How to Reduce Client Side Lag in Second Life

Posted by Chrischun Fassbinder on October 11th, 2007 filed in guides, second life

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No one likes lag, whether it be local, server side or some hardware’s fault in the middle. Have to admit I’ve many a time found myself explaining the details and walking people through changing/disabling certain settings. Rather than continuing to do that here’s a guide that I can now point them to. It also makes an interesting and information filled blog entry worth sharing.

The following are ideas and suggestions to aide you when in the battle against Lagnor.

For the most part, lower end hardware will see a greater percentage of increased performance than a high end machine. For those who just meet the bare minimum requirements here are the client settings I recommend using for greatest efficiency…

1. Open the Preferences Window (CTRL-P)
2. Under Graphics Detail (tab on the left hand side of the preferences window) change as follows…

* Avatar Rendering to “Normal”
* Terrain Detail to “Low”
* Move the Tree Mesh & Flexible sliders all the way to the left
* Use the sun and moon option rather than Nearby Local Lights.
* Uncheck all Shader options

Preferences > Network

* Texture Cache Size should be set to small if you have 512MB of memory or less, or large if you have more.

Preferences > Adv. Graphics

* Enable OpenGL Vertex Buffer Objects should be enabled
* Set your video card memory size as low as possible
* Max Particle Count to 256
* Outfit Composite Limit to 5

Preferences > Graphics

* Set Draw Distance to 64
* Uncheck Run in a window

That does it for the changes which can be made using the preferences settings.

The next step is to enable the debug menus and turn off rendering of the less used material types.

1) To enable the client’s debug pull-down menus from the top of your client, press CTRL+ALT+D.

2) From the Client pull-down go Client > Rendering > Types > *

3) The least useful material with best return in overhead return are below in that order.

- Grass (ctrl+alt+shift+0)
- Clouds (ctrl+alt+shift+-)
- Water (ctrl+alt+shift+7)
- Tree (ctrl+alt+shift+3)
- Particles (ctrl+alt+shift+=)

4) Configuration from the debug menus are not saved so you will need to disable showing of certain material types each time you login, that’s why knowing the hot-keys is a valuable time saver.

5) It’s worth turning off fog as well, which is now located in the debug menu at Client > Rendering > Features > Fog

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That does it for the options and settings which account for the largest changes in increasing efficiency of the viewer. If this was your first time using the Client/Server “debug” menus, take some time to check out all the neat options they provide. If you botch something bad enough were you can’t turn it off or don’t know how, just re-log to clear, as nothing is saved with those types of settings.

While Second Life is memory a hog… taking advantage from some of the suggestions above should greatly reduce the size of this digital pig to a near manageable size. :)

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