The Growing LAG in SL, Is It YOUR Fault?

The biggest performance hit is always going to be the way in which the database structure is configured. Limited scaleability of the core system, combined with the pipeline networking nodes within the system.

Basically, SL is out growing the core system, it has been 'strecthed' several times to try and cope, but will require a complete overhaul to make things better.

Did you know that the OpenSim platform can support 500 connections (Avatars) per region (sim)? Around 45,000 prims, along with the correct viewer (Client) can 'see' prims of 250x250x250 and bigger, 99% hollow, 100% transparency.

LL increased the connections to each region from 50 to 100 this year, well in theory anyway.

So what is the limiting factors imposed upon SL's capacity? Simply put, money. This relates to, why allow 250+ ppls to reside on a single region, when your revenue stream is about selling land? The more people that desire space/land, the bigger your revenue stream is.

Don't get me wrong, the thought of sharing a sim with 249+ other people would be akin to living in NYC without streets and open spaces. The cross chatter of openchat and voice would be a nightmare. However, there are instances where without wanting to use 4 sims to put on a show/conference etc, just to get around 200 ppls resonably able to function, would be desireable, along with the logistics and costs imposed by the current limitations.

Most shows HAVE to be spread out across several sims, just to accomadate the potential visitors. However, the Nett result is, that no singular event at the show, can ever draw 'big' crowds. Start hitting around 60+ ppls and the sim gets flakey, take out your own people running that show, and your true potential visitors are around 30+.

Unless every script is converted to MONO and it works out of the box, that will always be another limiting factor. LSL runs an seperate instance of the same script, eachtime it is used (think Mystitool), whereas with MONO, it runs one instance. The Nett effect to the CPU is quite dramatic, in its reduction.
LL also ought to consider capping scripts in a more refined way. At present, even when you turn off scripts for everyone except your own group, still many people can run their own scripts on their own avatar, as long as they do not interact with items/avatars on that sim, again adding to the lag on the sim. Turning OFF your radar or Mystitools will not turn off those scripts! Removing those HUDs is the only way to prevent them from adding to the lag.

LL don't simply leave this tap unchecked, give controls to sim owners to reduce that type of localised lag by being able to either a) limit the amount of scripts per user, or b) turning off scripts to either everyone, or outside a selective group, mean exactly that.

Avatar Rendering Costs per user.... Advanced menu, Rendering, Info Displays, Avatar Rendering Costs.

Green (which is good) has a rating up to 800, Orange 800-1000, Red= you are adding additional loading to the sim and everyone around you. I have seen avatars with a 25,000+ rating!
I wouldn't want to go back to the days before primmed clothing, BUT.. 25,000+ single avatar cost to the sim and everyone around them, including adjoing sims!!!!!
Capping that, would make designers create smarter... same with the senerio of a 1024x1024 texture on a door knob, do you really need that?

Processing power per dollar keeps going up yet SLs performance has not improved (the power of their data centers), the software code behind SL is messy/inefficient/imcomplete/broken, its Linden labs job to fix it.

LOL! Yeah openlife is working great, you can't script, build, or move, how they are even attempting to max out a 10X prim limit in their sims, all i will say, I will believe it when I see it. So far, openlife is a void of nothingness in my opinion, you can't run complex scripts, and you can't cash out your balance, sorry but a world of no, from me anyway.

Sure, we all contribute somehow to lag, often without being aware. Not wearing shoes, but a simple top, jeans and my preferred hair from a popular designer, my avatar displays a rating value of less than 2500. Changing my hairs to hairs from another popular designer increased the rating value to more than 4300. After completely detaching my hairs the rating has fallen to a value of 300. Both hair was not cheap freebie hair, but from rather popular and somewhat expensive designers.

I didn't mention OpenLife, I refered to OpenSim, which is the core programme which SL and look alikes are all based upon.

Yep, I reckon it's all my fault.

I don't think LL uses OpenSim, i.e., SL is not based on OpenSim.

I have alot of problems now since 2 days... more lag cant attach or detach items... only if i am lucky... even i detach a skirt... its still there... and wont go away if i detach it... and nothing helps.. voice chat is messed up people can hear me just fine but they are lagging like crazy, if i walk it lags and my AO doesn't work only sometimes... couple sounds missing and alot more i believe but never runned into it yet because i been trying to fix it because changing clothes and use voice chat is the main thing... and i got a good enough computer because normally i run everything on MAX and no problems ... untill 2 days... ago ... it started with a little but now its worse and worse and i checked alot of things and its NOT my computer my internet connection is fine... 5mb and use to have 3mb at the time before and everything was fine...anyway things i have tried to fix it...

Downloaden the lastest SL and reinstalled 3 times...(nothing)
Checked all the setting and tried to lower them and see if it helps... (nothing)
Downloaded the lastest drivers for my video card (nothing)
Clear Cache and such (nothing)
Restarted my Internet & computer couple times even left it off for 2 hours to cool off(nothing)
i tried everything i know and nothing helped... and its not my computer and if you tell me to Defrag like manny others suggested no... doesn't work in this case because its only SL
if anyone got any suggestions or tell me to wait till SL is getting fixed just send me a IM ingame or whatever i hope lindon lab sort this out because this is getting on my nerves and i am out of ideas

agree - one single person can bog down a healthy server to a crawl with their login.

ive noticed arc 2500/ person isnt that bad at all, depends on if the attachments are pysical and or scripted too. i would say the limit should be around somewhat 5000.

agree - a lot of useless impact to the assest servers too, some lower end video boards will have problems with textures > 512x512 especially alpha ones.
imagine all the useless amount of datas fetched to >10k of people, ...

well most stuff in sl seems to be developed by people without any glue what a gamengine can do and what not. the engine doesnt calculate a prim, it calculates triangles and theres a huge difference in triangles count between a cube, a sphere or a sculpty.

A mixed bag of responces. In the original post, I gave a balanced view about potentials for lag, and whether people thought they contributed towards lag, whether LL was responsible for everything, or a mixture of both. I gave several perspectives, focusing on LL's setup and lack of expandability creating bottlenecks and limitations and the examples of how we all contribute to the situation.

A few seem to be in denial about how, or whether they actually contribute at all and it's all LL's fault, others seem to accept that we all play a part in the issues of lag. It's an interesting mixture of responces.

High Avatar rendering costs has a huge impact, not so much on the core system, as most computations for rendering the effects are borne by everyone sharing the space of someone with a high count. High and low system spec systems, are effected accordingly. Some will notice small differences, while others, more. This is of course amplified, when the delivery mechanisms (LL's systems) are slow or crippled in some way.

Bad core programming and internal network/storage systems will always be the underlying throttle that gives the average performance, combined with the weakest link in the chain, the internet itself. It is hardly surprising that the whole platform is getting progressively flaky, as LL struggle to play catchup, matching their systems with the additional loads being placed upon it. Probably due to lack of early investment, scaling up system bottlenecks, along with their thirst to add more and more functions (eye candy/toys).

Failures to curtail and control the increasing stresses placed upon a underlying system that cannot cope with the dynamics placed upon it, giving the appearance of firefighting issues, once fixed, now unfixed. Statements and turnarounds regarding Policies of the business model all giving out mixed messages.

The potential truth is, unless LL get their systems to a point of stability and a 'reasonably' acceptable level of userability, then they must provide a mechanism to allow controls over the impact that each user places upon those systems by capping elements, the situation will always be going downhill.

Capping stuff would be an admission of failure, It won't happen.
Things will get worse with a growing userbase as has been said, its already worse than it used to be. If they can't straighten the code then no amount of hardware will fix this.

I think a lot of people miss the fact that if SL had no lag + unlimited resources then there'd be many more millions of users.

Let's discuss this after the fibre optic ring is in place.

Quote - Mars:


"The potential truth is,"

"Potential truth" is not the truth. its a lie.

do you like that potential Mars?

What's that?

I think the words "The potential truth is..." = "In my opinion..."

i try to squeeze every ounce of efficiency out of my scripts

i use low res textures exclusively

i keep my prims in check


but just existing you cause server lag

i dont feel that i use more than my fair share, and keep my footprint as small as possible

The UNpotential truth is that "lag" usually just boils down to "my computer sucks".

So on that perspective, everytime TP's go offline, its all our computers? The very best you can do from a hardware aspect, to lessen the impact of Lag, low fps, freezing, slow rezzing etc etc.. is to keep your system updated. However, the reality is, without data flow between everyones systems and LL's systems, being in sync and flowing, nothing you do will change that.

Now, having just said that, if a portion of that synced data flow was due to our loading of that system, then that is something we can do about it. LL can assist in that as well. Consider a Class 5 server running a full sim can handle around 5,000 active scripts at the sametime, without some form of check other than manual, a landowner cannot cap like they can with prims. Prims being a lower consideration in computations than scripts and textures.
Class 5 servers host 4 full sims, so if your sim shares a server with 3 other sim owners that are either unaware, or don't care, the impact they are causing, you may find your sim will suffer. Not everything is in the hands of the sim owners, as the platform allows for avatars to cause as much load as they want, to the point that the system will collapse.

There will always be lag, the more we all get, the more we all want. I started SL on dialup, now we have broadband, there is still lag. Contention Ratios over the internet, along with greater numbers of users, soaks up any 'spare' bandwidth.

I said usually.

Plus it might be a lousy internet connection too.

SL is not like a game where spending twice as much money will double your framerate (mainstream hw vs all highest premium parts).
Try running a $2000 PC vs a $1000 on a very good connection, there may be 1% difference> - with a great connection - 5-10fps is still commonplace in busy/complex areas.

I spent some time here in this forum subject:

LL Blog: Avatar Rendering Cost

discussing the ARC and causes and possible solutions with Kitty Barnet, who had a far superior knowledge than mine in the perspective of lag.

At that time,(i dont see that anyone is now saying anything different ) Kitty convinced me there was not an obvious solution since the factors were often chaotic, (Chaos theory)

The tipping point was not easily preventable, i looked at whatever methods one might use to evaluate and prevent lag and could find no definable truth.

If the perspective here is that Linden are ignoring solutions that would improve not only the SL environment but in so doing would also increase income, that is not something i see happening.. SL is about making money its a business, one could not ignore such a solution.

So.. if one really believes one has a solution.. then why is one here? ,if in a time of recession, one really had a way to make money.

Else opinion, or potential truth... is not the truth.. or one is talking to the wrong people?

If i knew the answer i would be doing more than sounding out here.

i like money

AWM - Since you revealed your ignorance by stating that LL runs on OpenSim, maybe you should save us some of yout technical flatulence and post elsewhere. Go help noobs with questions about attaching their hair or something.

Technical flatulence is this what nano bots will have?