The latest release is causing many people lots of problems. For others no problems. I find this version of Firestorm Viewer to be the most problematic viewer from Firestorm that I’ve used in a long time. But I remember the OLD DAYS when viewers were seriously buggy.

So, what problems are people seeing with the Firestorm Viewer?

Slow render/rez – I see a bit of that. While I think Firestorm is generally faster at rezzing scenes often something just doesn’t rez. And it never rezzes or I don’t have enough patience, which sucks. But there are two quick fixes… or may be that is two steps to a fix… Press Ctrl-Shift-R twice to pop in and out of Wire Frame mode. This will usually cause everything to render correctly, scene and avatar.

Once in a while changing to Wire Frame won’t cause the avatar to render fully. Some times everything but the avatar rezzed fully. In these cases or just to restore the avatar Rebake the Avatar: top menu Avatar->Avatar Health->Force Appearance Update (Rebake) or Ctrl-Alt-R.

One or both of these steps should get you easily rendered and avoid restarting the viewer.

Viewer Crashes/Freezes – These are difficult to pin down. Before you start trying to troubleshoot the problem make sure your computer is in good shape and working well.

First, run the System File Checker built into Windows, 10 and 11. Do that by opening a command window and running the SFC command as an administrator. See the images on this page. Also, you can search for Windows 10 System File Checker for more detailed information and step by steps.

Enter the command: SFC /SCANNOW. This will take 5 or 10 minutes to run. It will find any problems with the Windows System Files that may be causing problems. It will end and tell you; all was OK, it fixed things, or is could not fix the problems. If the problems are such it cannot fix them, then you need to search for: fixing Windows [10/11] DISM. This is a bit more complicated but it is still only a couple of commands and Windows does the work. The result is almost as good as a reinstall of Windows without the annoying need to reinstall apps.

Make sure your Windows install has all the updates installed. Type: Windows Update.

Make sure your graphics drivers are up to date. You can search for: how to update Win[10/11] graphics driver [your card’s brand name].

Click below for more…

Once these things are done, test to see if your problems with Firestorm Viewer are resolved. If not then test another viewer to decide if it is; SL – the Server side or the Firestorm Viewer – client side.

The Linden SL Viewer is the ‘goto’ viewer for troubleshooting. If the troubleshooting leads to a problem on the ‘server side’ aka Linden side, you will have to supply the Lab’s support people info from their viewer to get help. And the Firestorm support people will ask if you tested in the Lab’s viewer as part of their troubleshooting.

Everything is Slow – When you start Windows it does a ton of internal checking and goes looking for updates. You can open the Task Manager (right-click any open space in the Task Bar and select it) and then click the Performance tab. Look to see how much of your hard drive’s or SSD’s time is being used by Windows’ tasks. For the first 5 to 20+ minutes after Windows boots you will often find it is 100%. In which case the ENTIRE computer will be slow and the viewer ridiculously slow.

Popup, drop downs, menu panels, dialogs… everything takes forever to open. Look to see if the drive is overloaded and suffering 100% use.

Is there anything to be done about it? Depends… no not the diapers… From the Task Manager->Performance you can look down toward the bottom and open the Resource Monitor (there are various ways to open the monitor). In the monitor you can see what is using the drive. Most of those things will be internal Windows tasks that we should leave alone. You can search the web on the task names to find out what they do.

However, look down in the memory section. There is a column labeled Hard Faults/sec. This should be a column of zeros. Even one or two faults per sec is a horrible impact on performance.

In this case a fault is an app running out of memory. To give an app more memory Windows takes memory dedicated to a sleeping app, saves it to disk and gives the freed memory to the active app. This takes time. We measure it in milliseconds but it adds up as the computer is doing billions of things per second and switches, waking and putting to sleep, apps hundreds to thousands of times per second. If it is having to save their memory to disk and retrieve the next app’s memory so it can run… SLOW.

If you see memory faults, you need to add memory to your computer.

Adding memory is easy. But it is technical. You have to buy memory with specs that fit your motherboard. It isn’t rocket-science. You look up your motherboard (HDMonitor a free app will tell you which MB you have). Find the memory type they spec for it and buy that memory. Search for a video that shows how to remove and add memory to a computer. Watch the video BEFORE you start spending money. If you think you can do it, go for it.

Pay attention to memory stick size. Desktops use a longer stick than laptops.

Video Card – some computers have a dedicated video card or chip, aka GPU. Others don’t. To find out if you have a dedicated card or not and which one check this video:

Or… you can look in Windows’ Start Menu->Settings->System->Display->(scroll down) Advanced Display Settings->Display Adapter Properties

If you don’t have a dedicated GPU then your computer uses the GPU built into the CPU. It also uses part of your computer’s active RAM for graphics memory thus reducing the amount of memory available for the viewer to use. My laptop uses the GPU in the CPU. The new Firestorm Viewer version 7 forces the fans to max speed. Sound like a wind tunnel… But the viewer runs OK. If there are no mirrors around my fans slow to their normal quite speeds.

Summary

I am not having much in the way of problems with Firestorm Viewer v7.1.9. May be once a day I’ll crach TP’ing home. Some suspect TP’ing into a location with a mirror crashes the viewer. My experience suggests this is true, but doesn’t conclusively prove it.

My previous article shows there isn’t much difference in performance between v6 and v7. However, walking in front of a mirror does incur a performance hit.

Having listened to people complaining in Firestorm Support, I think it is clear those with older computers are likely to have problems. Those that do NOT have a dedicated GPU are more likely to have problems. And older CPUs have less capable built in GPUs. The older they are the less capable they are.

The tenth generation CPUs (released August 2019) are the oldest ones capable of running Windows 11. Windows 10 is done in October 2025. That is Microsoft’s cutoff date for 10. About 15 months from now. You need to be on Win 11 and have newer hardware.

2019 to 2020 computers on eBay go for US$200 depending on how they are equipped. And if you have eBay notify you of deals, you can get some really good equipment for cheap.

So, people can cry and whine, but the world is spinning around the sun and there are no foreseeable stops ahead where they’ll be able to get off. Since the Earth is moving at about 67,000 MPH that is the speed you would be falling behind. Things are changing. Keep up.