Lag and Region Performance

To keep things as simple as possible we'll break it down into three main sections.

Client ( Green ) covers how fast your viewer (Firestorm Viewer, Second Life Viewer, Singularity Viewer, etc) can render the scene you can see. Generally speaking if your FPS under this category drops below 20 you'll notice stuttering or delays. The cause for this to drop are too numerous to count but in general this is related to your computer hardware, your viewer settings, or in some rare cases, a griefer item within your view.

Network ( Orange ) shows your connection to the region. Packet Loss over 0% will cause very noticeable issues. Ping Sim over 400 ms will result in delayed inputs (you press forward to walk but it takes half a second or longer to begin moving) and likely slower rezzing of your surroundings. If you notice a very high UDP Data Received rate there could be something on the region within your draw distance causing numerous (and unnecessary) viewer updates. Generally speaking this issue is limited to your internet connection.

It would be best to do a speed test on your internet (speedtest.net) both locally and to a server located in Phoenix, Arizona (where the Second Life servers are located) .

As of December 2020 all Second Life regions are now cloud hosted within the Amazon's AWS service. You can check the EC2 Reachability Test and view the section for North California and Oregon. (More locations may be possible, but these are the ones we have seen in our metrics) In extremely rare cases this could be a Second Life/Region issue.

Server ( Red ) covers the items related directly to the region. There are numerous readouts here but we're going to focus on a few key items that will tell you if the region is running properly or not. The first three numbers to look at are Time Dilation, Sim FPS, and Physics FPS. These should all be 0.990+, 44.9+, and 44.9+ respectively. Main Agents and Child Agents show the number of avatars on the region and number of avatars who can see into the region (only applicable for regions connected to other regions). Scripts Run shows what percentage of scripts were able to run during that one frame. Heavily scripted/populated regions would easily see this number at 50% with no major issues. Total Frame Time should be at 22.222 ms or lower. Higher values indicate a region that is overloaded in one way or another. And last but not least Script Time. For Full Prim regions this should be under 15 ms and for Homesteads under 5 ms.