Why do Second Life simulators lag? How can you tell when the lag is at your end and the lag is at the server end?

Under The Grid is a new series looking at the mechanics underneath Second Life, and how it functions. This week, we're going to take a look at simulators and what we know about lag.

There are several pieces to the lag equation. Your hardware (we'll just call it your computer), your viewer (we'll call it the client), your network (this includes whole chunks of network that belong neither to you nor to Linden Lab), sims (short for simulators - those square areas on the map that are sometimes also called regions) and the servers that they run on. There are a lot of pieces there. There are even more that are involved in the running of the grid, but we'll talk about those another time, along with non-simulator causes of lag.