Sunday, January 22, 2012

SecondLife : Reducing Lag : And The Network Bandwidth Setting

By Avatar JayR Cela

    A number of years ago I recall a good friend of mine explaining the numerous variable's in SL that can have a cumulative effect, causing an unwanted lack of performance in the SL viewer. Most people refer to it as lag. Ya know when ya just so happen to drop into a happening hot spot, full of people, and everyone is just grey textures, or things just seem to take forever to rezz ( come into focus ). Dam that is annoying ! There are a number of workarounds that you can do in order to solve this annoyance.

    I think everyone all ready knows about decreasing your Draw Distance ( 128 meters is usually the optimal setting ) Eliminating unnecessary shader options and various other configuration tweaks within you Viewer Graphics Preferences can also have a huge effect in your viewer of choice's performance.

    The majority of these are all located under the Graphics Tab, and or Advanced Graphics. It all depends upon which SecondLife client that you have chosen to use, and where they are located at.

    One thing that seems to confuse a number of people is the Network Bandwidth control, fine tuning this particular adjustment is not black magic. It does however take a little bit of time on your part in order to find the optimal setting.

    The first thing that you need to know is, how fast, or slow your connection is. This is relatively easy to determine with the use of a number of free on-line services. It does not really mater which one ya choose, just GOOGLE Internet speed test.

    Once you know your maximum download speed, open your Viewer Preferences and find the Network Bandwidth control. At this point set it to aprx. 1/2 of the value you determined as the max. From here you can fine tune it a little bit one way or the other to find the sweet spot that works best for you.

    It really does make a difference.

JayR Cela :_)

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