Extreme Gesture / Sound delays
needs info
Eren Padar
Gestures and sounds can take AGES to trigger... from 30 to 60 seconds or longer. At one time gesture performance was instantaneous. Now, sometimes they work, often they don't. What good is a gesture that happens 60 seconds after we give the command? Am wondering what is the bottleneck that seems to be affecting so much of SL performance.
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Maestro Linden
needs info
Hi Eren Padar, the playback of animations and sound effects from gestures depends on your viewer having the associated asset. There can be a delay if the viewer needs to download the asset. Repeated playbacks of a gesture should be fast, as the assets are already in the viewer's local cache.
Is this delay occurring the first time the gesture plays in a session, or do you also see this for repeated playback? If it's the latter, can you share an example gesture which demonstrates this issue?
Eren Padar
Maestro Linden Greetings Maestro! The delay occurs only on the first play. Repeated playbacks are instant. The issue is: why should it take 30 to 60 seconds to retrieve a gesture from the asset server? That seems to me extremely poor server performance... and negates the validity of the gesture.
Example: Someone says something funny. So I type in /haha. A FULL MINUTE LATER my avatar laughs. By that time the joke is long forgotten and the laugh is terribly out-of-place.
In the earlier days of SL, gestures and sounds were practically instantaneous. If using a gesture depends on my Viewer already having the associated asset... what good are gestures? If one hasn't been used in a while it's what... (I'm guessing here)... un-encoded from a slow asset archive, transferred to the main asset server, transferred to the sim server, then transferred to my computer? Because I can't imagine any other method taking 30 seconds to a full minute to play a single gesture.
Seriously speaking: can you imagine the result if every single page on Amazon took 30 to 60 seconds to load? How tolerant would shoppers be of that over a period of time? (I'm thinking competitors would pick up a whole lot of business).
That's the issue (with respect): Acceptable performance of Second Life... vs unacceptable performance. And again I have to ask, what is the asset bottleneck(s) affecting so much of Second Life, from gestures to texture rezzing to mesh rezzing to avatar rezzing? Whatever that bottleneck is, it's excessive and really, in my experience shouldn't be all that difficult to identify and correct. I recognize that Second Life likely has millions of asset requests per day... but so does Amazon. Netflix. Prime. Wal-Mart.
Netflix streams live video in real time. Yet Second Life can't transmit a gesture? ('Scuse please, me asking the blunt questions. Computer consultant for 35 years. Retired, but old business habits of "cutting to the chase" die hard.) ; )
Maestro Linden
I tried the following to measure the delay in sound gesture playback times. I tested with Second Life Release 7.1.15.15596336374 (64bit) on Second Life Server 2025-04-24.14648572313, using a 27 second stereo audio clip that I obtained from archive.org:
- Upload a sound clip that's easy to hear and is just barely under the 30 seconds limit imposed by SL. A large audio clip should have the largest file size and thus take longer to download.
- Create a new gesture which print some text (which should appear immediately) and plays the audio clip
- Clear the viewer cache, and login with the viewer
- Once the scene has loaded, trigger the gesture
- Using a stopwatch, measure the time until the audio is heard
- Repeat steps (3) - (5) a few times
The playback times I got were all faster than I could react to start and stop my timer - all times were below 50ms.
When you try these steps, what times do you get? Also, which viewer are you using? This could be a viewer-side bug.