What is Lag?Lag is omnipresent in Second Life. But there is a large degree of variability in terms of how badly it affects each of us.
This guide attempts to provide a basic primer on what is lag and how to debug and combat the it. We hope doing so will help make living and playing at here at Fractured Planet even more pleasant.
Understanding lagUnfortunately, lag is a catch-all term employed to describe three very different things. While there is no non-technical way to describe these sources, understanding the technology is not really necessary to follow the rest of the guide. Feel free to skip.
The technology of lagSecond Life operates on a client server model like much of the internet. The "SIM" is the server, the internet is the network and our viewer runs on the client.
The server is responsible for keeping track of where our avatars are, simulating physics, running scripts and sending us the massive amounts of data that we need.
The client is your personal desktop/laptop/tablet/phone that actually displays the world to you and allows you to interact with it using the data the server has sent it. The network is what glues it together by transmitting your data back and forth. So what is lag? Lag is a catch-all term to describe any kind of delay between what your brain expects to see vs. what you actually see. The actual source of lag can be any of the above three components but the user perceives it as a deterioration in expected performance. This can refer to delay between attempting to move vs. when your avatar actually moves, a delay in how often your screen draws the scene or even a delay in executing a script once you have clicked on your HUD. In the worst case, your computer may just lock up and refuse to accept your inputs !
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