Monday, December 17, 2007

Why Second life crashes?

This is a very interesting question, where a lot of residents would know the answer of.
Of course everybody knows it has something to do with the capacity of pc, video card etc.... but I was wondering why I keep crashing lately so often in Second Life.
Even just standing somewhere, and only talking makes me sometimes crash.
As I am a photographer in Second Life, it is rather important to have as less lag as possible, and certainly not to crash, but unfortunately, where ever I come, I need to wait so long till everything has rezzed, before I can make one picture, and when I make that shot, I crash.
You can imagine my disappointment, and that is mainly the reason why I haven't post new pictures over the last few days.
Do I need to buy me a new PC? A new video card? Extend the memory?
Probably the most accurate answer will be, buy yourself a new PC, with a better video card, more memory.
So there is nothing else to do for me than to wait, until my financial situation allows it to buy me a new system.;)
In the meanwhile I hope that I can keep making pictures once and a while, without too much trouble of lag and crashes.

17 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hello Looker :)
Crashing in SL has been crazy lately, specially during high periods of traffic - thought the Lindens keep saying that has nothing to do with it.
I have a turtle connection (512Kb) and therefore things take lots of time to rezz and the lag is soooo big. But I found out that Europe's early hours on weekends (until 12 or 1 pm) are great to explore and take pics.
Just a hint, hope it helps :)

Looker Lumet said...

Thanks Winter for the tip, but, unfortunately, I am rarely before these hours on Second life.

Zippora Zabelin said...

*smiles sadly* This way SL is going to be a hobby for the rich (and the ones who own a powerful pc for work purposes anyway). I thought I was pretty spoiled with a 1 year old MacBook and a fast connection, but apparently that's not enough anymore. I can't run WindLight and on events like yesterdays bloggerparty I crash 4 times in an hour :(

Looker Lumet said...

Zippora, I don't think Windlight has anything to do with those crashes, or at least it is not the main reason.
The rezzing alone takes sometimes "ages", and when there is about 40 avatars at one specific spot, you can already forget it. Crash guaranteed. Just as yesterday, I crashed too at the blogger party, and no good opportunity to take some snapshots, because when I had a good view, it turned away by clicking the snapshot button.
What we have to endure with our Second Life.;))

Zippora Zabelin said...

Of course WindLight is not the cause of crashes :) I mentioned it as another example that SL is asking more and more computer power, and not everybody will be able to afford that, I fear.
Like Winter said, I think it is more to blame to the traffic lately. When we had our Blogger-meeting there were 56.600 residents online...

Anonymous said...

I have noticed an amazing ammount of crashing since the last Windlight update before the most recent one.

Looker Lumet said...

Indeed, I have to admit it too, this time Windlight causes the crashes. I crash about 5 times a day.(in 2-3 hours) And this last update did no good to me so far.

hhao said...

My Second life used working fine, recently it crashed a lot. I can not figure out what is the reason. Any tips? I have due core 2 intel CPU and Mobil intel (R) 645GM vedio card. Any help will be appreciate.

Looker Lumet said...

hhao, I can only confirm that it has nothing to do with your computer, but most of the times it is SL itself. So don't you worry about your PC.;)

stonyb said...

My wife uses a 7 year old HP Celeron with a basic Nvidia pci graphics card.
I use a new AMD quad core with 8 gig Ram and a Radeon 3870 graphics card.
She runs second life flawlessly and I cannot run it for more than a few minutes. I have run diagnostics, installed new drivers, dumbed down rez, all to no avail.
My conclusion is if you don't want crashes then run an old PC.
I have found nothing wrong with my PC except the fact that Second Life will not run! Therefore the problem lies within Second Life software!
stonyb

Anonymous said...

i know there is a amd update for second life but i have the same broblem iam useing intel always crashes when more traffic is on line

Anonymous said...

i see alot of complaints made does any one have any answers

Winter(2) said...

How funny to find another Winter here ;)
As last comment, alot of complaints but no answers. Now this thread is dreadfully old but in case someone look trhu blogs and ends up here like I do..

SL crashes no matter what you do. It has to do with SL itself. It's very unstable, in fact probably the most unstable Online "game"

Looker Lumet said...

It is an old thread indeed Winter, but it seems that it is still actual.
In the meantime I have bought myself a new PC, but have to conclude that it might be your card, your memory or a combination of these things that make you crash in SL. But the biggest cause will be SL itself, because it will never be tested on all possible configurations and is asking more and more from your system. There was a time all went well, but, lately, I noticed more crashes, and not even related to crowded places or whatever. Just standing at an abandoned spot can make you crash. So, to comfort those who are wondering why, it has probably nothing to do with your PC or configuration, but more likely with SL itself. But I wouldn't say it is the worst, or most unstable "game" online.

Unknown said...

this is very confusing
there must be some reason my pc was working fine with no crashes and one day it decided to crash 5 times /hr .
i didn't change the version or any hard or software and i'm the only one who crashes in the place.
so there must be something else

LS said...

I'm crashing a lot since December 2009. Before there was no crashing like now. I didn't change hardware or software, but now I'm always being disconnected from SL. Maybe I will just forget SL. What a mess...

Swythe Quirksettle said...

I find it off how so many people complain of connection issues with SL. Yet whenever I run it on one of my tweaked systems, including my old Athlon MP I never had too much trouble past the usual network lag.

What I think most people are having issues with, is that the SL client may have been compiled on a system that was optimized and tweaked for high performance for development, when lots of users do not even glance at the windows services that could have issues.

There's a lot of external libraries and code that SL relies on for windows. Such as the C++ redistributable and the .net platform and OpenGL. If any of them are outdated, you could see more crashes with later versions.

Also lots windows services and features could be shut off that can cause system hangs or try to snatch memory where it shouldn't (witch cause SL to drop packets and may mess with cache reading).

This is no one's fault, most people don't tweak. Or are aware of tweaking.