We are the lag...

We are the children...
We are the ones who make a laggy game,
So let's start trimming.
There's a choice we're making
We're making our own lag
It's true we'll make a better game,
Just you and me.

This post is intended as a serious discussion of what causes lag.
You do.
You have lag? Problems crossing sims?
Don't blame LL. Hardware has its limits.
You can't seriously expect to teleport properly or cross a sim border if you're wearing 1000 prims of attachments! Do you have any idea how much data that is?
Also, for the love of god, stop using pose balls everywhere.
Stop using crap that takes voice commands.
If you're not even online, why dont you put your toys away?
I'm sure the 30 seconds you'll spend re-rezzing your sex box won't make your boyfriend lose his erection.

Why not blame Linden Labs? If you cant actually manage to cross a sim wearing 1000 prims then it shouldnt be POSSIBLE to even attempt it now should it.

Stop blaming the players for the freedoms and f**k ups that Linden Labs allow.

I can't cross a sim border wearing 11 attachments... but then, Threemile WAS down while I was trying to get into it...

I do however, always find, flying into Zazi, even with NO attachments on, I start ghosting as I cross over...

OH THE JOY OF RELOGS!!!!!

I have exactly the same problem flying to Zazi, I think it's on the border of Batak (?), everything ALWAYS falls off and it's relog time !

Yeah, I have a card called "Lag Begins At Home".

But please, don't give me that crap about attachments. I don't have any. And I still have trouble on the sim seams. When their game is working better, I don't have trouble. When it is working worse, I do.

I do agree with your sentiment tho, Egg. I think we need to start with a GIANT TEXTURE PURGATION. The trillions of textures on LL servers are really a burden.

I'm going to have a nightly sacrifice now of textures at the temple. I think we need to work to reduce Philip's burdens.

Omg Eggy LOL thanks

Eggy, I have nothing against you but I am suggesting you get a new spokesperson. Speaking down to others and calling them children isnt the way to go if you are serious about getting something done. Also this is the opposite position you've taken when defending your scripting friends in the past. When you defend them you speak of their freedom to do what they want, when you speak of club go'ers you make demands. You cant have it both ways.

I love my beautiful linux server. It's powerful, graceful, peaceful, and everything I could dream of. I used to do everything on it, including play a game that I won't name. I ran the server software on my server and had great fun hosting to all my friends.

Of course on occasion the server software for that game crashed, it wasn't professionally written. But I didn't worry about how well written that was. Over time, the free memory on the server started to dip more and more. After a reboot the server would be so full of memory again. These days I don't play that game, I stick to Apache, MySQL and other software that is well tried and tested. And my server has much more memory for it.

Here we are, the point of all this. That guy is right, we can't just throw more fixes and hardware at the problem. OK Linden Labs should produce reliable code, but some part of it must be down to the enormous load we place on LL with all the stuff we don't need. SL is definitely good, but it can improve. And so can our use of the resource we have before us.

So maybe if we all just stand still, in one spot, naked, hairless and scriptless - there will be no lag!
Won't that be fun!

Users have the same attitude about Second Life that they do every other aspect of computing. I'm not making fun below. These are things I honestly hear from people.

Free space on the hard drive is there to store data. No, the software needs quite a bit of hard drive space these days just to function properly, not to mention well.

If there's any space on my taskbar, I can run more programs right?

I'm paying my webhost for this capacity and not using it all. Better add hundreds of graphics and a few dozen scripts to the site to get my money's worth. Never mind that it'll take people with broadband ten minutes to download my homepage. They have a bunch of other stuff running on their taskbar to do right?

Oh I have a spare prim allotment. By golly I'm gonna rez it. And to make it pretty, I'll twist and hollow and add a different rotating texture to each face. Now, I don't want it to just sit there and I need a visitor counter because it's paramount that I know every avs name that comes here when I'm sleeping. Oh and...

It's a deeply seated attitude that's not at all easy for them to change. Even when a person is convinced that what you're telling them is true, they're very likely not going to put away those hundred prim chairs or shoes. Even when it's hurting them more than anyone else, they seem determined to display a thousand textures on their parcel and complain to LL that the software is somehow dragging down their local frame rate.

What can we do? Educate. That's all we can do.

Having parcel size determine the timeslice a sim gives would be a good start.

I think it's a process of half and half. We do have more users now than ever before, and really we're just dealing with so much MORE data. We need the systems to be upgraded to handle the new loads, and maybe we need a rethink on how data is actually dealt with. I'm not a tech expert on this.

It is the job of the computer systems to meet our needs, but think: if we are overly tight with resources meeting our needs will be easy. If we live happy meeting our needs will be a challenge, and if we live fat and lazy meeting our needs will eventually be damn near impossible.

members are going to inevitably push the envelope of what can be accomplished within SL without causing excessive lag. When performance improves, the envelope will be pushed out further.

This is a creative environment, where all content is user generated. People don't want right-angle structures and naked hairless avs.

Creators have a right to try to express their vision, AND a responsibility not to push things too far that it severely curtails the playing experience of fellow players. Where the line of "severly curtail" lands would be the subject of hot debate.

There is a balance, as in all things.

Uh, Chris, it's a song, mmkay, I wasn't calling anyone "children". Where were you in 1985?
And I need to get a new spokesperson? Like I'm some kind of business or something? Eggy is just one man. Widdle ole me. Never hurt a fly, unless you think rants kill kittens.
Developers should have the freedom to do whatever they want, of course. But scripters usually don't cause any lag because they're usually frugal little hermits and they know what they're doing.
It's the wacky TSO refugees who need to have 500-prim kitchens with voice-activated appliances, couches with poseballs, beds with sex animations, totalling 50 listeners, plus fancy timers and sensors and heaps of crap. Not to mention 1024x1024 textures for each of their 50 portraits resting on their fancy animated, voice-activated fireplace.
And it's also those exact same people who complain about lag and think it's a "bug" that LL should "fix", when THEY are the walking lag bombs.
But obviously I cannot point my finger solely at consumers. Developers often think, it's JUST ONE listener, or JUST ONE timer, or JUST ONE sensor. And they think they are very clever, using their little link messages to avoid LSL delays and do stuff in parallel, forgetting the reason why the delays were put in place to begin with.
I got news for you, bubba. That little wad of money you so enjoy GOMing every week, well, it means your JUST ONE is constantly growing, and spreading all over the grid, turning into massive amounts of lag. As a professional you have the responsibility of making your code as resource-friendly as humanly possible. Why use an open listener when you can have a touch-activated llDialog, where the listener would only exist for 5 seconds at a time? Why use a 0.2 second, 96m-range llSensorRepeat for your "security system" when you could use an llVolumeDetect on your doors or something.
Yes, education is a good thing, but no one wants to teach classes.
You can have 9 textures on a single prim. Many people, myself included, have suggested that textures should be limited according to your parcel size, and there should be a limit to how many attachments you can wear.
It gets to the point where I lag in sight of some people (who shall remain nameless), and turning away from them improves my fps by an order of magnitude.
The problem is that people would scream bloody murder if you forcibly took away their precious sex balls. We need more INFORMATION AWARENESS. People can trim their lag down to acceptable levels. We need a little dialog box that tells us, you are running X listening scripts and X sensors. Or maybe you could have parcel-specific millisecond counts and percentages for Run Tasks and Run Physics. Even a raw count of how many scripts and textures you have on your parcel would be beneficial.
You want self-government, well, you can start by showing that you are able to govern yourself and then we'll talk about larger-scale government systems.

Solution: Make everyone birds by default and you won't have to suffer through my exhaustive avatars. ^_^

I got rid of over half my textures in my inventory, this still leaves me with plenty. I think we need to make it a habit to regularly go through our inventories and throw out the stuff we don't use.

Ugh. To clean out my inventory. This is gonna be a project. Better order pizza. For a week.

I know its a song. But your 'speaking down' to people wasnt limited to it, its all over your post. Which was my point, your tone, not the literal words.

Again, my only point there again on your approach. And whats this about you hurting people? Not sure what thats about, I certainly never suggested you would.

Not sure if you are saying that with sarcasim so I'll refrain from commenting on it.

I guess you are speaking to 'bubba' in general. Reguardless, no one is questioning the points you are making. I am only suggesting is that you drop the labels and apply your comments to everyone.

Yup. Think of the history of software in general. Do programmers work as tightly now as they used to? Hell no.

This is why we have prices and markets, in order to allocate scarce resources. It's time to put a price on resources, as was done with land-prims.

Maybe an attachment tier would work. Variable texture upload cost might be good too. $L10/MB maybe?

This would be one of the reasons why the lindens are looking at limiting inventories...

LF

Limiting inventory size is a good idea.

Another idea I had (that could be used along side Lordfly's idea) is to make the initial holding directories for new items temporary and automatically deleted within a set amount of time.

Example, say Lordfly passes me a shirt. That shirt automatically goes into my temporary shirt directory where it will sit for some amount of time (say, 2 days). If by that time I have not found a place for it in my directory structure it will be deleted.

This wont stop dedicicated packrats from packing, but it WILL stop lazy people from letting their inventories get out of hand from neglect. If you care enough about an Item, you will take the time to file it. If not, it's gone.

Even making this temp idea optional could help reduce inventory sizes (I know I would leave it turned on )

Just an idea.

Something else that i think will help players reduce their inventory is Snapzilla on SLuniverse.com. I love taking LOTS of pictures, and having a place to store them (Snapzilla) other than my inventory is great.

For those who don't know about it:

1. Take a snapshot
2. In the snapshot window, send the shot to [email]pics@sluniverse.com[/email] (in the email address box)
3. go to sluniverse.com
4. Use the pull down menu to find your name, select your name, and voila! Your pics are there.


Cristiano isn't paying me to type this by the way. I just thinks its very useful and will help my bloated snapshot folder.

Well..if I could go back in time a year, then make it a habit, that would be great. But now my inventory has become a living creature that devours all within it's path. It is a nightmare and beyond the scope of mere humans to destroy.

I can only pray that an act of god will destroy my portion of an asset server and I will be reborn, naked into the world...

lol... now i have the sudden urge to make everything on my property rez when someone comes within sensor range... and die when nobodies been there for 5 minutes. This could be impressive.

Limiting inventory might be a small problem if people resist buying things because their inventory is full.