Is Resource Management the Answer?

Disclaimer: I am not the technical geek type, so any glaring idiocies of techno-know are committed in innocence rather than a desire to give everyone a good laugh.
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IMO the number one problem in SL is lag. More so than bugs or idiots, because lag is almost always with us. Lag is the bane of events, parties, buildling, shopping and club sims. Lag especially strikes me as the one thing that will consistantly kill big planned builds, such as NeverLand, DarkLife, SimHorror... to mention the last 3 I visited. The lag present at at least 3/4ths of the time made these quite cool attractions crazy-frustrating to visit.

Someone brought up the Tragedy of the Commons in another thread recently. The idea that common resources will be exploited and exhausted because is it in the individuals self-interest to take as much out as possible. This appears to apply to sim resources with a vengence.

Owning your own sim and managing all the resources yourself is one answer... unless the reported "two island sims/one server" is correct... then, well it's probably a good thing you don't know who your paired sim is.

My assumption is that lag is caused by the things present in a sim that eat up processing power: objects, textures, scripts, and avatars (and all their attachments).

My proposed solution is that just like a sim have a maximum number of prims it can hold before you can't rez anymore, or things start getting returned, that sims have a maximum number of textures (total KB perhaps), number of scripts (calls to server?) and avatars that can be present in the sim... A number which when reached causes some cut-off mechanism.... such as Avatars not being able to be tped into the sim after it has reached capacity.

In addition to that... processing power above and beyond the set limit always be available to keep the sim mostly lag free as the normal state. The current model will always fail because people will push the system to the maximum.

I can already think of a couple of ways to screw this up for shared sims. Ignorant or Asshole Landowner A uses all 1024x1024 textures and scripts EVERYTHING.... but couldn't that be handled through parcel limits?

I guess what I'm really trying to suggest is that Linden Labs is going to have to do something with sim resource management to make lag the exception rather than the norm if they really want their stated goals of a metaverse to come to fruition.

Comments, Ideas, Have I missed this thread totally when it ran back in 2003?

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Are you talking about server, client, or network lag?

i guess we have to talk about server lag since the only solution to client lag is buying us all new awesome computers. not that there's anything wrong with that.......

i could see limits by parcel like we have now for prims. say you have such-and-such amount of land that means you can have X prims, Y textures and so much "attention" from the server for scripts or whatever.

maybe they could make the sims 128x128 meters on a single computer instead of 256x256 meters. bingo you got four times the server power right?

Not necessarily Zuzi. Having your PC setup the right or wrong way can make a difference of 1 or 2 orders of magnitude in performance.
Try going into your graphics card configuration program, setting everything to "Performance", then going into SL. Then try the same thing with "Quality". I cant notice much of an improvement with everything on, but the framerate is certainly one heck of a lot better in the former case.
Whether or not you have your motherboard's AGP chipset drivers installed can also make one hell of a difference, so can the amount of RAM you have(SL loves RAM!), and the amount of memory on your graphics card (even if its the same basic chip). So basically, you dont need to spend a lot of money to get a lot better performance.
People complain a lot about server performance, but the truth is that usually, by the time you managed to bog down a server, you have also thrown enough prims/avs at it to make your own computer go real slow.

I wish they'd license the second life server software! We are all wealthy enough to pay for our own 1U servers and bandwidth. They say they can't afford it, why does that mean we can't have it, give us the server software and let us all have islands, how cool...

I am making a stand here and now and I'm saying I'd gladly give linden labs the sum of three hundred Great British pounds as a purchase fee for enough second life server software to run my own sim, plus a 9.99 a month second life account fee. And I'd even foot the bill for my server AND it's bandwidth. All that money to be had...

300 pounds is like.. 450 USD? Right?

For the server software? You're joking, right?



Uh... what world are you living in, again?

Uh... what world are you living in, again?

Two methods that I can see:
1)Unused resource sharing with empty sims (while they are empty)
2)Resource usage limit per sim resident in a sim. Meaning: If you live in a quiet Sim and suddenly someone sets up a huge club with 200 rezzing laser lights that communicate over llListen each, with loads of quickly changing particle emitters and flashing textures that use llSetTexture instead of texture animation, they'll eat up their entire portion of the Sim resources... and stop there. Their own scripts will lag privatly - rather then dragging the entire sim and its objects into 32FPS.

Private time VS global time.

I believe some sort of resource management is the answer. It worked for prims. Technical issues aside, I don't see why it wouldn't work for other resources. The resentment toward clubs now is just like the resentment toward prim-heavy homes before 1.2.

I think it would be a better way to do business for LL. People want to know what they're buying.

Shoving is the answer.
Humans must be shoved.

I'm relatively certain that even two islands do (and they do) share one box, one island can not consume the resources of the other. They are given precisely half of the server's resources, and no more.



Ok.... if we're going to talk about server lag, then there are (probably) two kinds of server lag. Server processor lag, and server network lag.

Server processor lag is caused by things within the sim. The largest eaters of processing power are scripts and physics. Textures you choose or the shape of prims do not impact the sim in any appreciable way (except possibly when the grid is first brought up). Now, remember, avatars are physical objects, so they affect the sim greatly just by moving around. Also, any attachments they have do impact the sim slightly (since the attachments actually move around inside the sim) but not by much since they're phantom. Any scripts inside attachments will affect the sim just as much as an identical script in the sim that's not in an attachment.

Server network lag would be when there are dozens of avatars in a sim and it's having to pump out a ton of information to all of them all at once. The updates come less frequently then, which appears as lag. However, it takes a large number of avatars to even notice this sort of lag, if it can be noticed at all.



We already have the max prim limit (15,000), and that's split amongst parcels based on size, so that limit is rarely, if ever, reached any more.

Max textures... eh... maybe. Honestly, this sort of a change would be more for the client than the server, because once the server has sent the texture out, that's it. It's done. Sure, there's the whole "texture is in the server's cache" thing, but that doesn't affect performance in any way that I know of.

Max scripts... *sigh* I hate the idea, honestly, in a "resources wish to be free!" type of Virtual Adept mindset (yes, I know it's supposed to be information, not resources. Deal with it,) but I can see that eventually it's most likely going to be implimented. Whether it gets implimented before or after the "load level rendering" they're thinking about doing is beyond me. Processing cycles will most likely be split amongst parcels much like prims are. However, I still dislike the idea.

Max avatars we have, actually. There's a limit of something like 25, 30, or 35 avatars in a sim. Once that number is reached, no one else may enter through the borders. Unfortunately, LL's been unwilling to block teleports of any kind, so that limit is bypassed easily. It might be due to the fact that someone might have their home set to land in the sim, but quite honestly that's the ONLY time someone should be able to teleport into a full sim. I'm going to go add the teleport thing to the User Bug Queue.

Sort of. It depends on what type of lag you're talking about. Objects and textures (including avatars and attachments) must be downloaded to the client, which will require the sim to devote resources to accomplish this.

Scripts will impact a sim's performance, depending on what they do. However, not all scripts are equal. A script that does nothing until the object it's in is clicked is far different than a script that rezzes objects and performs sensor sweeps, though even that one may not impact the sim much at all.

Basically, the problem with this is that textures and objects aren't simply downloaded as soon as you enter a sim. They're proximity-based. Thus, if I have a structure with a large number of high-resolution textures on small objects inside it, you won't even notice from the other side of the sim.

As for teleporting in after a sim is full, the reason we're able to do this at all is to allow people to do what they want on their own land. If I own land in a sim with a club in it, why shouldn't I be allowed to have a couple friends over?

Also, as I mentioned above, scripts themselves aren't inherently "laggy", it's what some scripts do that can cause a problem. Further, they really only cause any problem when the sim is already taxed by being full of avatars, or complex physics.

If any further limitations by land are made, they MUST take into account all activity in that sim. If I want to do something while nobody else is there, who am I harming? Frankly, I don't see an easy way around it.

Benchmarks and IP checking will confirm that separate servers are being used for each island. Yes, "Sim CPU: 0.50" could mean that two sims are running on that particular server, but it could also be (and is) a side effect of using a hyperthreaded P4 with the Lindens' CPU detection code.

Either that, or the differences between a 3Ghz P4 and a 3.6Ghz P4 with hyperthreading are so great that one can comfortably run two sims on one CPU while still outperforming the earlier 3Ghz chip. Sorry, but I don't buy that. I'm going to have to go with "the Lindens probably aren't lying". The "filler" sims are definitely different sims running on the same hardware, but that can be easily demonstrated by the fact that they use the same IPs and by their performance relative to other sims.