcs even laptops have either nvidia or ati graphics with their own video memory cpu also called the processor the cpu is the brains of your computer while it was once easy to compare two cpus by simply looking at their clock speed which is these days measured in gigahertz or ghz cpus today come with 1 2 or 4 cores which are kind of like mini cpus so a 4 core cpu can almost do the work of four single core cpus at the same clock speed memory also called physical ram and measured in gigabytes gb this is very fast temporary storage for the code that s currently running on your computer every program currently running on your system uses at least a little bit of memory different operating systems have different requirements windows xp seems to run games wonderfully with 2gb of ram while vista does best with 3gb or more although you currently won t see much of a boost past 3gb modern operating systems do something called paging or swapping where if physical ram gets low they will automatically start using a portion of your hard disk for virtual memory so you can still run your programs but performance slows down significantly as a result hard disk this is one of the most overlooked aspects of system performance even though the hard drive is the single slowest part of any pc sometimes several hundred times slower than physical ram a fast hard drive speeds up things like booting your computer and launching applications and also speeds up any program like second life that uses a local cache to store things like textures and prim data the standard speed for most notebook hard drives is 5400 rotations per minute rpm which frankly is too damn slow many computer dealers offer faster drives as an upgrade which i really recommend more on that later components that don t affect gaming performance sound card most computers come with on board audio and unlike integrated graphics solutions audio doesn t require a ton of processing power you can buy nice expensive add on sound cards for your desktop and even laptop computer but you will only see a tiny amount of performance improvement if you see any at all network card wired as with audio most computers come with built in ethernet networking ports for wired connections there are some so called gaming network cards out these days which are supposedly optimized for online games they make two arguments first they say the cards free up system resources by offloading tasks to the network card second they prioritize gaming network traffic treating gaming packets with preferential treatment the end result supposedly is reduced ping times so far these cards have yet to prove themselves they don t improve fps the ping time difference is sometimes noticeable but doesn t necessarily boost your gaming experience and unfortunately these cards aren t always that reliable network card wireless the average broadband connection today is between 512 kilobits to 5 megabits per second in comparison the absolute slowest wifi 802 11 card you can buy today is 11mbps over twice the speed of the average broadband connection any new wireless card today at least supports 802 11g which is up to 54mbps most if not all wireless chipsets are add on cards or plug in devices so they do not use a whole lot of system resources so long as you have a good router uncongested air and you re within a reasonable range of the router any wireless card is going to perform just fine benchmarks in order to see how these different components contribute to second life s performance i ran controlled tests on a number of different computers you can see the full results online and a description of the tests and my findings follows click the image to see the results testing procedure in order to get consistent comparable results across all systems i picked a low traffic high prim high texture location fairy s grove creations in aurora and did not move my avatar at all between logins i also configured each of the computers to run sl in exactly the same way you can see some details about this in the benchmark test notes tab of the published results all had fresh installs of the 1 19 1 4 build of the official second life viewer all were configured to run second life at 1024x768 in full screen non windowed mode this is because screen resolution has a direct impact on performance also full screen mode performs a fair amount better than windowed mode it s just not very convenient for people who build in sl my avatar was placed at the landing point of fairy s grove creations in aurora facing the opposite direction from the store to see my exact position and viewing angle click here the aspect ratio setting in second life which is only available in full screen mode was set to auto detect the metric i used to determine performance was frames per second or fps just like frames in a movie a 3d computer game draws the screen you see many times every second rebuilding the entire scene from scratch the fps can fluctuate depending on how many things the game has to draw and how busy your computer is with other tasks i only monitored the fps when there were no other avatars on the screen because every avatar causes the computer to work a little bit more to draw as i said these results reflect best case scenarios in terms of performance i recorded performance on two graphics quality settings low and ultra that s what the two fps columns in my results represent the number of frames drawn per second at the respective quality settings in my tests the differences between low and ultra were not that obious the only really noticeable difference was that you could see further off in the distance under ultra but as you see from the benchmark results the difference in performance was profound all computers tested were relatively clean they didn t have any other programs running in the background and weren t bloated with a bunch of unnecessary software i often had to wait a few of minutes after first logging in with a new computer because it took a long time for all the textures to download i only recorded the fps when it appeared that all the textures were fully rezzed the only change i made to my interface was to close the minimap and enable the statistics bar ctrl shift 1 the minimap covered up the statistics bar otherwise i watched the fps number at the top of the statistics bar do not confuse this with the sim fps metric which actually talks about the current sim s performance not your computer finally it s important to note that while the standing still fps ratings here are a good measure of how fast these computers render 3d graphics they do not reflect the effect of the amount of installed memory or the speed of the installed hard disks as neither of these things is directly related to your computer s ability to render graphics they both only become important when you re actively trying to move around and do things in game for example if your computer doesn t have much memory for second life every time you turn a corner it will have to load a bunch of things from your cache causing noticeable slowdowns in responsiveness ...
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