Pictured: NiranV's avatar side-by-side with a SLINK mesh body - click to compare polygon count

If you're using Second Life and you're lagging for no obvious reason, you might want to take a close look at the users around you. Chances are, the problem is literally skin deep. That's because some of the top-selling mesh bodies in Second Life -- Maitreya, Belleza and SLINK -- are extremely resource heavy, and tend to degrade performance of everyone around them, including the users wearing these bodies. NiranV, developer of the acclaimed, graphics-optimized Black Dragon SL viewer, tells me he's experienced this problem first hand.

"What I see and hear from them, both from friends, personal experience, and their customers when I have to help them with Viewer-related issues, I find more and more reasons every time to absolutely hate them. Those three are the worst ones anyway -- Belleza being at the top, followed by Maitreya and then SLINK."

The problem, he says, is these mesh bodies all have excessive amounts of polygons that the Second Life grid attempts to display to every user in the scene.

"Maitreya starts with 80,000-100,000 — only the base body. Belleza was something like 200,000+ last time I checked. Modern games use roughly 20-40k for an entire character. A few games use more, obviously, but 20-40k is standard today. So with 100-200k you can imagine how much more straining avatars are. And they are just bodies — [not counting] clothes, no hair, nothing."

Even a single avatar wearing one of those bodies can hurt SL framerate performance by up to 5o%, and still more, as more avatars with these bodies enter the same space.

"SL is a complex system, not even super static tests always show the same results. So there's a +/- 10% here and there. But most scenes with single humans, wearing avatars built with either of these bodies, manages to half my framerate, if not make it completely unstable. I can see this behavior every day right in front of my parcel where human [avatars] travel to Firestorm's parcel. Just 1-2 of them are enough to drop me from 80-100 FPS down to 30-40 FPS on average… I’d say you generally see 30-50% reduction in your framerate for the first avatar, subsequently less for more."

Second Life is often faulted for poor graphics, but a key problem is Second Life struggling to display so many user-generated polygons at once:

"Entire scenes in SL consist of up to 20 million polygons. That's many times more than entire levels in modern games come up with. It’s absolutely insane. These bad practices of human mesh creators need to stop. Stop spamming 1024x1024 on everything. Stop spamming ‘subdivide’ on meshes and doubling/tripling/quadrupling their polygons when not necessary."

Other graphics experts have also told me the same thing about mesh bodies like Maitreya, Belleza, and SLINK. The real problem is these bodies are probably worn by hundreds of thousands of active SL users, and in NiranV's eyes, the community has done little to raise the issue:

"Everyone puts Maitreya and Belleza at the top of the list for being the very best and finest," as he puts it. "Every fucking blogger blogs about them, blogs in excitement how good it is, how good more polygons are—not understanding what it means. Everyone just smacks shit on their avatar expecting the viewer to magically do whatever is necessary to produce usable framerates. And yell at Linden when it doesn’t. I wouldn’t be surprised if professional coders were looking at SL from a technical standpoint and wondering how SL can even run still, how it manages to keep all this complex shit piled up and not break apart under the sheer load that everyone puts both the server and client every day, every second they use it."

It's the unlikeliest example of the tragedy of the commons: In a world where everyone is trying to show off their awesome avatar to others, avatar enhancements have become so resource heavy, no one can actually see them. It's probably why Second Life has largely become an offline, solo activity, with people shooting screenshots and video of their avatars posing alone -- because that's the only reliable way to get a decent performance.

But if the SL community has inadvertently caused this tragedy, Niran believes the community can also call for popular skin/mesh body brands to better optimize their products: