Sim performance -- what should I know before buying land?

Ok since it is becoming clear that sims are very very different from one another, how can I tell which sims it's "safe" to buy land in? What debug info do I look for, because in the past I've bought land in really, really crappy sims that turn into pea soup when 5 people show up.

If there's a club nearby, don't buy land.

That will solve 99% of most folk's problems.

Also if its an old original sim, such as the sims in the middle of the grid, (ahern, dore, clementina, freelon, federal, stanford, etc.) more than likely it'll be older hardware.

The longer the sim has been around, currently, the more likely its to be older hardware.

A good way to test is to get a couple people to hang out in the sim with you for awhile (10 is probably a good number) and see if theres any impact thats noticable.

I say this because some sims, if its 1 person in the sim, its fine, only somewhat laggy, but get 2 or 3 people in the same sim, and BAM, instant lag.

That also rules out 99% of the land in SL

Is there any data I can look for in the debug screens that can help me figure out what kind of server the sim is running on?

you can't. sorry, but you can't. if you don't purchase the entire sim, you have absolutely no way of knowing, or controlling, what happens there.

hardware is the least of your concerns. it's your neighbors you have to worry about. if you want to be safe, group with people you can trust and somehow purchase a sims worth of land. otherwise, accept the fact that you're going to be lagged.

Actualy, doesn't About Second Life in Help show some information about what the current hardware is?

Also in the Alt-1 screen you can see some info about how the sim is running, but thats not always something to trust.

I can't find the reference to it, but someone had said something like if the CPU is 0.5 then it's a hyperthreading CPU, and if it's 1.0, then it's not?

That's the kind of stuff I'm looking for, FWIW.

IIRC, a CPU of 1 means an older, non-hyperthreaded CPU. A CPU of 0.5 means a newer, hyperthreaded CPU. A CPU of 0.25 means you're in a void sim that's sharing a server with four other sims.

All this is going to be largely irrelevant in the near future. The plan is to make sure that a sim will always be running on hardware at least as good as when it was first put on the grid. That means that the older the sim is, the worse the hardware is likely to be, at least until LL starts replacing old hardware.

check stats (alt+1) in the sim you are looking at buying land in... shoot for sims with over 1000 simfps when there are few to no people in the sim.

Its ok doing that, i am in koss and it was sim free and a few neighbours, and it was fine til just over a week ago. that too had over 1000fps and then wham its gone and now its completely crap and has bubbles of lag, i went over one persons land on the sim and i couldnt even move, took me forever to try and get out.

So buying new land and or with less people is no guarentee cause they soon fill up