We get quite a few emails and forum posts about Framerate and Memory Leak issues, so we've put together a short FAQ to answer some of your questions.

Q: I am experiencing a great deal of lag, what can I do?
A: If you are experiencing an unusual amount of lag, you should report it to Technical Help via email at help@there.com. When reporting lag,the things which are important to note are:

• general location
• what you see in your ctrl-shift-P green and blue meters
• sector you are in (or multiple sectors if near boundaries)

You can get the sector list from ctrl-shift-H (your current sector number is next to the 'SSOT').  NOTE: We advise only turning that on when you need to, as it will lower your frame rate to have it running.

Q: My There client is taking up a lot of CPU and causing my computer to freeze up.
A: There uses all the CPU it can in order to keep the CPU warm. Literally! The reason is that laptops detect when the CPU isn't being used 100% and will shut down  for a small while. Alas, that small while is long enough to cause There to lag. Because laptops are now around 40% of the total PC market, we had to make it like this.

We've repeatedly run There in the lab, looking for client memory leaks, and haven't really found any. If you're using third-party utilities, like the Flash GPS 3rd Party Tool, we know there are bugs in that -- uninstall it if you don't want the bugs.

Q: How can I make the There client not use all my CPU?
A: To make There NOT use all of your CPU, you can try this:

1. right-click on My Computer and select Properties
2. on the Advanced tab, click Environment Variables
3. click "New" and name the variable THERESLEEP (all uppercase) and give it the value 1 (just a single digit one)
4. apply, save, close windows, and restart your computer (just for good measure)
5. now, when you log in, you may find that There is not using as much CPU

This procedure does not work on all computers. It also may induce lag on some machines. To reverse the effect, remove the environment variable you created and restart the computer again (for better karma).

Q: How Can I Measure my Frame Rate?
A: Pressing ctrl-shift-F will toggle the 'fps meter' on and off.  It shows two numbers:

• FPS (Frames Per Second) -- measures your graphics display rate
• PPS (Physics Per Second) -- measures your physics computations

Ideally, both would be close to 30.  When your computer gets overloaded, we make physics a priority, so your frame rate will suffer first.

Q: Tell Me More about the ctrl-shift-P performance meter?
A: pressing ctrl-shift-P will toggle the 'performance meter' on and off.  It shows three graphs:

• Green - Bandwidth, shows what percentage of "56K" you are using (if it is solid green then you are using 56K or more).  Generally this pegs out when you are downloading new assets, hearing music, or hearing speech.  You can control how much of your available bandwidth we will use for asset downloads by setting your "connection speed" in the "There/Preferences/Connection" menu.  If you set that to a lower value, we will send assets to you more slowly.  This might improve your experience if your bandwidth is normally saturated.

• Light Blue - Ping, this shows absolute latency between you and the servers.  It should normally be quite empty.  Little red bits here mean packets were actually dropped/lost, which is a bad thing in general, so if it is happening a lot, there is something to be investigated in the internet connection between your PC and the server.

• Dark Blue - Frame Rate.  This is the same number shown in the FPS meter, but as a graph.  Solid blue means you are averaging a solid 30 frames per second.  It is normal for this to dip a bit when something complicated is going on.  But once things have settled down, you want this meter to go back to solid Blue.