The recently open-sourced land scanner.

To try and see what kind of lag these things cause, I have successfully set up and am testing the recently open-sourced land scanner that was posted in the scripting forum recently.

Sim FPS when the scanner is NOT rezzed: 1300
Sim FPS when the scanner IS rezzed: 1215

I don't see the horrible lag degradation that everyone is claiming these things cause.

With the scanner still running, and updating my website, I rezzed a huge rotating fountain with moving textures, a bunch of listen channels and particles spewing out of it in all angles.

I was surpised to see that Sim FPS drop about 250 with the scripted fountain. I deleted the fountain and the Sim FPS went back up.

So, until a Linden can pop in and say, "Yes, these things cause lag and here are the SERVER-SIDE numbers to prove it," then, frankly, I'm taking the position that they don't cause noticeable lag.

The question should be were you in an occupied sim, or on an island with little to no objects or people. The script by itself wouldn't cause too big of a hit it seems, but when compiled with other things in the sim, it could cause major lag by scanning every 10 seconds. Between possible script conflicts with other objects, to AV's being in the sim, all of these things could possibly affect the script and how long and how well it scans. I'm not an expert in Scripting, nor are any of these things i've stated are facts, but it's just me thinking about what could possibly happen.

Hmm, not a lot of replies to this post, that's odd.

I think the alternative theory is that people just love to put the h8 on around here.

He's using getlandownerat, btw, not typical sensoring. So more objects / avatars are unlikely to effect things except perhaps to provide a bit more contention for server resources.

There were about 10 other avatars in the sim I was in at the time. In the surrounding sims I counted 8 total.

The script uses linked messages to do to ALL of its communication, except XML-RPC of course, which the top scripters have always told me that linked messages are secure and faster than using listen events.

The XML-RPC code doesn't cause any noticeable lag either. I once created a test script that sent data to a internet database every few seconds, this script seems to only do so every 30 seconds.

As far as land scanning goes, I don't see any lag when it scans.

I might whip this thing out when there are dozens of people around to see if that makes any difference, but I seriously doubt it will.

Deep down, I think everyone's hatred towards the past user of this scanner is rooted in jealousy, because I've been testing it since it went open source and have been unable to reproduce any major lag.

Thank you for reporting Aaron, it is truley amazing how hateful some people are, and how they easily just brutally attack someone with out valid reasoning.

~Stares at Sensual~

Hee hee. =)

Must this thread, too, get trolls who want to add nothing to the discussion?

I, for one, never had a problem with the scanners, per se. My objection was with the surreptitious placement of the scanners on other peoples' land without their permission. And from what Chance says, he corrected that long ago.

C'est la vie...

- Ace

I thought scanners were pointless now anyway...

although it is true playing baron pong is fun,

call your friends over
release 16m section
turn on damage in surrounding area
shoot skeet

PULL!

Thats cute, please show me where I have attacked someone, verbally or in any other way... Oh wait, unless you mean not agreeing with people?

Ace, that is a good point. Sometimes people put things where they shouldn't be; the idea of someone taking any of another's resources, no matter how small or large, would definately be something that would upset me, as I delete any foreign items on my land unless they appear to be truly lost, like a car or plane or something. A plywood cube with 18 scripts in it would look suspicious and get deleted by me for sure.

I just 'return' everything that isn't mine.

Thanks for doing that test Aaron. It was my non-completely knowing programming side that drew me to the conclusion that it could cause lag. As I don't know what everything meant in the script, I was worried that it may cause more lag than it might have seemed. I never really attacked Chance as far as the scanners go, it was my concern that we'd see an influx of the scanners going up all around, and that would cause a performance issue. Seeing as how i'm at work and have been here the whole time, I wasn't able to perform a test of my own, and all of the statements I made were guesses on my part. There still may be a bit of a performance hit when there are more people in the sim, but I think any of the other effects would be minimal. I'm still a bit concerned about the scanners popping up everywhere, which we just need to be vigilant with our delete keys, which could get annoying for some people.

Hmmm Chance no longer shows up in the people finder, for quite some time now, has Chance left SL? And, if so when would all of those 16m squares go to auction?

ROFL - No
They are too small to go back to auction. The only way to get them would be to.....scan for land!

HA!

Or use the Find tool to find Land For Sale, like everyone else.

Aaron, if you check the other thread, it creates large lag pockets at intervals, not constantly. In addition, did you set this up with a fully enabled RPC server? It should also be tested on a sim where the sim fps is less than 100. According to Kelly Linden, the statistics are unreliable otherwise, as sim fps is being reported including void "zero" frames.

In addition, if you're in a sim with that many other avatars, how can you be sure they didn't rez something lag intensive at about the same time you rez'd your fountain? Its a slippery slope, and the metric do not allow for accurate measuring. So far, we have to rely upon the experience of people to lead to discussions about what they have noticed since the metric provided are admittedly unreliable.

Again, what REALLY irks me is (a) these are useless and (b) are purely being left and spread out of spit.

Regards,

-Flip

what if you live in a sim like ours and only have 300ish fps? 85fps is kinda a lot and in our case prolly enough to cause time dilation. It also depends on what server you on? What server was this mesurement taken? slower sims will take a bigger impact. Also, thats only 1. Being open source there could be tons on these in-game. (I always tought it very rude to take resources from a sim you dont even live on, and not even visiting). Fortunatly there usage I think no longer make since with the lindens getting released land, YAY!

Um... I'm sorry, but I don't know what are land scanners for. Can anyone tip me on that?

They would not be listed in that list unless Chance set them for sale. Which he's not going to be doing, I'm sure.

Chance's account seems to come and go on a fairly regular basis. I've seen it "return" from the dead three times now in the past couple of months. Maybe it was killed again after he posted the code?

I'll test it later to see how it does. Specifically in lower fps sims, approx. 500 sfps. Incidentally that thing runs 16 scanner scripts simultaneously every 10 seconds. A better idea would probably be to run 1 or 2 with less delay between. Usually a steady light load is better than a periodic hard load. Further testing is required though . Thanks for the release Btw Chance .

I'm guessing it was his language this time. It was fairly rough, lol

A copy of Chance's Public Land Scanner is now available in the University of SL Library, 5th Floor of MegaTower ^1 in BonnyDoon. No need to copy from the forums, just get a copy at the large USL Library

I'm more pissed off that a land scanner exists in the first place..

Errm, am I missing something? How is a drop from 1300 to 1215 not significant?

That implies its using 75fps. The object takes up 64 square metres in the sim, but there are 256 * 256 = 65536 square metres in the whole sim. An empty sim runs at about 6000fps, so a "fair" proportion of the sim fps would be:

6000 * ( 64 / 65536 ) = 5.9 fps

75fps is roughly 13 times the "fair" allocation of sim resources for a 64 square metre plot. In other words, if 10% of the land used a similar amount of sim cpu, the sim would crawl to a halt.

Disclaimer: fps is not an accurate measure resource utilization, and you cant really allocate so many fps per script, so this is a rough and ready order-of-magnitude analysis.

Azelda