The Lag Monster Myths

Eggy, not the same thing. Not the same thing at all. Notepad is a fairly complex, advanced program compared to the piddly scripts running on Second Life. Our home computers are not dedicated servers with specific-purpose operating systems. Your statement "Lag is caused by clueless users who fundamentally misunderstand the nature of SL" is about as clueless a statement I've seen in this forum... especially in light of the FACTUAL DATA that has been presented on this forum by more than one user.

I do agree that lag CAN be caused by clueless users that don't know how Second Life operates. That doesn't account for the serious lag that is being experienced system wide, or the lag that we've been experiencing in our PRIVATE sim. I've heard this claim from you more than once... and refuted it. Have you been reading the posts here and clear across the Second Life forums? The same story is being re-told time and time and time again... people's sims that were running absolutely fine, and then suddenly lagging to a standstill for no discernable reason.

Clueless users? How much is LL paying you anyway?

Oh, this sooo begs for a cutsie reposte... but I'll resist. LOL

I think Lex, that what has folks a little up in arms... is that this is exactly what we HAVE been doing... and Second Life is getting WORSE. I mean seriously, the only thing good I've seen happen on SL in the past 6 months is the death of the Ghost Fiend... and my hearty congratulations to SL on that one! But how long did it take and how hard did users have to scream in these forums to finally get that taken care of? That kind of thing is what breeds discontent.

I absolutely know how difficult it can be to maintain software. I've also been watching Second Life very closely for over 6 months now... and I've seen them time and again make decisions that have not inspired confidence from the users. I've seen them make decisions that have made Second Life decidedly more difficult to use. And I've seen them tell us things over and over again.. as mentioned in this forum... that data has already disproven. And when you start telling users that system problems are THEIR fault... well hey, that sure encourages them to give the company a break!

LL needs to give us a break. Admit the castle wall is broken and let us help fix it. That's a lot better than standing around and telling us there's no hole in the wall or worse-- that we put it there.

Sox, you're about the 6th or 7th private sim owner who has said this same thing. Too bad this is all a result of us not knowing how to run a sim or build correctly. I guess we are doomed.

Yes, and we've PROVEN time and time again it isn't. Or to be more accurate, it isn't THE key.



Or, on the other hand, Linden Labs could automatically limit such things, knowing they have new users who will be unaquainted with deep-core parameters and abuse things without knowing it. That's what a governor on an automobile is for-- to prevent abuse of the vehicle.



LOL. We're already limited to 117 prims per 512, which everyone knows is insufficient for truly nice builds. Now we should cut to 2/3 of that?

You know, we may not drive the car at 150... but it should at least do a respectable 70.



Which is exactly what is going on here.



Actually, in my experience it solves quite a bit. I have tried writing the nice, polite emails and encouraging kudos to Linden Labs. I've tried politely asking questions... and receiving no response at all. For example, I have recently been receiving emails such as: "3dsfeiasl234fslishgseitrer has accepted your inventory". I have written Linden Labs no fewer than 10 times asking what this is about, and received NO replay. So apparently, polite doesn't cut it with Linden Labs.

But when I started posting on these forums and setting out factual data and standing nose to nose with LL... suddenly I get some response. So I hate to say it, but it seems "in your face" seems to have better results from LL than "Hey guys, what's going on? Can I help in some way?" Makes sense. If asking the employee to do a better job doesn't get results, kicking his butt often will.




How do you figure this Chosen? Hey, I know you're an accomplished scripter and I'm impressed as all get out with your SF display. But the information given in the opening message of this thread proved just the opposite of your claim here-- it proved scripts were NOT responsible for lag-- as it was intended. I can't help but feel that this is a matter of folks who have an idea in their mind that they just can't shake. The 11th Commandment is it? "Thou shalt have no more than 300 scripts on thy sim". That's propaganda. That's generalization. That's UNFACTUAL. And it's unrealistic, considering the nature of Second Life.

If you drive a car no more than 50 mph for the life of the car, sure it's going to operate better and longer. And no one but a granny is going to do that. There's a difference between ideal fantasy and reality. A certain amount of performance is expected out of Second Life, and if it can't achieve that... then deep core something is wrong.


For the record, I'm not a slouch at programming. And I've had people visit my sim and double-check the scripts, the layout, and what we're doing. For the hundredth time... IT'S NOT OUR SIM. IT'S NOT OUR SCRIPTS. STOP PASSING THE BUCK ON TO THE USER AND FIND THE REAL REASON.




Agreed. But what those experiments DID prove is that the "500 scripts" theory is nothing more than propaganda. It's an easy copy-out that draws attention away from the real underlying cause. "Oh, you have more than 500 scripts! No wonder you're lagging!" Poppycock.




No, that would be absolutely the worst way. Because A) the scripts are not the problem, B) it would take hours and hours and hours to do that and C) We'd still wind up in the same place we are now-- realizing that the scripts are not the primary cause of the lag being experienced in Second Life.

What I get the feeling of is that I have often communicated with folks who are so tunnel-visioned on stats and programming parameters, that they're failing to discern the real, bottom-line, pervasive cause of these problems. We're being told we need to trim dead twigs, when in fact the trunk is rotten.

I'm through talking now . Either Second Life fixes it... or people leave Second Life and good riddance. Their reputation is already in the toilet. So do they keep beating the same horse until it's dead... or do they find out what's making it sick in the first place?

No, it's not THE key, but it is the part we have control over. Also, keep in mind the context in which I said that. The person I was responding to was complaining about textures, prims, etc. in addition to scripts as sources of lag.


They already do limit prims, as we all know. There's unfortunately not much of a practical way to limit textures, or even to determine how much texturing is "too much". I can't think of any way to force people to script efficiently.

By the way, does your car have a governor on it? Mine doesn't. I could be worng, but I don't think any cars sold in the US do.


That's why I prefaced with "Make your sim a community". I realize not every group of people is capable of coming together as we have in Indigo, but I believe that many land owners COULD if they tried. 117 prims on 512 is pretty useless, but if the entire sim were group owned, then that number could easily be exceeded. As long as the whole sime doesn't exceed whatever the maximum agreed number is, everyone benefits.

Of course, not every sim is going to be able to be group owned like this, but many could be. At the very least though, neighbors can work together. If Johnny has 512 and Sizie has 4096, Johnny and Suzie could certainly work together to make sure that Johnny can enjoy his full 117 prims without lagging the sim since Suzie might not need to use her full 900+. The point is where there's a will there's a way. Obviously nobody has to work together, but before people go around complaining, they'd do well to see if they can come together to actually solve problems.


I disagree. In the context that I made that statement, the subject being discussed was textures, prims, & scripts. The person that comment was directed at was one who complained that too many of any can slow you down. My meaning was that if this person feels that SL is "broken" because irresponsible users are abusing texture sizes, prim counts, etc, that's not LL's fault. That's the direct fault of the users.


This a demosntration off what makes you a good person, Way. Your posting here has been nothing but polite, respectful, and firm, exactly what I'm talking about. Not once have you been rude, demanding, boligerant, or insluting. You've voiced your grievances, stated your opinions, and maintained your dignity the whole time, and you actually think you're being less than nice. Dude, I don't think you have it in you to be anything but nice. You're doing great here.

If this is what you call "in your face", your previous attempts must have been so sugar coated their substance maybe got dissolved.


Sorry if I'm not being clear. I don't think your scripts are to blame in and of themselves. I do think that according to what you said about the LL response to looking at the sim stats that the way in which the particular sim is currently processing the particular combination of scripts is screwed up. Computers just get like that sometimes. I usually chalk it up to cosmic rays from space, but whatever the magical cause might be, once something like that starts it can be hard to correct.

I don't think anyone or any one thing is to blame. I just think something undefinable has gone haywire, and the only (unfortunate) solution may be to start over. I know that answer sucks, and hoepfully I'm wrong, but I've seen far less complex things than SL just decide on their own to behave in completely screwy ways all of a sudden. A good swift kick in the proverbial restart button is often the only fix. It's just a shame that in this situation there's no one "button" to press.

Oh, and for the record, I'd hardly call myself an "accomplished scriptor". I'm good at making things look good. I usually get other people to make them work.

Anyway, I'm not trying to "pass the buck on". What I am trying to do is thing synergistically. I find it impossible to believe that there is only one cause for the problem you're experiencing. Otherwise, between your tinkering and LL's investigating, the cause most certainly would have been found. For whatever reason, your sim is having problems processing the information that's on it as a whole. In my experience, computers often respond quite differently once they've been cleared of whatever info they are having trouble with, restarted, and then presented with the same information again. I know that's not a satisfying way to look at it, but it is what happens.


I don't believe the 500 scripts thing means squat. I see it more as a fall-back guideline than anything else. It's certainly possible to have one single script eat up the entire sim, and it's also possible to have a thousand scripts that hardly use any resources at all. It's obviously the content of the script(s) that counts, not the quantity.

I obviously didn't hear the conversation in which you were told that 500 was the magic number, but it's conceivable that this is viewed as a healthy guideline considering whatever the average resource demands might be for the avearage script. Just what exactly is an "average script" I have no idea, but I'd be willing to be LL thinks they do.


Yes it would be the "worst way" in the sense that it would take hours. It would however serve to prove or disprove your assertion that "scripts are not the problem". As I already said, I don't believe the scripts themselves have any inherent problems, but I do believe the server is having trouble with them at the moment. Something somewhere is likely corrupted at level that neither we or LL can see. Breaking the cycle, giving the server a moment to breath, and then having it start over might just kick it back in the right direction.

And if you're right that everything would just end up exactly as it is, then you've got nothing to lose except a few hours of your time. It's certainly not going to get any worse. If I'm right though, then you have everything to gain.


I've talked to many people who have given me this impression, but Lee Linden is not one of them. With all due respect, I think you're suffering from a bit of tunnel vision yourself. You've made up your mind that the scripts couldn't possibly be your problem, despite the fact that the stats apparently might say otherwise.

Computers get stuck on certain commands all the time. It doesn't make any sense but it does happen, and when it does the solution very often is simply to remove the command and then put it back. Again, I know that's not a satisfying answer, not something anyone can sink their teeth into, but I believe it's the only acurate answer you're going to get.


Sorry to hear you say that. I think it's been a good discussion up until this point. Hopefully once the major problems are resolved (and I believe they will be) you'll cool off a bit. It would be a shame to lose you.

Maybe before accusing people of exagerating you should check with them, that would be a good policy to avoid insulting someone else's intelligence. OF course the figure of 50% is just a rough one, but will keep a counter from now on so i can be precise to the second decimal figure.
If something doesn't happen to you, doesn't mean it doesn't happen to other. That would be a somewhat (I let you find the right adjettive here) assumption.



I'm not concerned about textures, prims, scripts or whatever. They all, of course use the server resources. What i tried to say, in my poor english, is that if they are the cause of lag, then the sim servers are way underdimensioned. If they are not, as I suspect, then there is some fault - on the server side - that has to be seriously investigated.

btw... I dropped Norton long ago for some better and more reliable systems

I had loads of lag when I first started, when I cut my viewing distance down to 64 I never saw lag again.

OK, OK, maybe I'll leave a COUPLE more posts here and there.



That's a good example Chosen. My personal solution would be: All textures must be X size or less. It may make some things slightly less readable. Perhaps if something extremely readable were needed, textures could be combined over a couple of surfaces to increase resolution. Even if not... the standard question would come up, "what is better... absolutely incredibly sharp textures, or being able to move around so you can SEE the textures? One established texture size could possibly solve such problems... and to me, that's a simple solution.



No. Several thousand people a year are killed in auto accidents. The #1 statistical reason? Speeding. So maybe cars should have governors and failing to apply such a common-sense rule is costing people their lives.





Betcha Lindens don't agree.
But you sure just made my day. LOL
In truth though, I HATE coming to forums with stuff like this. I takes away from FUN things. And I hate publicly telling folks they need to clean their act up. Oooh, I hate it. I would much prefer to send Linden Labs an email patting them on the back. (Of course, when they do a good job... I'll leave THAT in a forum too... like when they finally killed the GHOST FIEND. Woohoo!!!! Sadly though, we had to hit them in the forums to get that solved too. LOL)



Yeah, I hate to say it, but you may be right. I hope there may be less volatile solutions. If I were to give my best-professional-guestimation, my data-based gut instinct tells me the problems can be summarized in several areas:

1. Second Life grew too fast, too unexpectedly, and we have a "caught with yer pants down" syndrome going on. LL is trying to play "code catch-up"... which is never easy.

2. The base core of Second Life (whether it's the OS, the application software, or whatever) is not optimized to the needs of Second Life. (Yes, I know it can't be ultra-optimized, but there are ways to do things and ways to do things and I think the current "way to do things" is seriously flawed).

3. I think CONTENT (yes, Lee, I do agree to an extent with what you've said) needs to be re-examined and some rules put into place, because yes, obviously some content is seriously messed up. And like you said Chosen, ONE SINGLE SCRIPT can super-lag or even destroy a sim. Shoot, I have an Ama Omega particle script that sends this incredibly beautiful double-helix particle stream 600m up into the sky... and turns the sim into absolute mush. So my solution for the CONTENT problem: apply logical, common-sense limits to content. Allow avatars to only wear say, 100 prims, max. Have the system measure avatar bandwidth and highlight avatars that are extra "laggy" for all to see (let peer pressure do the work) or maybe a nag screen that pops up every 60 seconds until the owner of the av fixes the problem.

Is this step really necessary? Absolutely. I have heard (more than once) this self-centered concept: "I don't care how much it lags, I'm going to wear my hair." When people are this selfish, enforced limitations are essential. Because apparently they don't understand the basic concept that "better to wear 'normal' hair and be able to play, than fancy hair and not be able to play.

In the same light, there are some content items that are really, really bad, such as the ever-popular already-mentioned "AO" devices (that help people walk pretty) or the hundreds-of-prims jewelry that some folks wear. Common-sense elimination of such problems could go a long way toward limiting unnecessary lag.

4. Avatars seem to me the #1 *visible* cause of lag on SL. I say this with reservations, because the lag data doesn't totally correlate with # of avs on the sim, but there is a strong correlation. So perhaps avatars and the way they are put together needs to be strongly examined. This said...

5. There is a #1 *invisible* cause of lag on SL, because I've seen sims with 10 avatars lag like a fiend and sims with 30 avatars hardly lag at all. Obviously there is a deep-root, underlying cause of lag that has little or nothing to do with the avatars themselves... and that needs to be ferreted out and fixed. There is a ROOT REASON that a sim will be chugging along just fine and then for no reason, out of nowhere, with NO CHANGE TO THE SIM WHATSOEVER and NO NEW AVATARS OR BUILDS on the sim... suddenly lags to a standstill. That is not content. That is not avatars. That is INTERNAL... and that is what really, really needs to be hunted down.



Well, self-scripted or script-managed, that holodeck rocks. I want one of those aliens for my living room. LOL




I agree there isn't just one cause for the situation. But I bet there's one or two MAIN causes, which once found will render the other causes minor and easy-to-handle in comparison. I'd bet dimes to doughnuts there is an underlying cause of this lag that LL is either unaware of or doesn't want us to know about (ah the conspiracy theories abound), and that is what is seriously hurting Second Life.

We have cut our sim from 750+ scripts to 390 and guess what? No discernable difference in operation. Which (not to toot my own horn) is exactly what I had predicted. We cut the scripts primarily to prove a point. We had the heavy-hitters visit our sim and check things out for the same reason-- not that we felt anything in the sim was out of order, but rather to prove things WEREN'T out of order. Not one change was specificially recommended by the tech-checks, with one predictable suggestion: "Well, you still have 390 scripts... maybe you need to trim some more" (why did that not surprise us?).

Bottom line: our sim is a peach. So why are we still lagging? That's what I've been trying to point out... it's not the content. It's deeper than that. It's not our sim... it's system-core and system-wide.



Oh, I've heard this claim so many times from Lindens and others that it could almost be just placed on a recording and replayed every time I contact Linden Labs. I agree it might be a "general guideline" and have no problems with that. But when that claim is made-- and proven to be incorrect-- you'd think at least they'd start looking elsewhere.

Here's the funny thing about this Chosen (and LL... I'm not trying to say I told you so, but...): the last time we had a week-long crash on SL... I had predicted 2 weeks before then that it was going to happen. My predictions were based solely on user-side-observations of system activities and problems and about 20+ years experience in knowing when a computer is about ready to barf. LL didn't listen to me then. This time, I've been talking to LL for a little over two weeks (ever since April 27) telling them their system was seriously in trouble (anyone doubt that, ask Lee Linden, Blue Linden, my co-sim-partner Forcythia Wishbringer, Peter Lioncourt who helped me run some extensive tests... there were plenty of witnesses). Saw this coming. Here it is. Warned about it. LL didn't listen. Wham.

You'd think after a while, someone would get a clue. LL may be around this every day, hour after hour. That doesn't mean they have a handle on what's going on. Sometimes a person has to stand back a little to see the whole forest. I can understand they may not listen to the claims of every crackpot who comes along, but when that crackpot has data in his bag that proves his point, you'd think someone would put on the reading glasses and say, 'Oh, hey...'



Yup. You're 100% right. Which is why we cut from 750+ scripts to 390. And our statement as a result is: "Scripts are not the problem." (hmm... think I've said that before.. not sure...)




Speak fer yerself. I can see it. LOL. Seriously (hey wait, that WAS serious!)... kickstarting might help fix the problem.. but it would be a temporary fix. I agree... shut the system down. Reload all the data. Start from zero and have the system rebuild all the sims. That might help long enough to find out the core cause. Because this could be anywhere from dirty server lines to a bloated cache somewhere that's supposed to be emptying but isn't. So shutting the system down for a couple hours, rebooting and bringing it up to fresh might be a good idea. Then don't relax-- pull out the blasters and go on a bug hunt.

Paranoid as I am though... I still think there's something we're not being told. And LL may have very good reasons for not telling us-- but it doesn't help us help them.




Actually, I have examined that possibility several times over the last few days (that I might be tunnel visioned myself). That's the first step a person should take in debugging software-- to make sure our perception isn't buggged. If I were ignoring stats, then I'd say yeah, maybe I need to change my attitude. But Chosen, to be perfectly honest, there is nothing in the stats to indicate that my hypothesis are incorrect. The stats DO NOT correlate to episodes of severe lag. The stats do not indicate that the number of scripts significantly effects sim operation. What the stats do (as several people here have pointed out) is strongly support the concept of deep-core internal SL problems-- which is exactly what I and others have been telling LL. Not meaning to contradict your statement, but in truth it is not a case of "the fact that the stats apparently might say otherwise." In truth, they obviously DON"T say otherwise. Which was the whole point of this thread from message #1.. that the stats do not support the things we've been told by Linden Labs. They support the things we've been telling Linden Labs.



Good discussion indeeed. It's been a lively and well-handled thread by everyone, all around. Unfortunately, a time-consuming one. All I can hope is that agree or disagree, some of these points have at least caught the attention of Linden Labs and just might, possibly, provide a necessary spark of inspiration and insight at just the right moment and someone will finally say, "Oh... THERE it is!!!!" And the lag monster will die.

Is this likely? A couple months ago I crawled all over LL for the continued rampages of the Ghost Fiend and their allowing it to continue on rather than tackling it head on like they should have long ago. Sent them emails, posted it on the forums, gave them a hassle over it. I pointed out to them the simple concept that ghosting was the #1 cause of user-relogs (to the tune of hundreds/thousands of relogs a day), was tying up their system resources and was the #1 cause of intense user dissatisfaction. I guess someone eventually listened, because now the Ghost Fiend is dead.

Time for LL to forge monster-slayer sword #2.

or mabye just build within the current system and understand things will change for the better over time. The script 'room' a sim has now is relatively small, thats going to increase alot in the future. The same for the way clients deal with network updates and large draw distances, thats also getting worked on alot.

That doesn mean you need to turn off things now. Why force a rule for something when common sense can work. You have a private island, all of the content there is your content.. if you think that this is causing your sim or your vising friends to lag, then why not just, fix it, why demand LL make rules to save you from your own builds?

You had alot of things that could be considered 'highly active' aka using alot of processor time, and resources, even when absolutely NO ONE was there to enjoy them... perhaps you could/should rethink those designs so that they would be much less active when not needed.

Get rid of 0.1s timers and code loops, for physical/animated things, have a scan state, and an active state... when someone is say within 25m of them have them turn on an do their things, when someone's not, have them turn off, and just go into a say once every 5 second repeating sensor, in its own seperate script state lookin to see if theres anyone nearby to show off to.


The basic underlying fact you seem to want to ignore is that you can have a very good running sim, with alot of interesting things to see or do in it, and have it not lag. It just takes a little more work than tossing a bunch of items down and calling it a day. I know you feel 'wronged' and that something changed to make what you want to do a little less doable.. on the other hand you have also professed little knowledge of whats even in your sim to begin with, much less what impact it all has on the overall sim's performance.

You quite frankly have basically no idea who is running what, where, in there, and not knowing that, there is no *WAY* you can sole-ly blame linden lab for your problems, given for all you know a chair in one of your vendor area stores that was rezzed around that time without anyone really thinking about it, could really be the source of the problem.

and yes it really *could* be. You have 465 active scripts in that sim, and many of them are not yours personally, nor have you seen the code for them. Just because they *shouldn't* be doing anything to cause this kind of problem, doesn't mean that they're immune from suspicion. I've seen while true llSetText() loops inside of a 'click here to get help' notecard dispenser before, and all manner of terribly written things.

What you need to do seriously is either find a mostly empty sim, and start rezzing your things there temporarily, to see what kinda performance impact they have there, or conversely start temporarily removing things from your sim you already have and see what boost you get from their absence.

I have a simple comprimise:

Turn off all scripts in the sim and see what it runs like. All scripts. Make it like linden land for a few minutes and see if the problem clears up. If it does not clear up, then find the next possible problem and kill it for a bit. Keep up until the worst culprits have been found, and act accordingly.

Any thoughts?

yeah this is basically what they need to do, but i understand that this isn't easy, especially for a sim being shared by a large number of people

I don't want to have to police my neighbors. If scripts are a big problem why not restrict active scripts proportunately to the amount of land you own in a particular sim. Just as we do with prims... this is to stop members with a 512 block, running the whole sim through the ground with active scripts.

VOTE NOW!!!!!!!

http://secondlife.com/vote/index.php?get_id=189

Totally agree with the concept Foolish. (Hey my friend, how you doing?). In fact, that's the way I've always conducted trouble-shooting: most-likely process of elimination. Find the most likely cause, eliminte it, if that doesn't work, re-set that and eliminate something else until the problem is found. Works every single time.

But one doesn't always have to totally shut off everything, nor does doing so really answer the question, for 3 reasons:

1) Instead of shutting off ALL data, shut of a percentage of it and see if a correlative percentage of problems are eliminated. For example, of a system runs at X speed, eliminate 20% of the scripts and see if it gets faster by an equal proportion. That is in effect what we did. We cut our scripts virtually in half. Results: no discernable correlation between number of scripts and sim operation.

2) This is especially proven due to one simple fact: we are not the only ones experiencing these problems. Sim owners all over the place are experiencing them. Shoot Foolish, Forcythia and I even experienced such at your area. If this were just ElvenGlen, we could surely trace that without much problem. But it's not ElvenGlen-- it's system wide.

3) You don't stop driving a car to see if mileage improves. LOL. You search to find the cause of the low mileage to start with. There can be all kinds of things causing low mileage, and in some cars, it's lots of things. But more often than not, there is one major thing that's causing the problem. I think that's the case with LL.

There is one basic, bottom line question I have for Linden Labs:

If indeed, it was the CONTENT at ElvenGlen that was causing our lag, if there was nothing inner-core seriously wrong at SL that was causing the problem... why is SL down?

And please don't say it's because of the CONTENT of 600 sims. Because those 600 sims were running just fine 30 days ago.

Scenarios: Wayfinder (and many others) tell Linden Labs there's something seriously wrong with their system. Linden Labs says, "Naw, the primary problem is your CONTENT. You're the ones in the driver's seat." Second Life crashes. Who was more likely right?

Next important question: why oh why oh why are we still being told it's our content? I wouldn't have to be a computer professional to guess the flaw in that reasoning... but it so happens I am and I KNOW the flaw in that reasoning.

Here's the trick folks: better hope it's a Second Life problem (which can be fixed) and NOT our content (which at this point, cannot), because if it is content... you're not going to see Second Life in operation again.

Yes, some of the perceived "lag" in Second Life is content. Agreed 100%. Yes, a LOT of the lag in Second Life is avatars walking around equipped like battleships. Agreed. But I think evidence at this point makes it pretty clear that Second Life has some serious internal server problems (I mean, considering like, SL has been seriously crashed all weekend). And the sudden manner in which all this has happened, coupled with the fact that during most of April things were working fairly well, indicates internal problems, not content. Because surely content did not take a sudden, inexplicable jump in complexity betwen April 26 and April 27, eh?

they're not saying the content is bad just saying that having that much of it will degrade performance to a rather sizable degree.. and also yer 'statistic' approach assumes all scripts lag equally, which is blatantly untrue, they all lag to some degree, but a script you pass over could be 50x as intensive as the others you prune.

Your sim has both a high physics slice, and high run tasks, hence its running slowly, both of those are caused by running objects within the sim. Turn off those objects, and you will see noticable performance increases.

This is seperate from some issues that have cropped up in regards to the physics engine skipping some passes for no good reason when the sim is NOT burdened by lots of scripts, if 10 or more agents are present. Thats mostly like a scheduler issue and would be something LL would have to fix, not a content issue. But again that is only one small part of the problem... alot of the rest is having lots of very intensive scripts running all the time, which you do.

LL *IS* working to 'fix' that aka give you alot more script headroom

but its not going to be a quick fix, its going to be a long while before we can see it... in the MEANTIME what LL is saying is work on your content to make it less stessing to the sim, which is frankly, good advice.

As to why SL is down, thats a backend issue in regards to the database, and is not related to any of the problems within your indivual sim other than the unfortunate difficulty of getting in to access it. technically that was aparantly 'content' as well as someone wrote something that is significantly stressing LL's backend with repeated email checks, and propigated those scripts over several thousand times. LL is taking care of that with this patch hopedully to a good degree.

Eltee, I appreciate the concepts in your post. There's just one major flaw: they are programmer-saavy idealism... rather than end-user realistic. And a lot of the claims are just plain groundless.

You your self came to our sim. Even with your script-checking equipment, you failed to find one single item that you could say would cause severe lag problems. You also failed to point out the reason why-- if it is our sim and our scripts that are to blame for lag-- that sim was working perfectly well on April 26-- and not working on April 27th.

To be frank, I don't understand that. What is so difficult about this concept? If the sim was working just fine for a month and then suddenly stopped working, when NOTHING ON THE SIM HAD CHANGED... it seems to me very obvious that CONTENT IS NOT TO BLAME. How many times does that have to be pointed out before the techs get their heads out of the manuals and look to see if a mouse peed on the wiring?




And I also don't understand how you feel comfortable in making this statement. I think it should be pretty obvious from anyone following this thread that I'm a whole lot more aware of what's going on in my sim than the average bear.

Eltee, I'm sorry, but I've dealt with "techs" all my life (and this is NOT a personal slur, so please don't take it that way. No offense intended). I've spoken with people who are so heavy into their tech world that they forget how to speak plain English. Eltee, I'm a computer professional but I had difficulty understanding your stream of tech when you visited our world. If that's the case, are you able to see things from the average end-user standpoint? The average end-user doesn't optimize content -- but they ARE the ones who pay the bills. And if SL doesn't work-- for whatever reason-- they're going to be the ones who stop paying the bills. So in the end game, is it the responsibility of the end user to see that content is optimized-- or is it the responsibility of Linden Labs, to insure that their platform continues to operate on an acceptable level?

You're so into the scripts themselves and in streamlining coding etc etc, that you seem to have lost track of the fact that the average user, the average builder, average land owners, don't write their own scripts. They use already existing scripts, buy already existing furniture and plants, and they have ABSOLUTELY NO CONTROL over how those scripts work or what they do. So the bottom line is that you can tell folks to "use this coding method" or "that coding method" until you're blue in the face, and you can tell people how to make their scripts run like a fine-honed machine, and that is going to do absolutely no good whatsoever because of the simple reason that this is not how SL runs. Most people have no control over what their scripted items do because the scripts are locked and they CAN'T EVEN MODIFY THEM IF THEY WANTED TO... and they're sure not going to go back to the blackboard and re-write every single script from scratch, even if they could.

So you can tell us all these idealistic concepts all you want, and kudos to you for being able to implement them on your sim. That has nothing to do with the average user, the average land, the average sim-- nor does it have anything to do with the underlying core of SL problems that is still going to exist no matter how much script streamlining or cutting you do.

Because Eltee... if my guess is right, despite how nice and streamlined you've made your sim... you couldn't log in this weekend either, eh? And I would bet that despite all your streamlining-- there are still times that your sim experiences significant lag effects for no apparent reason. I'd have great difficulty believing that you never experience "no-cause" lag.... because everyone else I've spoken to does.

The point I've been trying to make in all these posts is this: sure content affects lag. That's a given. The very existance of a prim affects system performance to some small extent. But fix the UNDERLYING problem of SL... find out what it is that is REALLY causing this problem... and the supposed content problem will suddenly not be a problem at all. You fix the underlying problem-- and our sim and many other sims, will work just fine without us trimming one single script. And that's the end thing isn't it? Ignore the tech stuff... if the sim works, it works. Don't fix what ain't broke.

1) I did not fail to point out why your sim was performing poorly, you had a very large number of active scripts, and your physics step was very large, almost 3ms, whereas most sims its below 1ms even 'now' aka after whatever sim backend change was made. Additionally when i did mention you had alot of active scripted physics objects your reply back was 'well we need to have some things to keep the sim interesting' (paraphrased) which i believe to be a fairly ignorant attirude when you are trying to solve a problem, delete them, see if they were the problem, then put them back, at least TRY it. Also you yourself have said you don't know all the content in the sim, you haven't 'taken inventory' or if you have *now* you hadn't been monitoring it all that closely then. So when you say nothing changed, i cannot believe you because i know you were actively building that sim around that time, so things were changing, whether you believe they caused the lag or not.

2) i was speaking very plainly about what does and does not lag things in second life, and i understand you don't necessarily keep up with me there, but that does little but show you really don't have a firm grasp on SL's basic design much less the specifics of what factors into sim performance, im not saying this to be insulting but rather to tell you to perhaps be just a little humbler than you have been in your opinions, since you really don't wholly grasp yet what yer talkin about, you will, in time im sure, ya seem pretty bright, but yer over-stepping yer bounds here making these sweeping claims and accusations when you don't even yet firmyl understand the basics of whats going on.

3) i fully understand as well that most people don't have the first clue when it comes to scripts in SL, and im sorry if i happened to mistake you for someone who might. Now, again admitting you don't really understand the scripting, the scripted objects, what causes lag, or what you are actually even putting there... If you don't know what is in a chair you just rezzed, how can you *POSSIBLY* know how much lag it is, or is not causing? And given that how can you honestly not at least *doubt* a little that its *all* LL's fault, that there might not be some rather poorly scripted objects out there causing alot of this for you. Again its your front yard, its up to you to understand just how flammable or fire retardant the particular pink flamingo's you wish to put on it are, you can't yell at the fire department later for not coming to check them for you personally.
(assuming scripted objects are flamingo's, and how badly written they are equalling how likely they are to burst into flames)

4) The weekend troubles were wholly not related to sim performance at *ALL*, its like blaming the FAA for the traffic on your daily commute.. Its apples and oranges. Just because they have air 'traffic' as part of their oversight doesn't mean they can smooth flow on the local interstate. Just the same as database/login problems have nothing to do with the number of scripted trees or chairs in your sim. even tho they are both loosely referred to as 'lag'

wayfinder yer not a bad guy, but yer confused, and angry, and you have some justification for it but yer essentially barkin up the wrong tree and when nothing comes down yer jus gettin madder. You need to be more pro-active at solving this and you need to understand that your objects are if not CAUSING it per say are exacerbating it to a significant degree. Calm it down abit and be a little more willing to accept yer puttin high demands on things, and understand LL is going to work to make it better, they're in there right now, doin just that... it just may not happen TONIGHT, or tomorrow night... systemic issues and growth pains take planning and man hours to get through.

LOL No, I haven't. But I thought it might be fun to try.

On my WinXP system, I ran out of some kind of GUI resource long before memory became an issue.

I have 1GB of RAM. 180 instances of notepad, plus Outlook, and IE brought me up to about 435MB. I originally had 200 instances of notepad, but I couldn't get the taskmanager to open because of some GUI resource (I'm guessing). CPU was running at about 4%. So no trouble there.

Without the notepads, I was using 220MB RAM. so 180 notepads used about 215MB. or about 1MB per instance of notepad? Sounds high to me, but that's what I observed.

Well, I don't know. I don't feel like going all the way to 600, but I think my laptop could do it without any problems if notepad was headless.

doesn't really illuminate the situation, but it was fun.

Eltee, nice fencing match. Nothing personal in all this, but I am gonna parry/reposte, and sorry if the point smarts a bit when it hits... LOL. Don't mean for any damage... just replying directly to your direct statements and no offense taken/intended.



No Eltee, it's not ignorant. It's REALISTIC. What is ignorant is to fail to recognize the facts when they've been presented over and over again. You can quote specs all you want... that doesn't alter the reality that 1) a certain amount of activity is expected on a sim or it will be dulll and lifeless 2) a certain amount of performance is expected from Second Life 3) We were receiving that performance prior to the end of April and 4) Now we're not. You know a whole lot about tech specs. What about people? What you propose is that we eliminate absolutely everything that makes Second Life enjoyable, that we cut scripts way past the bone. What you propose is unrealistic, and no matter how many times you propose it, it is going to remain unrealistic. You call our viewpoint ignorant? I think you need to get out of the techbooks and pay more attention to the real world. Seriously. To be truthful, I think Linden Labs is suffering from the same attitude; they're paying more attention to idealistic concepts than realistic causes/needs. They're paying attention to idealistic TECH THEORY rather than SYSTEM REALITY based on the requirements INHERENT in their project. You can't build a race track and then blame the drivers when the asphalt fails to hold up.



I think it should be obvious that no one knows every single item on a sim (at least, no one on this side of sanity), especially when it's a multi-user sim. But I *have* been over every square inch of that sim several times. I have used the same tools you have used and like you, I found NO unreasonable items in that sim. And you say that our sim is running higher than "most sims"... which if you'll pardon my frankness, is a load of hooey. We are capable of checking other sims and as we've already stated... we have. Your generalized statements based on one visit to our sim just don't bear up to close examination.



Eltee, I'm sorry to be blunt, but you don't know squat. The sim was closed to the public at that time. You weren't around the sim and you don't know what stage of development we were at. You are not helping the situation-- you're just throwing out baseless statements What matters are the facts, and you weren't there to know the facts. I was and I'm going to state quite plainly: you're speaking from a standpoint of zero factual knowledge of the situation at the time, and you are totally ignoring the fact that these things have been experienced by sims all over the grid (as as been repeatedly stated throughout the thread). You're just throwing out statements and further confusing the issue.

It was obvious to both Forcy and I when you visited our sim that you had good intentions but weren't perceiving the big picture. All you did was quote stats and offered no solutions, repeating measurements that we had already taken and giving us generalized advice that really didn't offer any benefit. Sorry, that's how it is. This isn't an "ElvenGlen" problem. It's not a script-caused problem. It's a Second Life system-wide problem and your comments are just encouraging Linden Labs to continue in the same self-defeating track they've been pursuing for the last 5 months... and longer.



Eltee, a person doesn't have to know the intricacies of how a car runs to know when it's running badly. If we're keeping gas in it and oil and trans fluid and the air up and regular maintenance and it still runs badly... it's not the driver that's to blame.

I'm not going to sit here and spout my computer qualifications to you because I'm in no need of justifying my expertise. I would wager I was hard-core debugging systems when you were in toddler pants. One thing I've learned over the years is that computer specs have little or nothing to do with real life computer benefits. Ask a tech what computer you should buy, and he'll quote you specs and performance vs/price and almost always cost you more than you need to spend. The proper reply is, "Well, what do you want to do with it?" I do think you're so tech-bound you're missing the big picture, that client systems that were running fine a month ago... now aren't. And that's NOT the client's fault.. and it's not the number of scripts in the sim. And if you can't see that, well, remind me not to hire ya. LOL

I say this because despite repeated mention, you keep ignoring the basic FACT that our sim (as well as many other sims) used to run fine, with the SAME content, and now it's not. And if you don't believe that, well, we all have our problems.



That's simple Eltee, and if you'll read back a few pages, you'll have the answer to that. You do what we did and you go to a blank sim and you rez 200-300 chairs and see what happens. You don't have to be an almighty scripter, may they be praised for their infinite wisdom, to figure out the results. You don't have to know coding. You don't have to even look at the script (which is probably set to no-mod in the first place). You test, you analyize the results, you elimininate possiblities. Pardon me for saying so, but: duh.



Let's use this example. I buy a pink flamingo. I have a right to expect a certain amount of safety. First hot day comes along, the flamingo spontaneously combusts, bursts into flames and catches my yard on fire. Fortunately I manage to catch it before it burns my house down. But my neighbors who had the same flamingo didn't, and their houses burn to the ground. No, we don't blame the fire department. But we *do* blame the manufacturer, who was required by law to offer an item of at least normally expected safety factors... and that manufacturer is liable for the damage. That's a little more accurate example.


No, they're related to SYSTEM PERFORMANCE... which includes sim performance. And that's what everyone has been on LL's tail about for months now... basic, expected, system performance along with common-sense policies and approaches to correcting problems.



Confused? Really? Confused in what way? Sorry, I don't get it.

What tree do we bark up Eltee? Where does the buck stop? Who is ultimately responsible for the bad performance on Second Life... the folks who are running the show or the end users who are paying the folks who are running the show? Just read the posts in these forums and see how users are feeling about Second Life. Look at the stats and see how many users are LEAVING Second Life in frustration. Then tell us more about who is responsible for the way SL is running.

You tell us to be patient, that these things aren't going to happen overnight, that we need to give LL time. Well, we've been patient. We have given LL time. And the system keeps crashing. Our emails keep going unanswered. And "new features" are being added rather than fixing the serious problems that have existed for months. New policies are being enacted that make users scream in frustration and anti-Linden Labs posters are appearing in the forums. The users just started a UNION that is threatening to picket Linden Labs and strike on monthly payment issues.

Now tell me how any of this is healthy, how long we should wait for LL to fix things, and what the end result is going to be. As a business consultant, I can tell you what the end result forecast is-- and it isn't pretty.



Whatever you say Eltee. Have any prime Florida swamp land you wanna sell next?

Your turn. LOL. I can keep this up... well, not much longer...

In light of all this, I would like to mention one thing mentioned by a user in another forum:

Last time a major problem like this happened, users screamed, Linden Labs fixed it, and even reimbursed folks for downtime.

The purpose here is not to climb Linden Labs' case or to cause them extra headaches. It's to make clear what has been going on with hopes that it will help them find the solution to these problems. And if that solution is to stop being dunderheads... well, stop. LOL

There IS a solution to this situation. It's probably staring you right in the face and you just haven't seen it yet. Or it could be hinding in a faulty panel somewhere and soon it'll spark and die and you'll find it then. Sadly, you're losing users in the process, but that's how it is.

I and others have experienced months of lack of customer support, of seeing policies worsen rather than improve, of watching sales drop through the floor, of seeing the same problems continue over long periods of time without resolution, of being told to cut scripts and when they're already cut to the bone-- still being told it's not enough. Customer satisfaction is not even close to satisfactory. I've spent more than 6 months trying to make this work and I simply have no more time to spend.

Second Life is wonderfully fascinating-- and seriously flawed. From this point on, I'll pay attention to rock-basic business and leave the rest to handle itself. SL will either thrive or fail to do so based on the common sense of Linden Labs and end-user response to their policies and activities. It's an interesting social experiement, but I've spent way, way too much time involved in it. Time to pursue other, more important things. My SL holdings can operate under minimal steam and if even that fails... so what?

im not goin back through the whole thing in a tit for tat wayfinder but you misunderstood me abit.. what i said was higher in your sim was the physics step, and most sims (at least our old street and color sims on the mainland) have steps of below 1.0 ms, yours had nearly 3x that, i would call that high

and secondly, the critical fallacy in your whole argument is that you demand resources to run a 'resonable' amount of things in world but never define that. What is reasonable to some people, can be outright ridiculous for others... Back in 1.0 before prims were allocated by land size, we had someone move into our sim, buy up about 1000 sqm of land, and proceed to use 6,000 prims to make his house there. 200 prim chairs, full 150 prim sets of flatware at each table setting, etc...

to him this was reasonable... to the rest of us in the sim it was crititally terrible, as the entire sim became unusable, no one could so much as rez a plywood box, he had taken all the resources for himself, and his house, and left everyone else with nothing.

What im saying is that what you find to be a reasonable amount of activity, may in fact be far more than was anticipated by LL or than other sims generally do run. Lets face it, overall, in SL, most content is static, there are relatively few dynamic/changing builds and those that are out tend to be transient, often moving from one sim to another, as their neighbors get frustrated at the amount of sim degredation such builds tend to cause.

Now as to yer specific situation, if you don clean house, and start from scratch, puttin the things back one at time, you cannot know what kind of performance the 'sim' has avaialble.. theres 200 humming 'black boxes' there in your build, and saying you don't know whats in them basically only serves to underscore the point you should probably unplug them, to see just how much they are or are not affecting the sim.

And yet right now our FPS is 500+, our RunTasks is 1.0, and we still have the same same number of scripts, same "physics step" and for right now, things seem to be running pretty smoothly... which says to me that the stats aren't telling the true story. Which is what I've been saying all along.



Valid point. Let's consider "reasonable".

If a person buys a 512 piece of land, it is reasonable to asume he's going to want a couple of doors on his house to work. (Either that, or SL should pass a rule that doors must be phantom and not scripted). There's 2 scripts. It is reasonable to assume he'll want 3 or 4 places to sit down. That's 4 more. So let's say oh, just to be congenial, 5 scripts per 512. That means folks, no particle scripts. No special effects. No stereo sets, no blinking lights, nothing. Rock bottom, minimally functional dead prims.

There are 128 512m plots on a sim. 128 * 5 = 640. So are we to be told that 640 scripts is too much for a sim?

That's MINIMAL functionality. If SL can't handle that reasonable amount, then Lindens Labs needs to pass a rule: 2 scripts per 512. Or 1 script per 512. Or maybe none? Is everyone willing to accept a totally "dead" sim in exchange for practically zero lag? No avatar scripts? No prim scripts? No lighting? No vendors? No fireplaces...

On the other hand, Linden Labs claim that there should generally be no more than 300 scripts in a sim... that equates to about 2 scripts per 512.

When someone tells me 500 scripts are too many for my sim, either I'm totally clueless in thinking that's absurd, or he's totally clueless as to real-life SL user expectations.

Yeah, it would be nice if every fish that swims would check to see if someone is around to see it swim (I wonder what takes more time... telling a fish to move from here to there every few seconds, or telling it to probe the surrounding area for 50m to see if any avatars are standing around?). I'm sure every script in a sim can be streamlined given enough time and patience. The reality: very few people have that expertise, time, luxury or even access to the scripts that are powering the items in their sim. And reality: if all SL is going to be is a bunch of dead prims that do nothing but sit there, it's going to become kinda boring kinda fast.

So I agree with your concepts of "clean scripts" in theory... but not in realistic execution. It's just not going to happen without LL setting down some basic, hard-coded rules. And while I do believe some basic "governors" are in order (such as complexity allowances for a single avatar or the functionality of weapon scripts on non-arena ground)... I also think that other things require greater focus.

Just tonight Linden Labs was gracious enough to announce that the major data bottleneck was found, and it was what I and others have suspected every since 1.6... the way inventory is handled. I've seen people pointing that out all over these forums. Apparently someone at LL listened... because sure enough, the streaming inventory appears to have been a major data slammer. Not CONTENT. Not SCRIPTS. Inventory. That's internal. Which is exactly what this entire thread has been pointing to.

I would think that kind of answers this point of this thread-- for the time being. Not that other things aren't contributing to lag effects, for surely we still have to be cognizant of the way we build and script. That's a given no matter how good the sims run; otherwise we get sloppy. But the problem wasn't our sim content, was it? So when we kept saying that our sims were running just fine... and then weren't... apparently it wasn't just our imagination, eh?

Not wanting to say "told ya so"... but chee... how many pages does it take to get people to pay attention to evidence?

I'm not even gonna try to match wits with you folks as I would come in completely unarmed, but my 2 cents here, and something that appears (granted I didn't read every word in this thread so I apologize if I missed it) to be missing is some of the back end processes that LL must be running that none of us know about.

My SL wife mentioned that on Tues mornings/late monday night lag seems to be particularly bad (and we're running 503 active scripts on our sim, right about where LL wants it). I got to thinking about it, that's right before stipends are posted to our accounts.

Now think about what sort of processing has to happen to post a stipend for just one user. Figure all the dwell, ratings, etc that makes up a stipend (this includes DB queries to get those numbers). Now write that to the database. Now do that 35,000 times. You can see where this might congest the lines up a bit, the same lines that are sending you data to your SL client. Possible lag causer? And dont forget the aforementioned database is best used for storing & servign up website data, not serving thousands & thousands of clients a second. Oracle would be a much better choice here, and they have the $ to buy it too (8 million anyone?)

I know in our tech area at work we're running 7-8 batch jobs at different times to do various things, our setup is nowhere near the size of SL's, so I can imagine how much more backend things they've got going on.

Just something to ponder on top of everything else
-Syn

Thank you Way and to everyone else for such detailed, well thought out, informational posts. Its because of extremely knowledgeable users that some very important issues are being addressed.

Also, thank you Lee for your response, it proves that you guys really do listen and care about our concerns. I just hope some action is taken for improvement.

I'll second that Alyssa. Even though we disagreed, I have to appreciate the time Lee took to respond to these posts-- more than once.

OK LETS GET DOWN TO BUSINESS SHALL WE......

IM GOING TO TAKE A TRIP TO LINDEN LABS HQ.....GONNA GO STRAIGHT TO THE RL BUILDING WITH TAPE RECORDER AND CAMERA IN HAND.

TAKE SOME PICS OF THERE SET UP AND ASK ALL THE RIGHT QUESTIONS THAT HAVE BEEN POSTED "1 million" times ON THESE FORUMS CONCERNING GAMEPLAY ISSUES.

I AM WILLING TO BRING SOME NETWORK ADMIN. AND TECHIES WITH ME FREE OF CHARGE.

WHY AM I DOING THIS??? TIRED OF THE BLAME GAME. TIRED OF THE LAG. TIRED OF THE LIES. TIRED OF PAYING FOR A CROWDED BANDWIDTH.

SO MY CHALLENGE IS THIS............WILL YOU LET ME IN LINDENS???

REPLY OPENLY IN TEH FORUMS PLEASE.

THANKS.