SL freezes up my whole pc
needsĀ info
FaithReagan Resident
Hello, support has told me to write here about my problem.
Since about New Year i am experiencing very unusual glitch. Sometimes it happens within a few minutes after log in, sometimes it takes 30-60 minutes, but at some point my client freezes up and it freezes the whole system, i cant do anything, the only solution is to manually reboot pc, with a button on the computer.
I use Firestorm. I cleared cache, i reinstalled the client. I downgraded Firestorm to the previous version from summer 2025. Nothing helped. I tried Black Dragon and the same thing happens there. I also tested it in Alchemy and Second Life Viewer, all clients freeze my pc just the same. So this is an SL issue, not client. I wanna add that it cant be my pc, because i play video games, use computer for many things and it doesnt happen anywhere else but second life. And for nearly 3 years i have never occured any problems with second life.
After several messages with support i also downgraded my gpu drivers by at least 6 months back but the problem started appearing while i had the gpu driver installed at least 2 months earlier. It did not help either. I dont know what else i could do, but it seems like support cant help me any further than this, so they told me to report this bug here.
I hope it can be looked into because its been over 2 months and i cant enjoy SL on a normal level anymore which discourages me completely.
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Beatrice Voxel
Faith, you might consider running a utility such as SpeedFan or AIDA64 on your system, so that you can see realtime info on all of your hardware's performance specs. SL is kind of an odd beast - because so much is user-generated (and not optimized like you would see in a game) there's a lot of rendering overhead if the residents didn't pay close attention to what they were building.
Also, consider on what sims you're seeing this occur. Linden-managed areas such as Bellesaria will have much more standardized builds, so your system can load mesh and textures that are used repeatedly (thus less resource usage). Hit a club build and you could be looking at loads and loads of unique textures, each one only used once, but they still all have to be held in VRAM to render the scene. And then there's the people - avatars are rarely alike, and cheap / free clothing items aren't always optimal because the designer didn't take the time to make sure they were optimal.
One other thing you should check on your system: disk usage. Windows has a thing called "Virtual RAM" which is basically disk space set aside as a scratchpad for swapping things in and out of memory. If your disk is full, it becomes hard for Windows to do these swaps, and your performance will drag to a crawl or even lock up. If your OS disk is full, consider uninstalling any game or app that you haven't actively used in the last 3-6 months. With today's broadband speeds, installing something from scratch isn't the hours-long ordeal it used to be, so keeping a game on the drive just because you own it isn't exactly the best policy anymore.
Dan Linden
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needsĀ info
Dan Linden
Hi FaithReagan,
Please post the information from Help menu > About Second Life. Is this a laptop or desktop?
This could be a hardware issues or maybe an overheating issue.
You can keep an eye on the temperature by opening the Windows Task Manager, expanding it, opening the Performance tab, and selecting the GPU that shows some work (there may be multiple GPUs). It should show a temperature at the bottom.
Bavid Dailey
you mention other games and other uses, but do they stress your PC as much as the viewers do?
For example , each fully rendered avatar costs about 300MB (megabytes, not a typo) , so if you're tight on memory OR the memory has bad area you might see what you're seeing.
It's a long shot but it might be worth getting your hardware throughly checked over