Lag: Live and let live.

A rant I know but I'm interested to know the feelings of others ...

<begin rant>

There is a growing trend for event organisers and club owners to ask attendees to remove scripted attachments. Sometimes this is a reasonable request and of course the proprietors have full right to ask if they want to.

However ...

I for one will not support clubs or events that require unreasonable removal of attachments and I urge others to do so to. Lag is not caused purely by scripts ! More often than not it seems to be caused by an overdose of prims in the local area or just large numbers of people. I urge event organisors to stop this trend and ask LL to prioritise the lag issue, don't ask us to reduce our enjoyment of SL simply because you have a lag problem. There are a few ways to reduce lag in the SL preferences. Reduce your visibility distance, reduce your particle maximum etc.

We all have lag, we all need to learn to live with it until LL sort it out. Asking us to remove our attachments is like asking ur to remove our clothes, we might as well not bother logging on in the first place if we cant enjoy ourselves. If someone asks me to remove my attachments, I simply leave and never go back there. That way those that think scripts are the cause of their problems end up getting want they ask for, a scriptless, peopleless, sterile, uninteresting environment.

< end rant >

Yea, and they can always turn on the no-outside scripts option but that won't make a diff. You tell those club owners to take a reading from a sim with 30 scripts running and a SIM with 30 AV's without any scripts.

Not all lag is client-side; if a server is running 30 attached, badly coded scripts, you're going to generate more lag. Not every script is highly optimized.

LF

Yes but put those attached scripts in a sim by themselves and put the 30 AV's in a SIM by themselves. I know which SIM I'd rather build in.

Well i recall being at Philip's live broadcast and opening of the Time Capsule...

What did he ask? Please remove all scripted attachments...

When it was done...guess what...ran much better. I think Philip wouldn't have requested it had it been a non-issue.


My 2 shiney pennies.

Of course not but I'd be willing to bet that most attachments are doing no more than calling llParticleSystem() which is client side.




Sometimes it is a reasonable request, like at the fireworks show. But I think you both missed my point.

Perhaps i did miss your point, but what i did gather was that you would boycott events etc. that requested you to remove said attachments. My point is that they do impact performance and for the benefit of all it's a small thing to ask. People that walk around with non-scripted 200 piece hair extensions do cause some lag. User created content is not optimized always as mentioned above by others, and we can't point the finger at LL for giving us tools and allowing us creative opportunities and then turn and blame them for a laggy product completely.

There is no mystery to events with large amounts of AVs causing more stress on a server. I have run, and will run a busy club again here. I never asked everyone to remove those scripted attachments, because i can deal with lag knowing the constrictions of our current system. I am more versed in how to handle lag inducing objects, scripts, and effects now after spending a lot of time reading from those who are more knowledgable and have more experience here then I do.

First off as an owner...i looked inwards before putting the burden on my patrons. I have changed a lot of my high res textures to blank textures with tinting. I have removed most of my objects set to light (hadn't initially run local lighting and didn't see just how out of hand it became). Some scripts like a couple of the texture swapping picture boards were sending updates very frequently. The large textures I used for backdrops again took long periods to DL. also reducing total prims on the lot (still working towards that goal) also has been an effort on my part.

Is it too much to ask that if the sim is packed that those who are participating also think about the experience as a whole and remove unnecessary attachments? I also give patrons hotkeys to disable particles (ALT + SHIFT + = toggles on/off)and recommend turning down draw, local lighting off, and not displaying avatar names if they are experienceing clientside lag. Will i not allow anyone in if they dont adhere...no. Just tips that i have seen that help reduce lag and when you end up with 60 AV's at a rager...there wil lbe lag regardless. Although you might make it stable enough that the sim doesn't crash and the party lives on.

Again, I might have missed your point but this ahs been my reasoning and logic behind similar requests (not mandates).

That was an eloquent and impassioned reply Jay and I respect that. Last night at our small clubbet we held a birthday party for a close friend. There was at one point maybe 15 to 20 Avis there. I was doing a very intense particle show, and I mean intense. Turning them off made no difference to the lag whatsoever. An experiment to turn off all local scripts made no difference whatsoever.Simply having people around causes lag ( or seems to ). At one point a girl turned up with a ball gown and hair attachments that must have had 100s of prims in them and suddenly the lag went up. When she left it went down. So there is an example of my point.
We might as well ask people to remove their clothes. I'm sure they'd love us for that !

oh and yes I do boycott events that request i remove attachments. That is just me voting with my feet because my attachments are part of me.
I can go elsewhere I don't need to stay around in an area where I'm not mad to feel welcome. Call me a diva!

Well I was at a parade and the same question was asked. 5 minutes later the SIM was working much better but it was because half the people got bored and left because nothing was happening.

Yo ! Exactement !

I understand your argument but some people walk around with like 500 prims worth of attachments or more (and laggy animation overriders) - attachments - scripted or not they cause lag. And if it is your sim or your event you have every right to request them to remove excess primage. Its courteous. i often remove excess prims before going to events or even if i notice that they are causing lag.

well I'm not saying any more on this subject, i only wanted a rant cos someone had asked me to take off a scripted halo when there 2 other avis in the same spot with massive hair attachments. I just think there is far too much misinformation out there regarding lag.

Major causes of lag in decending order of practical (empirical) importance:

1. Avatars
2. Scripted avatar motions
3. Scripted avatar motion attachments
4. Static avatar attachments
4. Lights
5. Hidden land-scanners (extinct?)
6. Physics
7. High density textures (client-side lag)


No matter how many prims in an area, once they are loaded, they don't require updates and so take no bandwidth. As avatar movement and rendering is usually the highest update cost (once you are somewhere) they really are the prime source of lag for others.

To the original poster, you are free to boycott, and noone will interfere with that. I thought you might like to know that it isn't for no reason though.