We all experience lag and semi-frequent viewer crashes and server disconnections from time to time on Second Life, especially if the computer we’re accessing it with is not built for gaming. Your Internet speed does very little for it if your laptop cannot handle the data fast enough, but the good news is; nobody is in a hurry. It is very slow… Game. (I use the word “game” in the same sense as playing dress up or house is a game.)
If you’re asking my recommendation and you have the $$’s to spend, splurge on a Dell Alienware gaming laptop, goodbye lag… For the most part. lol.
The reason WHY there’s a lot of lag is the same reason we love Second Life so much.
There’s a lot that Linden Labs could do to solve the lag issue, but they should not. Namely, they’d have to ban the use of a number of creative expressions in favor of speed. They already reduced the maximum prim size to 64×64 meters (70×70 yards, give or take, which, in comprehensible context is the height of about 20 storey building,) and the maximum texture dimensions to 2048×2048 pixels. (It won’t fit your screen,) and got complaints of these strict limitations, lol. While there is a reasonable use for such sizes, many times amateur creators use overly large images and overly complex objects to do what could be done with less laggy components. The use of PNG images is also often entirely unnecessary, and JPG’s should be favored whenever possible (transparency requires png) but I’m veering off topic.
Second Life is all about user-created content, and that means not all of it is 100% optimized by seasoned game-developing professionals. Most of them wankers don’t even know how to optimize a texture, let alone a mesh object or a script, but that is, at the same time, the beauty of Second Life. Everyone can create content for it, and whatever is important to us can remain important… High definition facial graphics for super closeups? FIIINE. Super detailed outfits with every button rocking a 2048×2048 texture? Fine. Unadvisable, but fine! You do it.
And it’s that same reason the scale issue exists and isn’t a deal breaker, at the end of the day (even if it drives me insane EVERY DAY.) Creativity and the freedom to create is what matters, and we should all be quite happy to wait around for the results of it.