Sim performance

Hi,

My mainland sim has taken a serious performance hit recently with little or more agents traffic. Does anyone knows of any tool that could count/time active scripts on a specific parcel? I'd like to investigate which parcel(s) are script heavy. Object scanners dont really work for this type of data.

Thanks
Prime

On Mainland, useful information just isn't available on a per-parcel basis, except to LL. If the problem is as serious as this, a support ticket will get the answers.

With the proper permissions on a parcel, one could script a scanner that moved through the parcel all the way up to 4096, counting active scripts. But "active" doesn't really say much about impact on sim performance. I doubt this would ever be worth the trouble.

Other than that, about all one can do on the Mainland at present is to study the Statistics Bar for the details of how the sim is spending its time, then turn on relevant beacons and wander the sim looking for suspects. This is guess-work at best, and time-consuming. Hence the virtue of a support ticket.

Thanks Qie,

What do you mean by "turning on the relevant beacons"?

Have you tried going to the View tab and turning on Transparency? This will let you see in a red color all the invisible scripted items. Fireflies have an invisible ball that they function from. You might be surprised at how much is there hidden, yet scripted. Don't forget to look up in the air too.

I was thinking of a situation where the Statistics bar showed, say, Physics Time going up and down with the overall lag in the sim. (Note that you can click the various Time labels to get a little waterfall graph of each component of the frame time.) In a sim with no avatars around, Physics spikes indicate that some scripts are doing heavy-duty physics, so one might turn on View / Beacons / Physical Objects to see what might be causing the problem.

(I think in older viewers--perhaps the standard release version, even--one also turns on View / Beacons Always On, or something like that. And choose "Render Highlights" and/or "Render Beacons" depending on how you want to see the results--Render Highlights makes the relevant objects red, much like Highlight Transparent does.)

If Net Time (and/or Images Time) seems to track the lag, then Advanced / Show Updates may give some clues.

Interpreting pure Script Time is trickier: usually that statistic will vary inversely to serious lag spikes, because the sim will throttle back script processing, trying to keep the total frame time at a constant 22.2msec. It's very rarely the case that script execution itself is making lag, but rather what the scripts are causing the sim to do. Anyway, one can turn on View / Beacons / Scripted Objects and do a kind of manual scan for such things, but generally this just won't reveal much. (Hence the relative futility of an automated scan / count of objects with active scripts.)

All this assumes that the lag is truly sim-side: that the experience of lag happens while the sim is running fewer than 45 frames per second. If, instead, it's the viewer that's lagging on a particular sim, that's a whole different project (and somewhat easier, in fact).

What kind of performance hit is it?

Can't walk around? That's prolly phyics, not scripts.

Scripted items acting sluggishly? That's scripts.

Everything grey and not loading? Could be abuse of textures and too many asset server calls.

Clientside frame rate terrible? Could be too many polygons visible to you, from say, overuse of cut curved prims.

I have access to the estate stuff, and honestly I use the Time(ms) numbers in sim stats available to everyone, more than anything.

Which region?

Physical beacons are always a good one when looking around for why a sim is laggy.

Even better, especially lately for some reason, is Advanced->Show Updates. In particular, this is a good one for tracking down temp rezzers - you'll see a green poof when the sim cleans up the temp objects then red poofs when new ones get rezzed.

If the sim fps nosedives about once a minute, that's almost always a temp rezzer being abused.

The sim I live in has taken a strange hit of some sort as well.
Teleports from there are unsteady.
It readily crashes.
Uploading and saving notecards/scripts usually doesn't work.
I live in crazy land.