HOME / TECHNICAL ISSUES / LAG / STUTTERING
Question: I'm lagging in Second Life. By that, I mean the video's jerky or stuttering; OR there are times where nothing moves, including my avatar; OR there's times when I start typing and the characters don't show up even as I'm typing them. What's wrong?
Answer:
This type of "lag" - known as low framerate - usually indicates that your computer is having trouble drawing what it sees. There may be too much detail in the scene you're looking at, you may have your graphical Preferences too high, or something else might be taking up a lot of your computer's processing time.
First, make sure you're using a compatible graphics card. While some non-compatible graphics cards might work, they're likely to have much greater problems drawing the Second Life world. Make sure you're using the latest drivers as well.
Second, while your computer may meet the Minimum System Requirements, it's best to exceed them to prevent bottlenecks. (The Minimum System Requirements are the minimum hardware required to run Second Life at all.) A slower processor (under 2GHz), older video card (any nVidia Geforce older than a FX 5200, or ATI Radeon older than a 9700), or low memory (less than 512MB if you're not running other programs) can contribute to low framerates.
Be sure to read the Preferences Guide if you haven't already. The easiest settings you can change are Draw Distance and Object/Tree/Avatar Detail.
Check to see if your hard drive light is showing a lot of activity. If it is, then your system may be running low on memory and using hard drive swap space instead, which is significantly slower.
You might need to turn your bandwidth settings down in your Preferences, if your computer is receiving more network data than it can handle.
Try teleporting to a quieter area, or one with less objects, to see if the situation improves.
You might also read our Statistics Guide to verify that the problem is low framerate (Basic FPS in the Statistics window).
Try unchecking "Avatar Vertex Program" under the Advanced Graphics tab in your SL preferences. It says "(faster)" behind it but it's been verified to slow down at least one ATI card, so it may be causing SL to run slower for you.