World hangs shortly after entry

[Lawrence Pierce]

I've found that various worlds hang after entering them. Here is the sequence of events:

1. Start a world.
2. Enter the world.
3. Able to move around for a few moments, then viewer hangs (on Mac, this is the spinning "beach ball").
4. After 30-60 seconds, the system is available again, and no further hangs occur during that session.

This never happens on Serenity Island, but it just happened on the 100,000 prim Serenity Island. It also happened twice today on the EIC-UWE world (4 regions connected as a megaregion). It has happened on numerous other occasions in other worlds, but it is not consistent. Sometimes the same world that froze on one visit works without hanging at a later visit.

This happens with Firestorm and Singularity (latest versions), under Mavericks (10.9.5), and on two different computers (Mac Pro, iMac). Actually, today, the Firestorm viewer froze so long, I finally force quit it. Clearing the viewer cache does not appear to mitigate the problem. There do not appear to be other performance or network problems on these systems. The Second Life viewer used with Second Life does not exhibit this behavior.

I have added this comment to the worlds support area since it happens across two different viewers and two different computers.

[Roswenthe Blackwell]

This is very similar to my experience, except that when it hangs, after about 15 seconds, I crash out completely about 50% of the time. I am using Firestorm on a Windows 7 PC.

[Selby Evans]

Hi Lawrence,

This is a viewer issue that happens when teleporting between world, it's not a simulator problem. You can test this yourself by going inworld with one viewer, waiting a couple of minutes then teleporting into that world with another viewer while continuing to move around with the first one (preferably do this from two different computers). You'll note that while one viewer hangs the other remains fully working.

This issue results from the viewer not having enough resources to process the new world it entered until it finishes deallocating the resources it had allocated to handle the world it just left. Adding more memory to your system can help mitigate these issues if you're using an SL-derived viewer.

[Lawrence Pierce]

The issue I reported occurs when I launch a world directly (not teleporting between worlds). My system has 32GB of RAM.

Along the same lines as the issue I've described, I now find that when I attempt to enter one of my worlds, the hang occurs even before the world appears in the viewer display. Firestorm displays, "Contacting new region" for about 30 seconds, and during that time the Force Quit Applications program reports that Firestorm is not responding. When the world does appear, prims can be seen popping into the world, so the world was not fully built during the delay, but rather continues after. This is a world with 3440 prims, so it is not a question of world complexity causing the delay. If, however, I teleport into this world from another world, or enter it directly, while it is already running, the teleport happens quickly and the delay does not occur. I do not have this issue with Singularity viewer, only Firestorm.

The world name is 'Roof Deck Study'.

A final symptom that has come about at the same time as these delay issues... In some circumstances, when I attempt to re-enter any world following the spinning "beach ball" (as reported in my first comment), the world is only partially 'built'. This has suggested to me either a failure of the viewer to render the full world, or a communication issue between the viewer and the server. However, I have no underlying issues contacting the server as far as the ISP service. This bad render situation has occurred with both Firestorm and Singularity. Even after emptying caches and doing clean re-installs of the viewers, these issues continue (but only sometimes, not every time).

I'd like to get to the bottom of this as it is a noticeable impediment to smooth operation. Is it possible these issues arise based on the timing of server access and segmentation? Do you have further troubleshooting suggestions?

Note: as for the two viewer test, as soon as I attempt to enter a world with the second viewer, I am logged out of Kitely at the first viewer. And although my avatar appears inworld in the second viewer, I cannot move (also, oddly, my avatar's hair never rezzed). Oh, and a minute later the second viewer reports that I had been logged out of Kitely. Well, I'm not expecting this test to mean anything special - just wanted to comment that I tried it and got somewhat different results.

Firestorm bad render

Singularity bad render

[Ilan Tochner]

Are you attempting to login with the same avatar or with different avatars (one from each viewer)? My suggestion was that you do the later.

[Lawrence Pierce]

Hi,

Well, unrelated to these difficulties I did an experiment back on Oct 30 using two different avatars - I was trying to see if I could camera over to one sim from another using the map as a guide, but alas that doesn't work. Anyway, I had no viewer issues under those conditions, but I also used two different viewers (Singularity and Firestorm). So, that's the extent of my experience doing that kind of overlap, and I think what you're referring to is if I use multiple instances of the same viewer.

So, to be clear on the viewer issue I have been most concerned about... I am now working between two of my worlds using just one avatar. When I leave Serenity Island and enter another world of mine named: Island, the spinning 'beach ball' appears for about 20-30 seconds. This is inevitable? As I noted, I'm working with 32GB of RAM on a quad-core computer, so that seems like plenty of local resources as per your indications about memory. I do understand about the viewers taking time to deallocate resources - this would explain why Firestorm (especially) takes such a long time to shut down completely. However, this phenomena also strongly interferes with teleporting seamlessly between worlds. Or am I experiencing this lag in particular when I teleport away from Serenity Island because that world has so much to deallocate, whereas when I leave Island and go to Serenity Island there is no such application hang? Island = 586 prims, Serenity Island = 40890. I think I'm answering my own question, but I look forward to your verification or other thoughts on this.

[Ilan Tochner]

Hi Lawrence,

You are correct, the more memory your viewer had to allocate to visit a world the more time it will take it to free up that memory. Why the viewer is so inefficient at doing this is a good question (we haven't spent enough time looking at the viewer code to answer that question).

[Roswenthe Blackwell]

Testing that out, I went to preferences in Firestorm and found that the bandwidth allocation was extremely low. I turned it up to about midway, and I allocated a tiny bit more to the cache. The problems loading and crashing seem to have stopped.

Since I recently updated Firestorm, I suspect they reset the defaults to lower settings, as I hadn't had this problem until a couple weeks ago.

[Serene Jewell]

I don't know if this is relevant, but I sometimes experience the spinning beach ball when I teleport to a new world with my graphics turned up high. Normally, I keep my graphics low unless I am taking pictures. I have specifically noticed that if I have my viewer distance turned up (over 200m) and I teleport to a large or complex region, my viewer is going to hang for awhile.

My general rule: turn down graphics before teleporting.

Hope this is helpful to someone.