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

Well, I wouldn't be surprised if they are working on a strategy to deal with this and will announce it as pending in a new release's prerelease notes. Perhaps we'll hear about it as soon as Cory's townhall. But, from a PR standpoint, it's probably better to announce an improvement than acknowledge a problem, if you catch my drift. This is an issue that will be cast into sharper relief as time passes; at some point, a way of softening the edges will need to be implemented.

I wonder if it could be handled with a sim heirachy based major hardware classes, e.g. 1 to n, with each successive number denoting an effectively 'faster' tier of hardware. Void and noscript sims might get the lowest tiers, high-dwell sims might get the highest, and private islands get something that reflects the investment their owners have made. It would be tantamount to taking the single pool of available sims and dividing it programmatically into several smaller pools. It may be one of the simplest solutions that could possibly work.

Simply shocking!!!! Glad i don't own a PI but that's not the point. All PI owners should refuse to pay until something is done!!! Or something like that.... Lindens, it wasn't my idea... please don't ban me....

Seriously (not that the last bit wasn't(or was it?)), this has to stop. Knowing that, i'd much rather buy my own server and somehow connect it to the bridge...

Eh, true, its better PR, but as well, people become very jaded over time. The funny thing thou is that they have admited to many problems in the past, and have not been afraid to indicate them as known issues. The only thing I can think of is either an out-right refusal to perform any upgrades (don't want to allocate the budget to do so), lack of oversight and surveiance over the grid or just plain avoidance. I would hope its a PR thing, but the thought of that scares me as LL has for the most part been very forthcoming and honest about things.



Yes, thats an awesome suggestion. QoS for sims. I'd even remove the PI section of it and just say its globally that way. Look at how the sims are being used, and the average loads being drawn by each. Infact, this would stimulate the growth of simulators such as mine, and would greatly releive the performance issues experienced by high-dwell sims making for a much better SL experience. Good suggestion Chromal!

Ultimately thou, they do need to identify these under-performers too, and rectify the issues. I fear that someone else will soon receive this sim from me and will experience the same dread as I have for the past day. The investment of time and money that we as players place into SL greatly mandates this, as we spend incredible amounts of resources and ultimately, will either spur more growth and creativity, or slowly demolish the great vision that LL has for SL and we as players have for SL as well.

For what it's worth, I asked about this issue a month ago, regarding private sims. Here is the answer I received from an LL "higher-up":

Sims have 512MB of RAM and 40GB of disk. CPUs are 2.26Ghz P4, 2.4Ghz P4, 2.8Ghz P4, and Opteron 242. We make no guarantees about which sort of machine an individual sim runs on, and they do move around. However, the majority of our equipment is of the faster varieties, and this ratio is improving as we add new servers.

I dont like this idea at all. I purposely dont have clubs or casinos, I dont have a high traffic sim. Although I have seen FPS drop and rise by the thousands due to server switches, I dont have lag either. The people who work and play on my sim like it without clubs or casinos or lag. NOTE: This is definitly not a statement against clubs or casinos.

If I pay the same for my tiny dwell sim as the humongus dwell club\casino owner sim pays, why should I get a lower place on the server sim list? What if I want to expand? I would be stuck at the limit of my placement, which means I would have a nice laggy sim. So basically I will be screwed out of the ability to grow, expand, or change. This is almost similar to taxes in the ability to kill creativity and growth.

Ok so go walk into a car dealership and pay the same money as the guy next to you. You get a used car with dents and billowing black smoke coming out of the tail pipe when you go over 40. The guy next to you gets a brand new shiny car, 0 to 60 in 5 secs.., leather seats, surround sound system...etc. Why? Because you drive 10 miles to work and he drives 50. Still sound fair?



fen-

I sympathise with the plight of moving to an older hamster-driven server. But a few opinions from a non-PI owner (who is still mulling such a purchase).

Yes, the PI initial setup fee does suggest new hardware purchase. Course as Moopf pointed out, the purchase costs are even higher on the mainland. But, PI's can't resell land (not in world anyway with Linden protections), so that whole relative value issue can be a bit muddy.

But let's say each PI got a server, and it stayed with them. Depending on the hardware upgrade path, the older PI's would then begin to lag all the other sims after leading them initially. I'm not sure that's a bargain you would want. Now it sounds great, but if objects continue to evolve the best current sims may not handle SL well in 12 months, then you would be SOL.

So, I think the sim rotation still makes sense, some amount of metering might make sense for void sims or certain low dwell Linden sims (but not for low dwell private land, see Feniks post). But right now you are taking a performance penalty for the likely potential of later performance gains (as they upgrade further). Given the extent of the current performance penalty though, it is damn harsh and unacceptable.

Not sure as to the middle road. An obvious solution would be to spend some of that new cash and keep servers on a tight upgrade schedule so that the best does not massively outclass the worst.

ETA: Not judging the rant, I would be the same way. Just not sure as to the ideal long-term solution.

Well, I'm a little confused by what you're saying. If you've experienced your sim at a variety of FPSes and don't have any concerns about lag, you would continue to not have concerns about lag, but would also be protected against getting stuck with the slowest tier(s) of sims because yours wasn't a void or empty sim. You would be as free to expand as you are today. Why would you be stuck anywhere? Why couldn't you expand or change? I don't understand.


I'm not quite sure I follow your metaphor. A better analogy would be:

You drive to work on state route 123, and your neighbor drives to work on route 456. Relatively few people use route 123, so your drive to work each morning is fast and delay-free. Your unfortunate neighbor drives on route 456, which passes near a large factory that many commuters are trying to drive to at once for their morning shifts. During rush hour, for miles around the factory, each intersection along route 456 is backed up and there are even the occasional fender benders from stop-and-go traffic to slow things down further. The congestion even spreads to neighboring streets. Folks unfortunate enough to be living near the route complain of the noise of the honking horns and exhaust from the massed idling cars. The state department of transportation only has enough funding to improve a few roads this year, and they certainly don't want to spend money on the roads that are doing well. They look at routes 123 and 456 and decide to add a lane to 456 because it will positively impact the most commuters. Your drive is unaffected, and your neighbor's drive is almost as fast as yours now, or at least a lot better than it used to be. How is this unfair?

This is a definate problem that I hope Cory can address tommorow. LL needs to make all those old servers void sims. Lag and sim performance has gone down the tubes. Everyone w/ concerns on this should IM Haney to ask these questions at the town hall.

I think one thing that everybody has to understand, including us ranting , is that keeping all the hardware up to similar specifications is not feasible in the long term. It may be a short term feasible option but as the grid grows and grows the costs grow and grow as well. We have to accept that there will be performance differences.

Sim rotation is also a very good idea and one of the real steps to providing a scaleable and fault tolerant system as much as anything. However, if we accept that there will be performance differences because of the the lack of feasibility of upgrading hardware en-mass or within tight specifications, then some way to accomodate those differences needs to be made.

That is why, on the thread in technical issues regarding Luskwood, I suggested that a percentage of the land tier is given over to a calculation that charges you less if you were on sims that weren't as up to date. For me, this would mitigate the problem in a way that seems to be the only option if you accept that large performance differences are going to be the norm. If you experience poor performance, you are being charged accordingly. It accepts the problem exists and always exists, and charges the customers accordingly.

Charging everybody the same, regardless of the performance they are seeing, is not a long term option here as these problems will get worse over time and disenfranchise the community. Accepting it and working with it, is a long term option.

I don't expect this though, and even if it did happen, I would suggest that it would only be introduced with a price rise in land tiers. Having said that, this $8million might be a way to absorb a little contraction in earnings by the introduction of that, in order for the good of the community and for the good of the long term feasibility of the expansion and maintenance plans of Linden Lab.

I've noticed something similar on the mainland in Tan. I pay close attention to the sim FPS when building and for quite a long time it was decent (300-400 +) but not too long ago, it dropped suddenly to < 100fps

Now it is possible that some of the other builds may have caused it but I doubt it. There has seemingly been a reduction in builds and not too much new stuff other than a couple of scripted trinkets here and there .. but nothing very complex that could be responsible for bringing sim FPS down.

Then again, its not a private island so who knows? Maybe there is a new build that uses more resources than expected or maybe some of the scripted trinkets are in fact not written very well and are more resource consuming than I thought. I kinda doubt it though.

Tan, may I remind everyone, is a fairly old sim so .. maybe its time for me to pull out the tin foil and make a hat. Might be a global thingy of some sort.

Then again, maybe not.

I do wish I knew what was causing it though

-AP

Tan may have been around for a long time, but the hardware it has been running on recently and the hardware it is now running on may be different ages. That's what's happening now - if Tan crashed or rebooted you couldn't guarantee that it would come back up on the same hardware - it may come up on a brand new box or it may come up on the oldest box on the grid.

It's kind of luck of the draw.

Ahhh that makes sense. Might explain a few things :/

Thanks Moopf!

-AP

I am having this same problem... and I have been waiting , 11 days now, if they do not fix this soon they will be losing $600 a month from my direction... I am fed up.

omg to many words...
Its unfair because:
a) I work at keeping the lag away, it just doesnt happen.
b) I am not driving on federally funded streets, I am personally PAYING for my sim, along with all the other land owners, it should be no less than the best performance. This is true across the board, everyone who is paying for land should get the same and equal service.

The problem here is the lag, it should be dealt with, not compensations made for it.

Anyone here who wants to pay for a sim, or any amount of land, and wants a lower quality/performance parcel, determined what you build compared to the other guy's dwell, please raise your hand.

fen-

***EDIT 12/29/04 Please see my latest post on this subject in another thread
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Certainly NOT to disagree with your main point, NO ONE should have to deal with this, but if I may put it another way Fenicks...

Back when the private islands began, my wife and I dropped them 2K USD for our islands. THE ONLY REASON we left was to to leave the LAG of the main grid; there was also "potential" for special tools, but we didn't have them for the first 5 months of service. Until there were 30 some PIs, it did exactly this. However over the last 3 months I have seen the performance in ALL PIs plummet. If someone pays 2K USD in a auction for a plot of land, they have made that choice of ther own accord. It would make more sense to me to just get private island if you are spending that much, but people don't want to pay the 200 USD per month to upkeep it. Well I do,and of course I expect atleast a little customer service. However, I still believe we are talking about Apples and Oranges.

Examples:
A) I have to market my sim to get people to even come to it because it isn't on the grid, whereas a mainland plot is trafficked due to normal SL use
B) I cannot resell my island for any reasonable return whereas a mainland plot is resellable at near equal cost to it's original purcase depending on the market
C)We cannot be helped tier-wise and we cannot be group owned in a real way

These are 3 MASSIVE differences between the two, and frankly the reasoning behind my statements. I DO agree that everyone should be on upgraded servers. I DO agree that VOID sims and Linden owned sims should be on the older end of the spectrum if there must be some. However, I DO believe that the PIs should be addressed first. I appreciate that going from 60 fps to 40 is horrible when it's for no reason, but dropping up to 4000 fps at a time is just outright ridiculous.

*I'm sure I'll get flamed for this post, so flame away...

Add Mauve to the lag list. Log into my home see a nice 500-700, 30 seconds later it dropped to 11-21. I have reported this to lindens 5+times. Answer is "I will report it to grid monkeys" or I was there and nothings wrong"while 3 of us together had sim fps of 21-71) (The above isnt always constant but happens enough you cant get any work done.

I have got to the point I just don't go home anymore. If I do its a fast trip to check that my land dont have extra prims.

Crimson
Crimson's Land of Lag, Mauve
Read the signs