How to Improve Second Life Lag

Second Life can be a blessing and a curse. A number of factors contribute to what we all know as 'lag'. Here are a few tips to help.

Wi-fi to weak?  if your computer is not already connected via ethernet cable, I strongly recommend trying that.

Minimize your Avatar Rendering Complexity by wearing the bare minimum of scripted items on your avatar. 

Graphics Preferences:

1. Edit Preferences (CTRL+P) Select the "Graphics" tab
2. If you are running at 'high' or 'ultra' settings, try reducing in steps to 'medium' or 'low'
3. Make sure that your draw distance isn't set to some insanely high nonsense. Reduce the Draw slider.  This is under Preference Ctrl+p, Graphics tab.
4. Reduce your Grapics Detail. Go to Preference, Graphics Detail tab, then drag all sliders to the left. Also, disable Vertex Shader, Bumpmapping, Ripple Water. Also, disable local lighting and others.

Turn off Voice Chat. Even if you are not using voice chat, having the feature on sucks your CPU because it runs a background process. To turn Voice Chat feature off, go to Preference, Voice Chat tab.

Turn off any other CPU-intensive programs such as Microsoft Word or PhotoShop
Turn off any other internet-intensive programs such as internet radio or online games. (They're stealing resources from your Second Life viewer)

Land Lag:
One of the major things that affects the performance of any sim is scripts. The more densely populated a region is, the more chances of lag increasing due to scripted objects running on the region and nearby avatars causing you lag. However, scripts are the real essence of Second Life; without them, SL would be pretty boring.

On your own land, once you know which scripts are consuming your region’s resources, you can remove, replace or optimize them.

How to disable a script.
First, pick the object you want to optimize/disable. Right-click on it and select "Edit" from the pie menu. Go to the object's "Content" tab. Right-click on the script you want to disable and select "Open". The script window opens. Don't worry if you don't have modify rights to the script; you can still change it's running state. The "Running" checkbox at the bottom left of the script window is checked when the script is running and unchecked when it's not. Simply uncheck that box and the script is now no longer contributing to lag.

How to check script info: Go to World -> About Land -> Click on the Script Info button. You can check script info on your land and see every scripted item listed, and the total memory used.


Find Out Your FPS:

To find out what is your screen update rate, called Frames Per Second (FPS), by pressing Ctrl+Shift+1.

Things start to get pretty slow if it drops below 12FPS, and below 8FPS your probably tearing your hair out. If it drops too low, you can unexpectedly crash.

Hope some of this may help you reduce your lag. If you have a lag reducing tip please share in commits. Thank you!