40 FPS in an empty sim! (Sim performance RANT)

Well, this tops it. When will it be admited that obviously certain simulators (actual servers), do have a gross lack of power for the content that is being served in our modern SL? I remember a certain Linden said the following at a town hall in response to a question posed by another resident:





To paraphrase this statement "The servers work just fine, its your stuff that makes it slow."

For weeks on end, Spittoonie ran at 700-1100 FPS empty. Great, exactly what I expected. Then yesterday, drops down to <40 FPS when the sim is empty. What the heck is going on? I check around, NO CONTENT CHANGES MADE! Everything is exactly the same.

IM a Linden (my favourite one), and she immediately came over to check it out. She did her best to be helpful, but alas, no resolution. She indicated that she'd have the grid monkies look at it, cool. Well, into day 2 of the 40 FPS sim. 40 FPS, EMPTY on a sim that previously was kicking empty at 700-1100FPS? Hmm, interesting.

Now, to help support the current "theory" about the low numbered sims being allot slower, let me add this little observation. Guess what sim Spittoonie is on. sim1.agni.lindenlab.com. Yup, sim1! Yay!

So now my final note, why do I pay $200/mnth plus an initial setup fee of $980/USD for a/ this type of performance, b/ getting cycled to an ancient sim? Do you feel I'm justified with my annoyance? This keeps up, I seriously doubt Spittoonie can last much longer, or even for that matter ever be enjoyed by anyone.

And we all know that MrX Linden = head honcho. So this untruth comes from top. That's enlightening and really comforting isn't it. There's a thread in the technical issues forum that I participated in the other day about this as well. I can't see them admitting it. It opens up too many problems for their current tier charging plan admitting that not all sims are equal. I've seen it on my island, I've seen it in other sims. Seems that Linden Lab are the only people that don't see it.

And yes, you are 100% justified with your annoyance, as is everybody who owns land on the mainland who experiences this as well. Everybody.

You are certainly justified. FWIW, there is another town hall tomorrow, this one technical. There is a thread about it in announcements, your example should be hard for them to refute there, I would think.

Actually, the first servers run on a 2.4 ghz pentium 4, the new ones run on a 3.2 ghz pentium 4 with hyperthreading. Thats a 800 million operation a second difference, which is large enough a gap for me.

They've done a pretty good job of refuting this for many months now - just ask Luskwood. They could even further complicate things by changing some of the older sim numbers randomly to newer machines. Then the simple observation that old sim number = old machine wouldn't follow and make things muddier for everybody concerned. Not that they'd do that, would they?

If Philip Linden won't accept it (he won't, Trimda's MrX Linden is Philip), and they've stuck to this line now for a long time, then I wouldn't expect Cory to admit it tomorrow and I wouldn't expect them to make the situation any more obvious.

Yes, quite true. The mainland thou, they're reasoning does hold some truth in that having seen what a huge build right beside another sim has done. That was a part of the reason WHY I chose to go private island.

This just further shows that there is a clear dissimilarity in the back end hardware that makes the difference. Really, I'm really am worried for the next person who gets sim1. I'm actually half tempted to crash my sim just to hopefully get off of it!

What ikes me the most is the fact that me and Jack spent $980/USD to obtain this sim as a "setup" fee, and just to find out that it means squat. Either LL is charging outrageous setup fees, or it simply means that the acquisition of the new server is not quite for my use, but for everyone's use (the grid as a whole). At this point, I would rather use my "fun bucks" (L$) to go and buy land on the mainland from some land barron and my credit card wouldn't have seen a nice little charge popup on it.

Interesting you should mention purposefully crashing your sim, I brought that up in the other thread. It's against the TOS to do it on purpose on the mainland but would it be against the TOS for me or you to crash our own sims? I wonder. Certainly I can imagine more and more people contemplating this.

The $980 is really gaulling when you realise that you're not actually paying for the setup fee of particular hardware, isn't it. I like the idea that sims can pick up for an area if a box goes down, don't get me wrong, but there needs to be some truth and maybe a fresh look at how we're charged land tier fees, where a percentage of the fee alters down each month if you've been on an older sim with poorer performance. But things like that just bring me back to why I think Linden Lab are having difficulty being truthful about it.

I also have noticed this happening on my island sim. I have had three different "servers" since purchasing my island and each change has effected my SIM FPS. I am fortunate at the moment to be on the highest numbered server since purchase and my FPS is the highest it has been. I see no way they can deny that the servers are very different in their processing power. There is far to many reports of this. I have begun to take screenshots to have some facts to back up the claims.

I have posted about this in the technical forum and have also added it to the list of questions for the next town hall. I'm not sure we will actually get a straight forward answer but we can hope. I am also not happy with paying a large setup fee just to have the server used for my island be so random. I don't even know how to crash a sim but might consider learning if I ever ended up with the situation that Trimda is in.

I know I tend to ramble on and on. I appologize. But I spent a good deal of money (at least for me it was) to buy and island and have some control over the lag there. But these differences in Sim servers mean my efforts may be for nothing.

Thanks for listening,
Dain
Haven Island

Well, even if we put aside the sim number, being that it most probably is skewed, there is a clear performance difference. This box (sim1) is obviously either running in a severely degraded state, or infact, it is an older box. I hate to say it to the lindens but, you cannot assume that you can allocate more prims to a sim, and accept the evolution of new content in game, without expecting the older hardware to not become antiquated. We are continually introduced to new features and add-ons, of course the content will evolutionize over time. With this will come the requirements for more horse power or more limitations. As a result to the current denial, SL is slowly becoming less and less of a pleasurable experience, and more of a unplayable slideshow.

And something else, I remember when I started in SL over a year ago. SL was fast and sexy. It took allot to get bogged. Since then, I've upgraded my machine, new CPU, more ram, way better video card. I've tuned many of my settings down, just to ensure its not my system. As I fly around the map, I find, fast, slow, slow, fast slow, fast, slow. I even ask others if they're experiencing the same thing, and it always comes back positive. "Hey, are you lagging" "Yeah, bigtime." "Hmm, only 17 people in this sim. Thats odd". Hmm, maybe SL as a software platform has far outgrown its hardware?

Yay, we got 8 million, yay, lets all rot in poor performing sims, yay!

Oh, and Moopf, shhh, don't want to wake up the sleeping giant, just call him Philip L, oh wait, thats too obvious, instead, P Linden... Ahh crud.

I remember when the lag issues started getting really bad that there was a quote from a Linden saying that they were moving the half of the servers that were in the "bad data center" to the "good data center" (I can't remember which Linden said that on this forum I'm afraid), so that all the sims would be operating from this "good" one. They said things would get better after that. If anything, they got worse. So then they upgrade the asset server. Erm, no still not good. Then they change the way sims deal with the asset server in the last update. Erm, no still not good. Basically I'm not sure some times whether Linden Lab actually know what's going on or how to solve it, so expecting them to admit that there is a huge disparity between sims on top of this is like waiting to see a pig fly.

I wouldn't worry about waking the sleeping giant, after going to my first town hall (where he said that!) I actually realised that he tends to just speak in marketing talk - big ideas with little actual content, not actually dealing directly with the questions. I was really shocked at that, as I'd been led to believe that he wasn't like that.

You have every right to be annoyed. There is a long-standing principle of "warrant of merchantability" (introduction here) which says - broadly - that if someone sells you a hammer, it shouldn't be made out of cloth because you can't reasonably hammer things with cloth and thus a cloth hammer isn't really a hammer.

Now, of course, section 9.1 of the Terms of Service says:and it is all in capital letters so you know they mean it.

For decades, software companies have been declaring that this most fundamental principle of the marketplace doesn't apply to them. But their saying it doesn't make it so.

You've got more than a few ducats on the table, but probably 1/1000th of what it might take to challenge their disclaimer. Even Microsoft Word behaves reasonably like a word processor, 40 Sim FPS stretches the definition of what a "sim" is.

Bring up the sim stats with alt-1 and look for SIM CPU.

If your sim CPU is reported as 1.00 - you're on an OLD, CRAPPY server.

If your sim CPU is reported as 0.50 - you're on a NEW, high megahertz, AND HYPERTHREADED server which performs MUCH better.

In Indigo, under an old machine, we get 300-400 sim fps.
Under a new 133t hyperthreaded machine, we get 2000-2500 sim fps.

This is unscientific, but has been proven quite nicely by Chromal's sim fps monitoring site. Before and after upgrades, if we come up on a 1.00 box, its suddenly like playing in mud.

Here's a link to the site:

http://planet-zero.org/~chromal/simstats/index.html

Regards,

-Flip

I am speaking on behalf of both Princess Medici (owner of Amaterasu) and myself (owner of Kumori). I have read enough white paper and done enough investigating on this issue to know for a fact that this is happening and to deny would be a bald-faced lie. There may be very good reasons for it however, which is what I want to understand.

However...



This is the MOST important part of this. I don't care which Linden told you this frankly Trimda. This is not right. I can build a server to better specs than these without going over the price I payed for my island. Let's say about 800$ (I do have specs and RL prices if anyone wants to see them). So then we add on the intial software expense of 180$. Seems pricy for the software, but I wouldn't mind so much if I knew my other 800$ was being spent on a good server. This is obviously not the case. To be honest, the grid remaining on this system until they have all machines upgraded is not a bad idea. But to gouge PI owners for 1K USD and not give us the upgraded hardware is not right. We invested our money into LL so that it would one day be great. I think this is a simple way to return the favor. Additionally, I tried to get some type of proof of purchase or contract when we bought our islands but was denied. I'm sure for reasons such as this because now we as PI owners have no power. It's just a matter of whether or not the Linden's "feel" like helping us out. I'm sure it's a helluva lot easier to keep a rotating grid than to build 40 new servers! lol

FYI the difference from the last server to the current server in Kumori...

Before: 7000 fps
After: 3000 fps

Similar experience here Higbee. You wouldn't believe the wrangles I had to go through with Robin and Jeska in order to obtain an invoice for the setup and the monthly fees. And once I did get an invoice it had no invoice number on it and was not constructed as an invoice should be. I found that really suprising and now I have to ask for one every month but I've given up as they're not actually providing proper invoices.

How can you see (IW) what your current FPS rate is?

Thanks!

Rose isn't a private sim but fps there has gone way f=down in the past 3 weeks. Where before we were at 400-500fps now it fluctuates between 160-210. Nothing has changed in the sim in that time frame either.

I have noticed an increase in overall lag lately it seems.

Hit ALT-1 and it will bring up a stats screen. Then hit control-shift-M to close the minimap so you can see it.

Two things:

(1) As I stated earlier, some servers are DEFINITELY better than others. The two clear deliniations are reported by 1.00 CPU and 0.50 CPU... and I'm sure there's variation within.

(2) You'll always see a sim fps boost after a server reboot. If your sim fps is above 1700 or so, you can be damned sure you're on one of the new servers. When Indigo first was around before we built anything, we were getting 1800 sim fps with an empty sim under those older servers.

Regards,

-Flip

Seems most clubs I go to now are starting to pack. Are we having an influx of new players .. I don't know what it is exactly..but it seems these clubs I go to are starting to reach compacity and sometimes the lag is so bad people are re-logging constantly.

Flipper, are you sure you don't mean 18000 FPS? I know when my sim was first delivered, flat with just me and the teleport point in it, the FPS was at least 14000 FPS. That was on a brand new, very high number sim.

See, so here's the thing, wtf am I supposed to do. I have watched my sim performing like crud. I put in a request, but by the sounds of it, I'll end up back on one of these sims sometimes anyways. So, I guess all of us PI owners have more or less been relegated to "back of the line b**ch" status.

With a normal mainland sim, LL picks up the bill for setting it up, and slowly gets their cash back on it as people start moving in through auctions and tiers. Here, us PI owners are kind enough, and after this experience, stupid enough to pay this cost to LL immediately and furthermore, move into our new sim fee immediately (billed a month after move-in), whereas these mass blocks of new sims will sit for about a month to two monthes before getting filled. Infact, they even charge us extra to teraform our land for us, whereas, they obviously have spent countless hours on these new mainland sims. Does anyone agree that it sure sounds like there's someone laughing at PI owners in the background?

I guess I am the fool. Hell, I even make cool stuff for LL to show off to their 8 million dollar investors and future trade/business partners, and I even get to pay them for this "priveledge". And when all is said and done, I am simply lumped in with the rest of the grid. I don't even get my own dedicated resource for all of this. No, I get to use old, outdated, underperforming, antiquated servers that have been around since the dawn of SL. Yay, I just feel so freaking positive right now. Well, look forward to logging in tonight to see my sim unusable unless I have gotten lucky, but I know it will come back to this fun performance.

Eh, I dunno... Atleast I know I'm not the only one who feels outraged, angery or sad.

Trimda, I have to say that I don't really see the distinction between PIs and mainland. If anything people on the mainland have paid way more for their "setup" through auctions etc. than I did with my private island. So let's get away from seperating the islands from the mainland because, when you think about it, it's the same for everybody and it's an issue for everybody at some point or another. What needs to happen is for everybody to put pressure on for some truth on this matter, not seperate the argument between islands and mainland, as it then seperates any pressure we can bring to bear to get to the truth and get a resolution.

Actually, you are correct Moopf. This is an issue we all experience, and I find it incredible that there we have all witness this problem, yet the official overload keeps convincing most of the populous that everything is just fine. I'm just extremely fustrated with the fact that this issue renders the entire Spittoonie Island project useless. Who wants to ride a rollercoaster that goes slower than granny with her walker?

So, anyone wanna make bets when either someone from LL will admit theres an issue, or wake up to the reality that exists? I got L$10 on 6 weeks