Some people have asked us to tell you how to reduce Lag. Here comes a few tips and procedures for you to use reducing lag.

What is it

There are a few different types of Lag in Second Life. SL is a very cutting edge application which will manage to push the limits on much of your computer hardware. Your video card, CPU, memory, and your network will all be far from idle while you explore and enjoy Second Life.

Tips on Reducing Lag

<Video>

Here are the settings we recommend for those who are running minimal hardware or who are having trouble with crashes:

Open the Preferences window (Ctrl+P)

Under Preferences / Display tab:

All checkboxes listed next to “Performance Options” should be UNchecked.
Avatar Rendering to “Normal”
Terrain Detail to “None”
Uncheck Run in a window
Use a low resolution, such as 800×600 or 1024×768

Under Preferences / Options tab:

Check ON AGP Graphics Acceleration if you have the option
Texture Cache Size should be set to small if you have 512MB of memory or less, or large if you have more.
Set your video card memory size as low as possible (though you may want to turn it back up if everything seems too blurry to you)
Move Object, Tree, and Avatar Detail sliders all the way to the left
Check ON Avatar Vertex Program (turn this back off if you keep seeing avatars folded up into themselves)
Set Draw Distance to 64 (very important, this is the biggest factor in video speed)
Fog Distance doesn’t appear to have much of an effect, set it to your preference.
Drop Draw Distance - set to 0, if you have draw distance set to 64, this won’t matter anyway.
Bumpiness Draw Distance - set to 0 (it won’t matter if Object Bump is off anyway)
Max Particle Count to 256 (the default is 4096, you can also disable particles temporarily with Alt+Shift+=)
Outfit Composite Limit to 5 (no idea what this does, I think 5 is the default, and I don’t see any differences in performance when changing it)

Additionally, it can help a lot to make sure you have the newest video drivers installed. If your drivers are more than a year old, chances are you will probably get some noticeable improvement by upgrading them.

Network

<Bandwidth>

In the corner of your window, you should see two small vertical indicators. The one on the left is your PACKET LOSS, the one on the right is your CURRENT BANDWIDTH. These indicators can be green, yellow, or red, depending on the percentage.

Bandwidth is not as important of an indicator of lag as much as packet loss. If you see ANY indication of packet loss, that’s not good. If you see it every once in a while, or in very busy areas with a lot of people, that is normal. But, if you’re getting any significant amount of packet loss in quiet areas or while flying around, you may need to adjust your Bandwidth under your Preferences / Network tab. The exception to this is that some packet loss seems to occur regularly at busy hours.

1. Start with 300 kbps as your default.
2. If you’re not experiencing any packet loss, but feel like the world is loading too slowly and your bandwidth indicator is often yellow or red, then raise your bandwidth higher.
3. If you are experiencing packet loss, reduce your bandwidth down until it stops.

<Disk Cache Size>

We recommend a reasonable setting around 200MB. You can set it higher, but then we’d recommend purging the cache occasionally to keep it working efficiently. Higher cache sizes tend to slowly degrade performance over time. If you set it too low, then you’re always downloading things over and over again. 200 seems like a reasonable compromise in size and performance.

Also, you may want to disable streaming audio (Preferences / Audio tab) if you do not have enough bandwidth or want to save some CPU cycles.

CPU/Memory

Rebooting your computer before starting SL can help get better performance.
Close as many background programs as you can while running SL, especially P2P programs (Kazaa, Emule, Gnutella, Shareaza, etc)
Defragment your hard drive occasionally.
SL works optimally with 1 GB of RAM (that’s 1024 MB). More is better, but the payoff is much less beyond 1GB.

Tip: If you need to run background applications while running Second Life, you may want to try lowering the Task Priority for newview.exe just a little bit to give those programs a chance to run a little more smoothly. Don’t do this unless you absolutely have to, because it will slow down the SL client. Some people do this often when browsing the web while running SL, as SL tends to make the web browser very slow.

Additional Information

To view your video and network status, press Alt+1
Typical frame-rates are between 10-20 FPS in non-busy areas
Typical network traffic is between 20-50 kbps in non-busy areas

Lag occurs most when

Your Draw Distance is too high
There are many physical (physics-enabled) objects nearby
There is a large group of people nearby
You are moving (and therefore loading new geometry, textures, and sounds)
You or other people are playing sounds or animations
When many objects are moving around nearby
You have “fancy” graphics features enabled (Local Lighting, Object Bump, Ripple Water, Shadows, etc)