[sldev] Snowglobe Pauses

[Robin Cornelius]

On Tue, Jun 9, 2009 at 3:22 PM, Matt White<mwhite at leporidae.net> wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 9, 2009 at 10:06 AM, Stickman<stickman at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Usually the solution I hear in any game (read: 3D rendered world) with
>> problems like this is try setting it to use only one core.
>
> This is only a very recent thing. SL runs very well on multi-core
> machines - I've had to go back to the release client since Snowglobe
> is nearly unusable with all of the pauses. The release client works
> great on the same hardware.
>
> I'm just interested in trying to track down what's doing it so I can
> hand it over to the developers to get it fixed in future builds. :)
>

I'm afraid this is probably going to take a build from source to attack.

If your up for that then its not too difficult (doing the build is the
most difficult bit) to grab some stack traces from the various
threads. All you would need to do is hit pause in visual studio during
one of these events then open the thread and stack trace window and
copy and paste to a notepad the stack trace for each thread and
hopefully that will point at what is blocking.

Some other ideas,

What the fast timers (advanced menu->consoles->fast timers) if the
viewer resumes from one of these pauses you should with luck see one
of the counters shoot of the screen, if you click to pause the timers
and click on the really excessive bar you get a break down of the
timers on the left. It may point to a particular place in the viewer.

Also watching the log file can be helpful. If you are on windows, find
WinTail and open the SecondLife.log file and watch in real time, see
if a particular message is associated with the pauses.

My gut instinct says this is related to some of the arp_locking that
has been played with recently due to various texture decode issues,
and this sticks of a dead lock condition.

Robin