Employ minimum 'return object' time.

For the past two or three weeks, I've been working out an object that I had HOPED would propagate throughout the entire grid, take a sampling of the SimFPS, and return it to an object for compilation and use.

I had HOPED that this would enable me to create a map displaying all the sims and their relative lag, letting people see how much strain was being put on their server compared to other servers.

More recently, I had hoped that with such an in game tool, I could form a group of scripters who would locate problem sims, fly in, and look around for problem objects that could be altered or fixed, relieving the sim of it's load and generally improving the life of all SL citizens.

I knew of the dangers. I knew that a badly coded object would propagate throughout the grid unchecked, creating an 'ants' style problem on a grid-wide scale. I coded in a single test througout the entire script that if any of the objects existed five minutes past the initial launch of the object, those objects would die.

That test worked.

I knew that some people would have their land set to return objects every minute. I didn't expect many, but I expected a few, so I coded the replication to trace back over it's original path, ensuring that objects remained in place to send their data.

That didn't work.

I didn't expect the sheer NUMBER of people who had their land set to return objects every minute. I also didn't expect that the system would work LIKE that. I expected that each object that didn't belong had one minute of time to perform it's functions. Not that every minute on the minute objects would be returned.

I didn't expect 81 of my objects to be returned.

I expected my objects to be able to at least propogate througout half the grid or more in five minutes.

I got thirteen sims. Thirteen sims, out of two hundred and fifty.

Please. PLEASE. I know this has been talked about before in the past. Can we PLEASE have a lower limit on how quickly objects can be 'returned' from another person's land? My objects aren't intrusive. They're phantom, and once they're working completely, they were going to be invisible too. And small. And only present for a minute or two every hour.

If someone wants their land clear, an extra few minutes isn't going to kill them. A limit of three minutes would be little different than one minute.

And if we can't have a lower limit, can LL PLEASE fix it so that the time an object can be present is ACTUALLY one minute rather than "a minute or less"? Having the cleanup cycle every minute, cleaning up objects that have even only been there for a second or two is a bug!

How much of that land was one-minute return, and how much was full parcels? I did some experiments on five-minute return land, and no prim was ever returned before being in-world for at least five minutes. The median time until return was around 350 seconds.

Objects on over-full parcels, on the other hand, are returned right quick. Typical time until return is far less than a minute.

That said, I'd support a minimum auto-return time somewhere in the five-to-fifteen minute range.

I'm not entirely sure, as during the time I was spending cleaning out my Lost and Found folder, I had enough "Blah is online" messages to clear my history (which I seem to remember at one time being client-session long, but now seems to be limited to just a few lines).

That said, I do recall some objects being returned at locations like 168,128, and since all my objects were programmed to head to 128,128 at 50m per second, they couldn't have been on the parcels for very long. More than three seconds, to be exact.

One parcel was even set to 600 minutes. Yes, that's right. 600 minutes. That's ten hours. And my object just happened to cross into the parcel at the particular time for an object cleanup. (Unless there's a bug that 'queues' cleanups. Which wouldn't surprise me.) I checked the parcel. It's visually clear, both on the map and on the ground. I didn't right click and check about land, but it LOOKS empty.

I take you at your word that your intentions are to be SL-helpful, but the old coot in me is a cynic and surfaces easily.

So, why should I - or anyone else - second this?

By allowing you to rez or move an object onto or above my land, even for such a benign purpose as you describe, you are taking up sim resources that I pay for. Why should I subsidize this?

It's not a large step from what you are "doing" to what the forums slammed Chance Small from doing.. just a step in a different direction.

I definitely DO NOT second this idea .... convince me that I am wrong/misguided (probably very easy in comparison).

Molecular,
If you have land, or a friend with land, in a sim I'd place a scrubbie there. Scrubbies do a nightly (well 00:00:01am) email routine with the previous day's polls results. Emails a list so it's possible to add more people that would like specific sim info.

So far I only have one running, in Blue. But I want to, and would be happy to, have more Scrubbies in the world (one per sim). IM me in game if you want.

(btw the scrubbie report in my last reply to the $10prim thread is an example of the emailed info, the other scrubbie spews were from in-game reports).

Bos

Who's Chance Small?

As far as why you should endorse this, half of what I've posted is a plea to fix a bug. Bugs should always be fixed.

As far as sim resources, what's one prim that waits for a timer to go off before disappearing and dying? Hell, later on today, I'm going to be trying a trick that may result in uncontrolled replication for about five minutes, but may result in the only 'drain' on your precious 'resources' to be script time, and not even the presence of a countable prim. In return, there would be a chance that others might be willing to help those with laggy sims to improve their sim's performance.

Beyond land scanning potential, which should be out by the next build, I don't see any potential harm this sort of thing can do beyond what's always been there (ants problems), and a decent coder will avoid out of control replication.

On top of that, the half of my proposal which DOESN'T read like a bug report merely suggests increasing the guaranteed time an object can be present by a mere 60-120 seconds. That's all. How is -that- too much time? It'll still prevent someone from putting objects on your land permanently. It'll still keep the landscanners away. What other objections do you have?



That's one prim that's always present, right? That's too much to ask, in my opinion. I was trying to design a system that -just barely- put any strain on any of the sims. As little as absolutely possible.

Putting out 250 of these "scrubbies", just for the mainland sims, requires negotiating for prim rights with 250 different people, maintaining a network of 250 different objects in different locations, almost guarantees having some sims not be updated at any one time (when objects are removed/returned) providing an inaccurate display of data, and is an all around general headache.

On top of that, every time LL adds in more sims, not only do you have to wait for people to actually OWN those plots of land, but you have to go in and then negotiate with those people as well. All the while maintaining the network you already have layed out.

On top of THAT, it'll be impossible to poll Linden owned land, and in my experience of interactions with Lindens on these boards, they're generally not willing to add any sort of scripted object permanently to lands like the starter area. Hell, they haven't even MAINTAINED their OWN objects in the starter area. The place looks like someone just cut it up and tossed chunks elsewhere. The shooting gallery was moved, but was the pathway to it ever extended out there? No. The balloon tour area is now an empty lot. Have they removed the lot or added something else? No. When was the last time they actually updated the information with something relevant to today's times? No, I don't believe the Lindens would actually let me place a permanent polling object on their land.

Which is why a temporary object that polls the entire grid is the only option.

I can see your point about your script being for good purpose, personaly I keep my land set to clear once a day and that usualy keeps stray objects to low number, a min 5-15 clean up timer isn't going to do much heck it might even make the sim faster since it has to run less object checks(a small task but every little bit helps) . Now on the down side the longer return time could be used to force other more harmful objects in(we had someone trying to set up a sim to sim teleporter system over some land a few days ago without telling anyone)but even then, five minutes, boom it's clear agian, everyone is happy, it happens agian, same thing five minutes and everything is cleared up.

Here's something to test...

Does the Temp onRez flag override a plot's auto-return timer? If so, setting your objects to Temp woudl give you the 5 mins you need, regardless.

But then agian, the plots may win.

Uh I don't plan to put out 250 scrubbies. One per sim, selectively. So far I've selected no one else to run one, other than offering you one. They're not huge burdens. Single phantom prim. So far only one exists, and I'm in no rush to populate the world with a grid of them. I just figured you might want one for your sim. One-shot grid polling isn't going to show you diddly. You get one (or a few minutes) of info. No accuracy in that. If you want to investigate sim performances, then you need constant, steady polling. Which means you'd have to send out your grid constantly -- which means a lot more burden, which apparently is your concern.
I run 2sec polls, which should be low burden, capturing a few vars and doing some simple math. Much of the math is done at 00:00:01am, even so it's simple and.

I tried that several hours ago. I didn't get a single returned object.

I also didn't get a single email with information, which means that my intial 'seed' didn't even get the chance to last longer than 45 seconds. Since I don't recall the plot the initial seed is deployed to as being 'return objects', Temp is too temporary.



Exactly. The plan was to send out a pulse of these objects once every hour or two hours, and take a single FPS snapshot at each time. That should give me 24 samples for a day. I could use that to get averages for that, week, month, things of that nature.

Vehicles. The return timer for vehicles starts as soon as you drive onto the land. If you get off the vehicle, it'll be returned as soon as the timer runs out. This means that if I drive by someone's build and get off to look closer at it, I run the risk of my vehicle being returned within seconds if they've got a one-minute return timer.

Very annoying, and it usually means I don't stick around long enough for dwell to start accumulating.

I can understand why you'd want to use such limited polling (saving resources/being sim-friendly), yet that would be highly inaccurate. Polling once an hour, or once every two hours wouldn't lead to any information worth much. 24 (or 12!) polls out of 86400 seconds (one day) isn't worth the effort of collecting said data. At one-hour polls you're basically using "1-second" of data to "average" 3600 seconds that the sim ran. I'd wager the 3599 other seconds would probably end up not agreeing with your findings.

You need constant polling, and small divisions to the data collected (such as my break-down of simFPS "blocks" to show how often the sim ran at 1-50fps, 51-100fps, etc. Still, even my data falls short. I don't show if the 1-50fps time was contiguous, or just random.. but at least it's an indicator, especially if percentages are high at a specific fps level.

I'm going to tinker with Scrubbie over the weekend, attempting to up the accuracy but lower the sim burden while it's running (which is constantly). The offer of using a scrubbie still stands if you are interested, but it's definitely not grid-wide (which seems to be what you're after).


Anywho I'm ranting on, my normal 4am posting routine :). SL just went down, so I can't monkey around.

Bos

Quite honestly, regardless of your intentions, keep your land scanners off of my land, because the Return feature is there to keep people from placing -unwanted- -unwarranted- objects from being on our land. You're asking for leway to allow your scanning objects to be on the land of other's. It's just not right, dude. And I think peoples' new 'scanner frenzy' is putting off a lot of people--you really need to ask for permission before getting into this kind of thing, because, like I said, it's just not right to be putting your scanners on other people's land.

This has nothing to do with land scanners, if you read the posts you'd understand that.

This is about sim performance, and Mole's attempt to poll the grid (world) being thwarted by auto-return land.

breath... deep... there you go!

Bos

Land scanners, FPS scanners, nosebleed scanners it's all the same. Don't put things on other people's land without explicit permission.

While you're tinkering, why don't you go ahead and try to prove your theory? Make several of these... "scrubbies"... and make them have different polling times.

I was assuming that the generally accepted practice of statistics would get me a similar average when compared to constant data, but if you feel otherwise, and you've got the detailed polling device, show me that statistical polling doesn't work.

It might show that you could improve sim load just by polling less often.



Fine. I'll stop pushing for a feature that has been asked for before (and I'm surprised at how much hostility my SMALLER request was met with compared to the previous thread), and just try to code my objects to propagate ad infinitum for ten minutes. At least I'll be able to complete my project.

et. al.
reading & comprehension > skimming & assumptions.



Good point/idea Mole. I'll hopefully have something going tomorrow, as I'm lazy today.

Exactly why I set my land to auto-return objects immediately if not sooner.... you are going to do what you want to do with your stuff on my land using my resources that I paid for with my tier fees... you are going to get a free piggyback ride on my dime?

Well, thank you very much for justifying my actions and point of view about my land.

Had you asked me... I might have considered it. Now I will just lump your request in with the other inconsiderate SOBs here who think their sh** don't stink and justify their actions, desires and reasoning as "better than anyone else's, because.. well, it is!"

Screw that.

You better believe it. I'll find ways around the bloody return timer. The concept of a 'bigger picture' always seems to escape people.



I did.

Okay I had a longer rant here but no , most people are going to miss the big picture on this thing, most people don't know that something similar most likely exists in their sim right now that people use to poll sim stats dynamicly, something that most likely takes um more of people's precious resources then your script would but they'll still fiercely refuse to let you use a script that goes on their land, that would just be voliation, then agian I'm sure some people would ban vehicles flying over their land if they could because oh they cause lag...EVERYTHING CAUSES LAG, to an extent, if there was no lag SL would be a bunch of black with 300+ client FPS or however a black texture will fill through your video card...

I endorse this feature suggestion wholeheartedly.

I will be working on a system that monitors the grid looking for new simulators. Since LL hasn't given us something like llGetRegionCornerByName(), I think its a pretty worthwhile cause. A handful of unobtrusive, phantom objects would roam the world, looking for new simulators with llEdgeOfWorld(). This will generate NO lag whatsoever, but will still be thwarted by the auto-return timers.

It will be useful for projects that require a complete map of the grid, such as vehicles with autopilot.

Introducing a minimum cap on the autoreturn of 5 minutes would satasfy me.

==Chris

I tried to build a fleet of self-navigating vehicles for people to use, but I quickly found out that it wasn't practical. In one test, I sent 12 vehicles, 1 every 30 seconds, on a pre-programmed route from Abbotts to Luna and back. All of them were deleted over Linden land that had a 1 minute auto-return.

It really is a shame that we can't have pilotless vehicles, like taxis and automated tours.

*grins* My project would find the simulators too. Same amount of lag and everything.

You know, I'm beginning to suspect that somehow, moving, scripted, rezzed by scripted objects have 1/10th the 'timer' that normal objects do, which is why this is causing so many problems. And why my objects were being deleted mere seconds after moving into a plot.

This would also explain why I'm losing firebirds at such an astonishing rate in Seacliff: I'm having 250-300 of them returned to me each day.