The Lag Monster Myths

Well, I'll say one, thing, this is a lively conversation at least. And kudos to you Lee for taking your valuable time to address these things. I suspect that you're daily up to your tail in alligators--so I'm sure we all appreciate your replies.

I want to actually agree with you in a couple or three things:

* SIM FPS really is just a minor indicator of how a sim is running. Because I've seen times of "lag" when FPS was at 350, and times of smooth running when FPS was 90. It's obvious when you're sitting here watching FPS jump from 50 to 500 and back several times within a period of 10 seconds, FPS isn't really a reliable indicator of system performance. On our sim, we use AVERAGE FPS as an indicator... which has proven reasonably accurate-- but even then it doesn't track specific times of excessive lag.

* I understand and sympathise that there are so many things that COULD be causing "lag" that it's difficult to trace the significant cause. And I do appreciate the fact that you folks are burning the midnight oil to fix this problem. I can't help though, from reading your responses... feel LL is looking in the wrong part of the forest... perhaps pruning branches when we need to find the dead trees.

I'm a person that looks at the overall picture, then by the process of elimination finds the problems. It's worked for me as a trouble-shooter for over two decades now, and it has literally helped me locate bottlenecks when certified technicians have thrown up their hands in surrender.

Let me pose a scenario and question: Consider Yahoo or Google. They have a LOT of users. They have variable content... blogs, web pages, photographs, sound clips, movies, etc etc etc. There's very little on the net they don't handle in one way or another.

Now let's say that tomorrow morning, for some strange reason it takes their clients 10 minutes to log on. What if it takes them 2 minutes trying to find a web page? What if they send an instant message and it doesn't get through for 30 seconds each way. What if the client clicks on a weblink and winds up in limbo time after time after time, and when they try to relog on the server... it won't let them?

Do you think Yahoo or Google would tell folks, "Well, you're in the driver's seat.. you need to trim content."???

It wouldn't take them even one day to locate and put an end to the problem. They wouldn't make excuses. They wouldn't accept excuses. They'd find it. They'd fix it. End of story. Because they absolutely cannot afford degredation of end-user experience. They are user-service oriented companies, and user experience is EVERYTHING.

Same situation here. Your clients don't want to hear excuses. We don't want to be told it's our "content" when we already have trimmed our content to the bone. We don't want to hear that we're in the "driver's seat"... when we aren't. (Well, yes we are to an extent... but when we're driving very well and suddenly the pavement phantoms out from under us...)

That's the bottom line. That's the end result. Linden Labs can tout content all it wants but hey, Linden Labs ALLOWS the content. Ultimately, it's Linden Labs that is in the driver's seat and ultimately, it is Linden Labs that is going to prosper or suffer by the perceptions, likes and dislikes of the end-user (or ex-end-user).

And that's why ultimately, things fall into the laps of Linden Labs. Regardless of the CAUSE, the system either works or it doesn't. In my experience, if something doesn't work... you do it another way.

well another thing to understand wayfinder is a sim is abit like a desktop computer, in that the fewer things it does, the smoother everything it does gets... when ya say 500 scripts is paring it to the bone, okay i understand you have a look and presence you are trying to mantain, but imagine if your desktop machine had to run 500 copies of a normally innocuous program, say 'notepad' to get your desktop just right...

you don't complain to microsoft, notepad is too ineficient, i can't run my 500 copies of it without my whole computer slowing down. No, instead you need to fundamentally re-evaluate whether running 500 copies of notepad is really worth the hit its going to cause.

Now i *want* to help out hee... believe me i have alot of experience designing scripted objects passively, or 'passive centric' ly as it were. but i will say right now, 500 is *alot*of active objects.. we basically have two sims, lusk, and perry, lusk has 80-100 active objects, perry has 40-50 (we own alot more of perry).. and thats not to say we don have scripted things there, we do, heck we have one'f the most popular and successful vendor businesses in SL, totally passively coded, i've just spent alot of time ensuring that nothing is active, in our sims, unless it *absolutely* needs to be, and again i would really be happy to help out with you guys. I really deeply think SL needs more well run theme/group builds, and will be happy to help you keep yours running smoothly

Wayfinder: I can't really link your metaphor to the situation at all (to the extent that it applies, it neatly removes the entire concept of content creators and any contribution they make to the situation), and where it does apply, it discusses global issues, which I already asked we cover separately.

Time and time again, I've asked for additional information regarding your problems. Without that information, I've explained that I can't troubleshoot anything.

You are in control to the extent that I can only act based on the information you give me. I cannot act on SimFPS changes, because as we've both stated at this point, changes in SimFPS and changes in performance are very much unrelated.

Provide me the other statistics and I can attempt to analyze the situation (as can you, or eltee, or anyone else with the inclination). I've stated enough times that I need you to help me help you.

So, I ask for your cooperation. I won't get involved in this thread further unless you specifically post what I need to troubleshoot your problems.

best thing to do for lee (and i've done it before) is prolly jus grab a to disk snapshot with the ui enabled, and cut/paste the sim stat panel to the forums, or better yet do a few, some empty, some full of people, some with fewer scripts, some with more i'll try an do that this afternoon when i can get in

as for traceroute
sprintlink.net seemed to be a bit of a bottleneck last time it happened can you shed light there ?



This gives me some hope

eltee, is there a thread somewhere that talks specifically about this technique? or maybe you could start a thread and briefly explain what the basics of the technique are.

Also, a brief explanation of what an active script is might be helpful. I'm aware of a lot of the issues involved, but tragically I realize that I don't have a clear understanding.

And Lee, this is exactly what I meant when I said that Linden Labs doesn't really listen to end users... because we HAVE provided that information, over and over again. I have sent Linden Labs emails with statistics readings. We have had Lindens on our sim during times of lag. We have quoted stats and figures etc etc.

In addition to that, I have mentioned here... more than once... the exact results of these situations and the fact that when they happen, NOTHING on the sim has changed.

But in case all that was somehow missed, let me summarize:

Prior to April 27, our sim had been running at 600+ FPS *average*. We had more than 700 active scripts, about 11,000 objects, and at the time the lag monster bit us... 3 avatars on the sim.

As of about 3pm April 27 (as memory serves), Sim FPS dropped to 40. Then to 30. Then to 25. With 3 avatars standing on the sim, we could hardly move. Nothing on the sim had changed; no new items, no active script additions, NOTHING. We just suddenly went from functional to non-functional. There was no CONTENT explanation for this. And since this lag from that moment on was experienced by every person that entered the sim, including Live Help and Lindens... it was not a client-side or "dirty net" issue (unless of course the net problems were server side).

We cut active scripts to 580. Lag effects significantly reduced and our FPS went up to an average of 350-- which was almost half our prior FPS rate. In doing so, our RunTasks figure dropped from 7.+ to 1.0. The sim still wasn't running at its prior smooth, but it was at least workable. Still, now we were running at half the average FPS and with discernable lag effects, whereas before April 27 we had been running at almost double the FPS with little or no discernable lag effects... and we were running with 33% fewer active scripts!

We further cut active scripts to 565. Did we realize an improvement? No, just the opposite. Our FPS average dropped from 350 to 195, and our RunTaks ms increased from 1.0 to 3.0 average.

We have visited other sims with DOUBLE the active scripts and many more avs on the sim, yet experienced no discernable lag. We conducted tests where we rezzed hundreds of items with moving textures and active scripts, and discerned little or no lag effects. But at seemingly random times, those same places would suddenly have lag hit-- on an apparently system-wide basis.

Those are the figures Lee. We have given Linden Labs those figures until we are blue in the face. Those figures were posted in the very first message on this thread. I have sent Linden Labs entire readouts of the stat box, with every figure in the box cited.

What other data is required? Happy to provide whatever you need.

This is exactly what I'm referencing. When you describe the scenario when SimFPS fell below 50, you provide no other statistics at all. Here's what I need at the moment that occurs:

Time Dilation
Agent Updates/Sec
Physics FPS
Main Agents
Child Agents (only if another sim is connected)
Active Scripts
Pending Downloads
Pending Uploads
all of the Time(ms) values

It's great to quote them when you're not experiencing performance issues, but you haven't yet provided any of them (let alone all of them) for a circumstance of poor performance. This is why I can't diagnose your problem in this discussion.

The number of scripts is important. The time spent processing those scripts is more important. (People seem to process "500 scripts is usually too many" better than "spending more than 2.0ms on Run Tasks is bad." If you reduce the number of scripts but don't really change the time they spend in Run Tasks, you're attacking the symptom, not the problem. If you lower scripts and Run Tasks increases, then you've got at least one script with a high, variable load, and it needs to be identified.

You have provided numbers in each post. You haven't yet presented the full situation (other than one or two statistics that "have no cause" without leaving out the very statistics that identify the problem. As such, you have yet to make a full, complete case example with enough stastical detail to rule out each of the possibilities in our Statistics Guide:

http://secondlife.com/tiki/tiki-index.php?page=GuideDebugStats

The question I need answered is: Which of those values is well outside the bounds the Guide considers "normal", at the moment any of the previously described problems is actually occuring? That's what I haven't seen so far in this discussion.

the data really needed is more snapshots like these at the bottom of this thread:

/111/c3/41406/1.html

these were from a specfic phenomena that started in 1.5.13 after the rolling server os udpate, not 1.6 related at all actually... but with events, it causes even the best sims to start skippnig physics passes and causing time dilation, with even 10 or so people, and LOTS of server headroom (sub 1ms total server slice even)

yet somehow physics passes are being skipped...

beh i want the old sim os back heh

Network stats aside:

If the CONTENT is apple, banana, orange on 26th April and no "perceived" lag is found... why is it that when CONTENT is apple, banana, orange on 27th April, much "perceived" lag is found?

Ok.. so it could be client side stuff.. so you wait a day and test again, with the same 3 people to ensure that CONTENT = apple, banana, orange still, and it's still much "perceived" lag.

The point is, which was outlined in the original post, that while the statistics and theory might show that there should NOT be lag, there is indeed lag and conversely, if the statistics and theory say there must be lag, there is no lag... This brings up the interesting question that the stats, in this particular situation won't help at all. They may allow the problem to be traced but they will not be able to define the problem itself.

eh honestly i think the scheduling on the new sim os is pretty inferior to that of the old, and its causing some subtle behind the scenes issues with script loading, physics timeslicing, and some other things

i *never* saw time dilation with a 0.7ms physics slice and sub 1ms total slice before (aka 1000 fps), not *EVER* and ever since the sim os update, its happened on every single sim i've seen that has had more'n 10 people and not alot of script load

Thank you Luke.

This is why I no longer provide Linden Labs with stats. I stopped doing so several days ago. It was a waste of time.

We sent in the stats. Contrary to Lee's statements... we sent in ALL of them that we were told to send in. In addition, Lindens were online and onsite on several occasions. What happened to THOSE stats? After a while, it becomes obvious that we're chasing monkeys around a barrel. It's time to stop paying attention to STATS and start paying attention to what might be CAUSING those stats.

But frankly, after trying for two hours to get online tonight and failing... it has suddenly occurred to me that we paid $1,000 for a private sim and are feeding Linden Labs $200 a month... for a system that WE CAN'T EVEN LOG ON TO.

So stats aside, that's just plain lousy service. Logging in *should* be absolutely the easiest, fastest, most debugged and fool-proof part of Second Life. If we can't even LOG IN to the system, why should we expect any other part of the system to work?

Bottom line, if such problems continue then users will shut down their sims, just as many have already done and are deciding to do. There ARE activities in the world other than Second Life. If Linden Labs thinks we're going to continue paying them $2,400 a year for this kind of "service"... they're living in bigger fantasy than Second Life.

Call me silly, but if you buy a car because the manufacturer says it can do all these nifty things, and then you buy it and it's slow, or sometimes wont start at all, and then they try to tell you it's your fault, seems kind of like misrepresentation to me.

Seems a little bit more governing is needed on LL's end because apparently 90% of the SL population cant live up to the things that LL touts that SL can do.

If excessive scripts are the problem maybe you should put a limit on how many scripts can be on a parcel of land (much like prim limits). Should avatars be able to carry around 400+ prim attachments?

Just a thought from a tired man.

Alright, I joined late, and I really liked all the information that came from this thread, mostly from Lee and eltee and a few other sources. But then I read this stuff above, and I just have to ask: what is it that you want? Lee is telling you that the best way he knows to diagnose lag problems is to use those stats. From these two snippets above, it really looks like you're after something different than actually diagnosing and fixing your problems. Are you trying to get LL to admit that there are huge underlying problems with their system that cause inexplicable lag? Does that really help anything? It seems like you're trying to get some kind of admission or something, rather than an actual attempt to fix the problem.

No, what we're trying to do is get Linden Labs to stop flogging the same old dead horse and work on actually fixing the problems.

I have been a member of Second Life for about 6 1/2 months now. The first month I was online, I didn't really experience a whole lot of problems (aside from the serious griefer thing that existed back then). Then suddenly we had 30 minute logins, extreme lag, a system hard drive crashed and took the system down for a week, and since then it has been problem after problem after problem.

This lag has been going on for MONTHS. I think that if during that period of time, Linden Labs hasn't been able to gather enough STATS to fix the problem... they need to stop focusing on stats and start focusing on underlying causes. Stop telling users it's CONTENT and start paying attention to what is going on internally.

There are many things that cause lag-- and many things that need to be addressed. I am convinced, after all this time, that there are serious internal problems with SL that are the primary cause of lag. But there are some things that could be done to limit lag. Some of these would be unpopular.. but they would make the game run more smoothly.

As an undoubtedly unpopular example or two: what is more important... to have a super-lagging AO device that helps an avatar walk pretty... or that avatars be able to walk in the first place?

What is more important: that avatars are able to wear jewelry and hair containing hundreds of lag-inducing prims... or that they are able to exist in a sim with other avatars?

Is it more important that avatars have fancy special effects (the ones that lag like crazy) or that more than 40 avatars can exist on a sim?

STATS appear to be doing little or nothing toward SOLVING this problem. All they are going to do is *maybe* indicate that YES, THERE IS A PROBLEM... which we already know. But face it, if stats have not exposed the problem by this time, THEY'RE NOT GOING TO. My suggestion: Wake up people! Try a different approach!!!

That is what we are talking about. We as users, are tired of being told "your problem is content" when that EXACT SAME CONTENT existed the day/week/month before and everything worked just fine. We're tired of being told we're in the "driver's seat"... when it is ultimately Linden Labs that is in the driver's seat (for example, I cannot pass a law which limits avs to 150 prims maximum, can I? Nor can I pass a ruling as to how much bandwidth one avatar can take in everyday performance). These are all things ultimately under Linden Lab control.

But even further, we are not in control of whatever it is at the heart and core of Second Life that is causing lag to hit suddenly, sim and/or system-wide, out of nowhere and for no perceivable reason. Whether that something is a shoddy operating system, dirty trunk lines, excessive bandwidth crowding, or whatever it is... the end user has NO control over any of that. We're upset at continually being told that it's primarily OUR fault that this lag problem exists because we have "too many scripts" or "too much content" or "you have 20 *gasp* avatars on your sim".

As one user mentioned... we feel like we have been sold a Cadillac-- and delivered a wreck with a bad engine. We can't log in. Lag drags us to an absolute standstill. Events are destroyed. And if all that isn't bad enough, LL keeps bringing in new policies and decisions that upset users even more, in the middle of a time when their system is running like a jalopy full of maple syrup.

Guess that about sums it up. We've taken the stats until we're blue in the face. We're tired of takings stats. We want some admission that things in Camelot are not running well and we want the powers that be to stop making excuses and passing the buck-- and fix it. That's not too much to ask, is it? You ask what we're trying to accomplish? We're trying to get this game to deliver what was promised.

For the record: We had Eltee come into our sim and do script checks. Eltee couldn't really find anything specific (some of the STATS showed a *little* high... but WHY?). We've cut scripts down to less than 400! Yet any time more than 2 avatars show up, we start lagging. Perish forbid we have TEN people visit at once. We're not the only sim that is experiencing these things. Are we to operate under the assumption that our sim will work just fine-- so long as no one visits it?

Ah, at last a solution! Just make sure no one plays in our sim, and it will work great!

OK, after several hours I finally managed to log in tonight. Naturally, with hardly anyone being able to log in, there were only 2 people in ElvenGlen sim-- myself and Forcythia... same 2 avatars we always use.

Lag was a fiend. We had trouble turning. Had trouble walking. Had trouble teleporting from one place to another. I joined a new group-- took the system a full minute or more to recognize the group transaction.

SIM FPS 810
MAIN AGENTS: 2
ACTIVE SCRIPTS: 354
AGENT UPDATES / SEC: 20.0
PHYSICS FPS 45.0
CHILD AGENTS: 0
PENDING DOWNLOADS/UPLOADS: 0
RECEIVE MESSAGE: 0
RETRANSMIT: .1
RUN AGENTS: .1
PHYSICS STEP: 2.0
RUN TASKS: .6
SEND: 0.0
SIM CPU: .51


There's your stats. So why the lag? Granted, SL was having serious problems tonight (which is thoroughly discussed in about a hundred other forum messages elsewhere)... but the above are more or less common readings, as we've been pointing out for the last month. So how do such readings correlate to lag so bad that at times we had trouble moving?
With only 2 avatars on the sim?

Some Linden please could explain to me this weird behaviour (forgive my english, i'm italian):
the sim i have my place in has usually about 600 "active" scripts. in the process of testing a new version of a system I made, i rezzed a number of scripted objects that made the active script jump to almost 1200. for a month those objects were in world and there was no perceivable lag. Some people that came to take a look at the system experienced no lag at all. Everything was running smoothly (weird isn't it?) even when crowded (say about 20 avatars) events would be run at a nearby place.
Once the system was released, i took everything away and active scripts dropped to the standard 600 number. Since then though lag has increased in an awful way. Some days i can hardly move, sometimes I take almost 30 mins to be able to log in.
Unfortunately i didn't care to look at stats because a) i thought Linden were actively and seriously indagating the (general) problem and actually i know little of how the server side architecture is designed, and b) was actually distracted and concerned about other personal problems.
But i remember forming a thought..... maybe i should rez again my huge number of scripts to have things run smoothly again?

I agree completely with Way. In my "little" experience as a software engineer and long time user of other 3d environments were lag was a issue too, I FEEL the problem is server side and should be targetted and investigated deeply.
I know every contents contributes to lag, of course. Textures do, number of prims, SHAPE of the prims, scripts, avatars (what is the lag interoduced by basic animations, for instance? what tasks and info has a server to download every millisecond to clients to show avatar anmations?) they all contribute. Still as Way so clearly pointed out, that is not an explanation of why lag varies so much under the same or very similar situations.

Here's an experiment for you: pop up 600 instances of notepad and tell me how much your computer lags!
Have you EVER tried to run 600 programs at the same time?
Lag is caused by clueless users who fundamentally misunderstand the nature of SL. This is not TSO. This cannot support TSO-style usage where your tiny home is filled to the brim with furniture and EVERY SINGLE OBJECT is interactive.
Unless you are willing to buy your own sim to do it.
You don't need to have 50 chairs, you can't fit that many people in a sim, and your chairs shouldn't have 50 poseballs with open listeners.

well i don't know about TSO, i know that if i buy a car with 4 seats and and 2 people can actually use it otherwise the car doesn't go, there must be someting faulty with it and i would want my money back too.
Maybe Eggy, if no one used scripts and textures and prims and whatever, we would NOT have lag. Just MAYBE though!

This car analogy keeps coming up. It's not a good comparison at all. A car is closed system, specifically designed to be capable of performing only a select handfull of functions (seating X amount of people, moving up to a certain speed, steering, braking, etc.), so of course it can do all of them well. A computer is open-ended and capable of performing an infinite number of tasks.

The only part of the analogy that holds up is that in both systems there are certain things you can do individually with no problems, but that you should never expect to be able to do at the same time. In the car, you have a gas pedal and a brake pedal that both work flawlessly. However, if you step on them both at the same time, you're going to have problems. In the computer, you have mulitiple programs which each can operate flawlessly, but if you run them all at once you will have problems.

How this relates to SL is simple. Just as you can severely damage your car if you do something stupid like try to shift into reverse while traveling forward at 60 miles per hour, you can also "damage" your sim performance if you try to perform simultaneous actions that may be mutually incompatable or conflictive. Let me offer an (oversimlified) example:

As Lee stated, scripts are dynamic, which means their functionality, reliability, etc. can vary, depending on timing. Let's say you have 2 scripts that each use a specific resource in a different way. At times when they operate seperately, everything seems Kosher. Even though they might appear to be active at the same time, the machine may actually be time swapping back and forth between them. Once in a while though, they may both get trigered at the exact same time, causing the server to receive conflicting instructions, which could make it go all Hal 9000 on you.

For a home PC equivilent, anyone who uses Norton 2004 or higher and also has a Creative sound card has learned the hard way that sometimes they both work fine, but sometimes they interfere with eachother. There's no way to predict when, why, or how the conflict arrises; it just does. After it starts, you can have a hell of a time trying to get it back to normal.

I guess the best analogy I can think of is computers are like girlfriends. What worked yesterday might not work today. Guys, you all know what I'm talking about here; you know you do.

Well Chose, admittedly the car analogy might not be the best one. But that is not the problem. The problem is LAG in SL, that is the way you get stuck in world even when circustamces are not that bad, the way tp work only 50% of the time and the other 50% you have to log out and hope to be able to get back in in a reasonable time. Those are the problems, not the car analogy.
And, as anyone know, or should, lag is not caused only or mainly by scripts. Think of the textures that have to be dl to clients, think of number of prims and their SHAPES that have to be sent in a descriptive way to clients and there represented on the client's screen, think of the animations(and all avatar position and movements) that have to be sent to clients to keep them syncronized.....well i could think of a hundred things that can cause huge lag, not only and not mainly scripts.
I feel that scripts are a simple excuse to justify something. It look like the medieval witch hunting, or whatever it was called. Now what we, users, should ask for, is a serious analisys of the problem so that at the and some clear and definite limits could be set.

And are you happy when Creative and Norton mess each other? do you say..oh well, never mind let me turn Norton off, or let me throw Creative away. Is that your thread of thoughts? well here is different. If something doesn't work with my systems both in rl and in sl, i work on them check them and find fixes. My customers pay to have working systems, they rely on them for their business. If my system would work the same as SL does sometimes, i would be fired,lol.
Though of course, bugs are always there, ready to hit one in the back. No one is perfect. Just i expect that, the same way i do, so other should for the systems they release. After all Sl is NOT for free and many rely on it to get some real money too. So whatever is said (blaming scripts) just to give and easy explanation can cause real damage to users who rely on scripts to make their living there.

Well ok, Wayfinder, thanks for your candidness. Now we're getting somewhere, you're not beating around the bush anymore.

What you've said is quite true... you're right to feel that there is some kind of underlying issue here. You're right even to want to now what's going on, to know the real truth. I think about all that's left is that you need to realize that LL is likely not hiding anything. I think they're about as annoyed by all of the instabilities as we are. They're working as fast as they can, and they're not hiding the fact that there are big issues. Look in the announcements forum... right now, as we speak, the entire dev team is working to put some new big measures in place to solve the login issue, and they're doing that on a weekend, no less.

I think the big thing here is that this is not a matter of incompetence. SL really is a very difficult problem in the computer science field. I can completely understand that they've made the "correct" decisions and good solid designs all along (otherwise SL wouldn't even be here!) and yet the huge amount of growth has made it blow up in their faces anyway. This isn't easy, and despite the fact that LL rocks, they're still having trouble solving these problems. It's just not easy to solve. If it was something easy, rest assured they'd have done it already.

The best approach I can suggest is to give them these stats when they ask for it (that's the most concrete data they know how to collect), and trust them to find the underlying problems, if there are any. Give them accurate, detailed information about what you're experiencing, and trust them to dig further. They're doing their best; they have to be or SL wouldn't be what it is today.

Wayfinder Wishbringer - brilliant post which absoloutly mirrors EVERYTHING thats been going on with our sim right down to LL responses.

I have one observation about lag:

The next person who tells me a single scripted object is giving them lag when they are wearing hair made of hundreds of prims and bling made of another thousand, is going to get the sharp end of my tongue...

Look, exaggerating is no way to have a discussion. Last I checked, this was not a complaint fest thread, but an attempt at real discussion and understanding of the causes and effects of "lag". If you want to blow things out of proportion, just for the sake of complaining, there are plenty of threads that exist for that purpose. Take your pick of those or start your own.

You know full well that teleports do not fail 50% of the time. 99.9% of the time they work just fine. It happens that right now, there is a major problem with the system, so teleports (among other things) are barely functional, but you know as well as I do that that is not normal. As Lee pointed out, it is somewhat difficult to seperate the high-strung emotional reactions to the current global situation from any evaluation of normal operating circumstances within a single sim, but that doesn't mean you should use that as an excuse.


Yes, and your point is? Lee has said time and time again in this thread and elsewhere that content is key. If you're so concerned about textures, prim counts, etc. slowing you down, there's an easy way to solve that. Make sure that in your sim you and your neigbors keep things within respecatble limits. In Indigo, we are all committed to keeping texture sizes, texture repeats, prim counts, and script functionality at reasonable levels, and as a result we have one of the most consistently smooth-running sims in SL. No reason you or anyone else can't do the same.

To go back to your car analogy, just because your car is capable of going 150 miles an hour doesn't mean running it at that level is good for it. Just because you CAN have gigabytes worth of textures displayed on your land doesn't mean you SHOULD. Just because you CAN max your prim count doesn't mean you SHOULD. Just because you CAN write resource-intensive scripts doesn't mean you SHOULD.

Everythig you've mentioned here is a user common sense issue, not a Linden issue.


There's no way to set universally applicable limits (besides the ones already in place like prim counts) because SL's content is constantly changing. If you want some common sense advice though, here it is:

1. Make your sim a cooperative community. Meet your neighbors. Establish strong relationships so that you can all work together. You might be suprised what can happen when you make an effort to bring people together to work for the common good.

2. Try to keep your sim's prim count well below the max. In Indigo, we're committed to no more than 2/3 capacity and it works just great.

3. Keep textures reasonsable. There's almost never any justification for a texture to be bigger than 512x512. In Indigo I think we have just one 1024x1024 texture, which is my galaxy map (too much text on it to make it smaller and still be legible). Other than that, almost everything is 512, 256, or smaller. Combine textures whenever you can. For example, if you've got a cube that needs each side to be textured differently, a single six-framed texture will use far less resources than will six individual textures.

4. Keep scripts reasonable. Avoid functions that are very resource-intensive. I'm not gonna go into too much detail on this since it seems to be a hot button on this thread, but there are numerous other threads on the subject which I encourage you to read.

5. As Lee said, keep your mind aware of the difference between system-wide problems and individual sim problems. Right now we're all suffering from major system problems, which are extremely frustrating. Now is probably the worst possible time to attempt to troubleshoot performance within individual sims, but once things return to normal (and they will), if your sim is "lagging" the stats to look at have been mentioned a hundred times already. If all those stats are normal and it's still lagging, then and only then do you have cause to ask LL to look into larger issues for you. Again, to go back to your car analogy, the manufacturer may have responsibility to make sure your car works and to maintain it through your warranty so it keeps working, but it is still your responsibility to put gas in it, change the oil, maintain tire pressure, drive it responsibly, etc. If you do all that, and it still doesn't work, then you have cause to blame the manufacturer. If you don't do it, and your car runs badly, you've got no one to blame but yourself.


Of course I'm not happy about it. I consider it to be the height of irresponsibility from both companies. I've strongly been considering neve dealing with either company again.

I agree with you that the system problems in SL are rediculous. I don't bitch at anyone about it though because that would solve nothing. As I've said time & time again on these forums, you get much better results from others when you're politely insistent than when you're a demanding oager (not saying you're an oager, but there are plenty). If you want LL or anyone else to listen to YOUR opinion or to go out of their way to help YOU with YOUR problems over the thousands of other people, why not consider going out of your own way to be as respectful, courteous, and supportive as you can while still being firm? Trust me, it works as well when dealing with LL as when dealing with anyone else, and it feels a whole lot better in the process.

I know people have a tendency to think that loudly ranting about their problems will make them feel better, but that only lasts a little while and then they just have to do it again once the temproary satisfaction wears off and they realize nothing has changed. Working synergistically with others to resolve problems in a positive manner is something that lastingly feels infinitely better and it works.


Once again, no one is attempting to blame scripts for system-wide problems. Frankly, the login server sucks, and we all know it, as does the asset server. I don't see any point in bitching about it though. I don't know what the root problems are and neither do you, and it's doubtful either of us would know how to fix them even if we did. Therefore all we can do is settle for knowing that LL is working to improve these things. How fast they can work or how long the improvements will take is an unfortunate mystery we have to live with right now. All the bitching in the world won't change that.

It's especially unfortunate that such major problems have appeared right now. E3 is next week. I don't know if LL was planning on bing there or not, but it sure would be a shame if they had a booth to show off SL and they weren't able to log in. I couldn't imagine anything more embarrassing (well, maybe I could, but not in relation to showcasing at E3).

As for the smaller (more "normal) problems, in the example given in the thread starter it seems that the stats showed that scripts were the likely culprety, despite the author's attempts at experimentation in other sims. No other sim in the experiment was given the exact same combination of variables as those in the affected sim.

I sould probably mention by the way that I was in the affected sim the day it started having problems, so I have a little experience here. I don't believe the experiment of rezzing chairs and animated textures and such was an acurate recreation of the scripts at work in that sim. Even if the exact same scripts had been duplicated though, that still wouldn't make the experiment sim into an acurate copy of the original. The surrounding sims, the avatars in them, the objects and scripts in the, etc. all have to be taken into account. No sim is truly an island unto itself.


Wayfinder, I know it's a pain in the ass, but I think the absolute best way to solve your problem would be to take every single scripted object on your sim ino inventory, and then put them back one at a time. I realize this would take hours, that it's an extremely unpleasent prospect, and that you shouldn't "have to" do it. However, we computer users all know that sometimes the only solution is simply to restart. I don't think it's likely that you'll be able to pin down the cause of your current problem (ghost in the machine, and all that), but I do think you can probably revert your sim back to its previous lag-free status by rebuilding. You might also want to ask LL for a sim reboot if you haven't already. I'd advise waiting until the current system problems are resolved first though. Good luck.