When Does Mono Go Live?

Any idea when Mono will hit the main grid?

The last LL note was that it should be turned on with the 1.24 server. This week's update will get us to 1.23, so it's really really close.

(Snippet from "Upcoming Releases: June edition" on SLdev)

The Working date has been July 23rd. But now that they keep delaying the rolling restart for 1.23, that will likely push that date out as well. maybe around first of August would be my best guess now.

Still excited for this. I'm working on a biggish project with some other people and it runs around 4 times faster just compiled into Mono, but should be able to boost this to 8 times. The increase is relatively small since this project uses a LOT of list manipulations.

Haven't had a chance to test some of my other stuff yet, but it's looking very good. I suspect things that use a lot of raw LSL operations (i.e - very few LL* function calls) will see huge gains in terms of speed.

/me too!!


Yep. I think they've said that math-intensive scripts will see the biggest boost..

My level of excitement for mono is through the roof. It won't break existing content, and I can recompile all my oldstuff for mono goodness!

Not to ask a completely clueless question, but will Mono help rendering times? I am specifically wondering about sculpted textures. Right now, when I animate sculpts, typically the script starts to lag if the sculpt map is changed more than once every 0.4 seconds. I know, it's advertized as 0.2, but that's been my experience, even when I don't use lossless sculptmaps.

Now, I went to the Betagrid, and was able to get a 0.2 second texture change, but I'm not sure that wasn't due to "empty sim effect".

Do any of you smart people know the answer to this?

Probably not. If it does help, which it probably won't, it'll be because MONO freed up some sim resources and the sim is happier.

Sex beds with well over 200 poses ... woot!

:/ I was afraid of that. Oh, the things we could do with just a solid 5fps animation speed!

Virrginia, that is unrelated to server side stuff, and entirely client-side, meaning your computer. That's the good news; it means that there are things you can do to fix it. If you're interested, search this forum or start a new thread asking "how can I improve client frame rate?" For example, in Preferences set draw distance to minimum, set particles low, and disable most of the Windlight features in Graphics. Or get a faster computer. I feel for you because I'm in the same boat.

Well, as usual, I'm probably using the wrong terms here. I shouldn't have said "render", I think. I am thinking it has more to do with the call for llSetPrimitiveParams

But you tell me. Here is the behavior I see: When I call llSetPrimitiveParams more than about every 0.4 seconds, it seems as if the calls "queue". To wit, for my animated sculpts, the animation lags behind the timer (when said timer is <0.4sec), and when I stop the timer, the animation persists for a while afterwards (I am guessing it is finishing up dealing with all the calls I made)

As I said, I think I misused the term "render" as the sculpts DO render instantly (once cached by the client), it is just that the call itself seems lag.

Am I making any sense yet?

Ah, I see. It was "animation" that sent me down the wrong road. You're talking about animated objects.

Each call to llSetPrimitiveParams delays the script for 0.2 seconds, to keep you from using it too often, since it's an expensive operation.

In other words, LL really doesn't want you using this function the way you're using it, because that will tend to lag the sim. Not because of the script language, but because of all the repercussions from changing things inworld, changes which need to then be propagated to all clients using the sim.

But, on a good clean sim with few avs present and not too many laggy scripts running, you should be able to get 5 calls per second. The only help Mono will provide here is to make it less likely that other scripts will keep your script from running when it's ready.

And as I said before, that only works as long as people don't load down the sim with scripts until it becomes unbearable, and then delete them until it's tolerable. Once that happens, you're back to square one -- but hopefully with more cool stuff in the sim using up those precious CPU cycles.

As a software engineer for 30 years, I see this cycle repeat ad nauseum. Our newest software seems very slow, running on not the latest hardware. The hardware guys bail us out, delivering much faster hardware, and our new software is reasonable. Then the next generation hardware comes out, which you'd think would make our software just zip, but two things happen:

The damn customers want more fancy but resource-intensive features
The damn software engineers get sloppier about optimization, since the CPUs are so fast, and we're under such pressure to deliver new content quickly

As a result, new computers seem faster but end up being barely tolerable. The only time computers really seem fast is when you run a really old application (if you're lucky enough that it still works).

It's human nature. Folks like to blame LL for SL's performance, but they're only part of the equation. We're the other part (we the scripters and we the SL users).

Ok, so back to beta with you, and try the same script again. First save and run your script with the Mono box checked, then with it unchecked. That should tell you pretty quickly if it was Mono that made the difference.

I have done this with some scripts that made numerous llSetPrimitiveParam calls, and there did seem to be a slight speed increase under Mono as compared to LSL. However it was anywhere near double the speed.

*wasn't ?

The scripts that get the big honkin' boosts from mono will be the ones that eat a lot of time doing stuff other than llCalls..

Hm, I count only 41 unresolved bugs with the word "mono" in them, which is perhaps good.

Like djb used to say, profile, don't speculate. Others' experiences are good comparison references, but the right way to identify the nature of a problem is to go out and test that instance.

Well, said testing will have to wait until I can teleport on the Beta grid, or the welcome area I was booted to becomes a Mono testing area

.

OK then, Mono regions where you can try logging directly in:

Sandbox Wanderton MONO
Sandbox Goguen MONO
Sandbox Cordova MONO
Sandbox Newcomb MONO (down at the moment)

Yes, that would be remarkably useless since you aren't the one seeing the timing discrepancy.

.

Do try to keep up, the slow sculpt changes were reported on the main grid, not beta. The question was about possible improvements, not bugs, in the beta servers.