Scripting, lag, and you.

Yeah yeah. We don't want to try being considerate! We want RULES! LEGISLATION! CHANGES TO THE TOS! THROTTLES! CAPS! BANS! NUMBER OF SCRIPTS TIED TO LAND OWNERSHIP! *cough*

try in some heavily loaded of poseballs like eros to shout something like "show" or "hide" and you will see the sim fps drop to 20 a few seconds while all the pose balls in shouting range suddently acitvate themselve

ITS an exellent way to prove that the show/hide command was a flaw in the poseball concept ^^

Not ALWAYS a bad thing.

Hey now! Where did I once say I wanted more rules or anything like that? It doesn't really affect me, I just play fascist in my sim like you do in yours, Kris!

I just want scripters to take the extra step to try to make their code as efficient as possible (if they have the skills... if not, ask for a hand!) before releasing it. There's not reason for a single script in a single avatar's ring to drop sim fps from 250 sim fps to 50 sim fps, which I have seen on some live help calls.

-Flip

Or more correctly, in the implementation.

The reasons Eggy can start a civil conversation about script throttling:

Eggy is a respected member of the scripting community with 2 years of experience. He knows how LSL scripting works, and has taught at least some aspect of scripting to a unknown but very high percentage of the SL population.

Even if you don't know Eggy's background, he has posted in a civil tone, and without wild accusations.

Eggy has qualified his statement by saying the type of script that creates lag varies greatly.

Eggy has consulted with people (the Lindens) that know how scripts effect sim performance, using hard numbers.

Eggy is not demanding anything. No changes to the rules, no punishment for abusers, simply asking the community to help come up with a voluntary rule of thumb.

The numbers Eggy has suggested makes sense.. as a rule you can hand out to non-scripter who asks how to reduce lag. It doesn't prevent scriptors that know what they are doing from scripting.

Eggy has provided a concrete example of an object many non-scriptors use that, badly written and in large quantities, can create copious amount of server side lag. By spreading knowledge about the types of scripted objects that cause trouble, we can easily reduce server side lag through education, instead of legislation.

Examples of objects that can cause server side lag:

1.Listening pose objects.
2.Vendors with timers and listens.
3.Objects that rez objects on a frequent basis.
4.Objects that move and use physics.
5. Physical objects that use the torus and ring objects.
6.Objects that frequently change colors, textures, size, or shape.

I'm glad Eggy is willing to champion the cause of voluntary script reduction, and pleased that he is willing to do so in a civil, inclusive manner, and without his own personal agenda and fear mongering.

Look, all that is well and good, but if the fewer scripts are still laggy, it's not going to really help.

Whereas making scripts more efficient will have an immediate and noticeable effect on lag.

One thing Ive noticed. Is I come across scripts that were sliced and diced and use listeners for no reason at all, Link messages would work fine. Maybe a "Lag Reduction" class for begining scripters taught by some of you more experienced people can also help the problem.

Certainly, but that is of no help to a non-scriptor.

Eggy's advice can be seen as a rule of thumb for end users, not script creators.

Hear hear! I would take great pains to be sure I was able to get to just such a class. Has a central "Coding Best Practices" list been compiled? I imagine I'm certainly one of the folks in the "know enough to be dangerous" category in the sense that I've learned enough scripting to make my creations behave and interact as I'd like them to, but I'm sure I don't yet know enough to make the scripts truly lean and hungry. I'm no LSL poet yet. The Wiki's pretty good at offering tips here and there, but they're pretty scattered due to the structural nature of wiki-style documentation.

Prokofy is a disrespected member of the community with six months of experience who still has some significant support because he is willing to challenge the status quo. He knows how scripting *feels* on himself, and on other avatars in the game, and that's as valuable as knowing how it *works*. He doesn't need to know the sequential, monkey-like routines required to master scripting to be able to render a judgement on *the effects of excessive scripting on himself and others and their enjoyment of the game on property they have purchased.

Prokofy has made pointed and sharp accusations, not wild, and not uncivil. Prokofy has never been edited or banned for what he has written on the forums.

Prokofy has qualified his statement about needing to curb scripts by indicating some upper ceiling could be established, i.e. more than 300 or more than 500 or X-amount of CPU draw, because that would take care of a) numbers, which do cause lag and b) types, which also do cause lag as well, but not exclusively. He is not advocating a per-script tax or fee. He is advocating increased tier fees as a whole for those who regularly use large numbers of scripts on sims -- exactly in the same way that those who use large numbers of prims on land on sims have to pay more tier.

Prokofy has consulted with people (the Lindens) that know how scripts effect sim performance, using hard numbers.

Prokofy *is* demanding something -- more curbs on hedonistic, heedless, and malicious scripters and script-uers -- because they significantly impact the enjoyment of the game for others, harm and devalue if not ruin their investment in land (or their game/entertainment expense on land, depending on how you view it). Prokofy believes it is in LL's best interests in attracting investors if they can *secure the investment in land on servers by also protecting such investors from the griefing and lag induced by other residents who use excesive numbers of scripts, who use abusive scripts, or who use scripts that lag for the entire sim and indeed 4 sims.*

Prokofy is urging the community not to go the route of the silly tekkie wiki once again and think everything can be solved by "education" and "voluntarism" but focus on the bottom line of human behaviour: pay to play works. People don't play heedlessly and harm others when they have to pay to play.

Prokofy has emphasized that the earnest, good-willed types who are advocating merely education and voluntarism are a vestige of the past, and cannot be relied on any more to secure the space needed for more serious investment in the game. Their ideologies, personas, habits, and ways are no longer a viable basis for growing the game -- they are merely a recipe for keeping the game a small haven of bright beta-testers for game devs to reward with favours to get free labour.

Prokofy notes that the examples that Eggy provides of laggy scripts:

1.Listening pose objects.
2.Vendors with timers and listens.
3.Objects that rez objects on a frequent basis.
4.Objects that move and use physics.
5. Physical objects that use the torus and ring objects.
6.Objects that frequently change colors, textures, size, or shape.

has completely left out these big laggers of sims:

1. bounce scripts and other watchdog security scripts (that also harm avs by pushing, often to home)
2. objects that listen for whether a person is online or not

I'm glad that Prokofy is willing to champion the cause of forced script reduction -- as to types and numbers -- through a payment plan and pleased that he is willing to do so in a sharp, confrontational, and controversial manor at sacrifice to himself for the greater good of creating habitable sims for not only himself but others.

Prokofy has no personal agenda and is not fear mongering, but in fact has been targeted by others with personal agendas and fear mongering. Tenants, buyers, neighbours on dozens of sims -- these are the people I see suffering from excessive numbers and types of scripts. Fix the problem.

Editorial, you're hired
Prokofy, those examples were posted by Editorial, not me. They are indeed correct, as well as yours. Any script that has sensors in it causes lag, and so do dataserver queries.
Actually, anything that is constantly, frantically running, in a tight loop or a short timer, listening for voice commands, constantly polling for data, triggering events or changes in large amounts or on a regular basis, will lag a sim.
And like others have stated, as well as myself, the type of script calls and parameters you pass them DOES greatly influence the impact on performance.
The problem is, to borrow infamous Prokofyisms, people in SL could not care any less about kewl tekkies and their obscure notions of sensors, listeners and timers!
They are here to play house, attend tringo games and make money!
So we need to give them a simple rule of thumb such as "1 script per 100 meters" or "1 script per 50 meters" or whatever, in your experience, would be best.
I started with 100 and asked for the community's input. Post your statistics, or something, but for the love of god dont turn this into a "FIC versus Prokofy" thread or any such needless drama. Maybe I should make a new thread, or even fly around and look at the numbers myself.

Eggy says:



Where's the evidence of this?

Eggy's being an experienced player and saying this with an even tone is what gets him respect. You raving with all of the coherence of a mental patient, flinging personal attacks upon everyone who uses scripts, and demanding myopic solutions to problems you barely understand are what earn you all of your well-deserved ire. Go away.

I know this is a heated topic within Second Life, but I wanted to remind everyone to remain civil towards each other and refrain from personally attacking one another in the SL Forums.

I imagine that would be the posts where a Linden mentioned dishing out script CPU priorities in a similar manner as prims.

hrmm.. wonder what a good general number is.. probably 1/100 is about right for the consumer scripts I generally see out there. Given many seem to be unfiltered listeners with long command lists.. (besides touch scripts and very inactive timers, most active devices are at about that lag level in my experience anyway)

but make this the rule for number of scripted items (not number of actual scripts)

Since we know a vender with some linked message on touch scripts are not the problem

I think they cause lag if they have listen scripts. I have noticed a tremendous improvement in Sim FPS in Terminous (up literally 300% on average) simply because the script usage was halved.

Many sex balls AND just plain old furniture poseballs use open listens.


I think Hiro's posecubes will be a great improvement for those who have AV sex with only two avies involved. I've seen...(clears throat) what can be done with the one on one posecubes and it is pretty amazing.

I can't tell you how relieved I was when someone answered my questions about lag (not just one but many someones on multiple occasions).

I really genuinely appreciate and like tekkies. I genuinely appreciate 3D content makers. It is true that I am in SL chiefly to socialize and build community and make arts events. This can't happen for me, though, when my sim is lagged to the point that people can't move. The wonderful advice I have gotten from folks helped me tremendously to help my neighbours understand what was causing our horrendous lag, and to also cull the lag I was adding to the problem.

Thanks Tekkies! We socializers may not always say so, but we think you rock.

You want to point fingers at lag, point them all.

Avatar presence should be measure of the land you own. Not a sim wide allocation. You own the whole sim, pack 'em in. You own a quarter of it, you should only be able to host 1/4 of the avatars allowed in the sim, and then that's it.

Dwell should be a fee, not a bonus.

Because, sim resources should be fairly shared. That's the objection about scripts...isn't it?

ALL the residents of a peaceful sim end up paying for the ability of some club to do it's thing. If you object to a lack of script partioning, then you should object to this. Unless of course, you're not REALLY concerned at all with the fair and TOTAL partitioning of sim resources.

I'm on my land, and working, alone. Maybe 10 or so scripts running. A club event starts up, the ENTIRE sim is brought to it's knees. I am no longer able to work. I log off in frustration because I'm tired of moving 1 frame every second.

And I own 1/4 of the sim. Rendered totally useless. This is fact, not conjecture at all. It happens ALL the time.

What's fair about that?

i believe this will change once they start allocating cpu resources by land ownership + commons (though how would that work for physical objects? anyhow...)

but until then dwell is supposed to be a measure of interest. at least there is a correlation to how much dwell a place gets and how much interest people have in things at that place.

but dwell also correlates to how much of a sim's resources a place uses.

it's an interesting way of looking at things.

one idea to lower forum lag is to remove prokofy neva

we dont need this kind of extra

The LSL Wiki has a pretty good discussion on lag, and how to reduce it here.

Here's my take on the issue. There are two sources of what users experience as "lag". One is an overworked sim, and the other is an overworked client. Some of the major sources of lag are :

Sim Lag
=====
- Sensors
- Listens
- Physics (especially when physical objects collide with other scripted objects)
- Anything that causes an "object update" (texture/color/geometry changes)

Client Lag
======
- Overuse/Abuse of light
- Overuse/Abuse of particles
- Oversue/Abuse of alpha surfaces
- Lots of curved surfaces within eyeshot

But to try to use the raw number of scripts in a sim as a metric simply will not work. A single script can wreck more havoc (pun intended) than 1000 scripts. It all depends on what the scripts are doing.

- Ace

/bump

One of the major problems, I think, is that shoppers don't demand low-lag. Because of that, scripters can cut corners and still reap rewards.