MegaPrims,PrimSavers and Processing

Hi
I have a 65Ksqm lot, I believe it is openspace. Total prim allotment is about 3,700. We made it a tropical island rental area with 5 rental lots, 3 of which are occupied. There are some low traffic dancing areas for resident use and their friends. There are a few prim savers reziing trees, bushes etc. Roughly half of the island is sunk as a lake.

So far lag hasn't been noticable, at least not with 1-10 ppl on the sim.

With approx 600 prims free the wife and I wanted to build a sky box.

My question to the community here:
If the only ppl on the sim are 2,000 feet high, are all the scripts still running down below at ground level, eating up recources or do they stop, being out of rez range?

Kind of like - If a tree falls in the forest with nobody to hear does it make a sound?

Thanks
-Zerock

Yeah they will still eat resources like crazy. Scripts use region resources regardless if you are there or not, they run on the core 24/7 and affect the entire region.

Also the prim savers will make lag like you would never believe - it's not just the scripts, it's the constant reloading of textures &c. Anyone anywhere in the region is gonna get lag spikes as the region is filled up and loaded down.

Basically there is no way to win. Exceed the performance specs and you'll pay for performance somehow. More prims? Pay dearly with lag. Sad to say but that's just kinda how it is.

By "Prim Savers" I presume you mean temp rezzers? A single prim that constantly rezzes and re-rezzes temp-on-rez bushes and the like? These tend to cause horrible lag spikes, especially in an OpenSpaces sim, so I would be wary of using those.

The good news is that when they released Havok 4, they apparently did fix things so those temp-rezzers no longer devour the available prims in the whole sim. Used to be that while a temp-rezzer let you evade parcel limits, the temp prims still had to had 2X as many prims free in the sim as a whole for them to rez. (A 100 prim temp-rezzing gazebo, for example, would devour 200 prims from the sim's total allocation of usable prims).

If the lag-inducig scripts and most of the people are on the ground, and you are way up in the sky, you will have less lag than on the ground. If it's too far away for you to rez visually, the scripts in an object don't have anywhere near as much effect on you. or a while I lived in the Magenta sim on the Mainland, on a parcel owned by a friend. Someone built a really laggy mini-club and someone else built a really laggy store, both close enough that it seriously hurt frame rates on the ground. But in a skybox at 700 Meters, things were far closer to normal.

Then the store moved to within 100M of my altitude, and my frame rate dropped like a rock every time they held an "event". I moved, and never returned to the mainland since then.

From the knowledge base:

"Why are they "light use"?

Normal regions run on their own dedicated CPU, but the Openspace regions run four per CPU; as you would expect, this limits their performance. Openspaces only ever share with other Openspaces on a server.

It is therefore important to understand what these regions are. They are provided for light use only, not for building, living in, renting as homes or use for events. As a stretch of open water for boating or a scenic wooded area they are fine, but we do not advise more serious use than this and will not respond to performance issues reported should you not use them in this way."

So in a nutshell don't expect them to run like a full sim and remember you are sharing resources with 3 others

Ceera's right about client side frame rates.

Script lag (scripts taking up cycles) is location independent, so if you use 50% of the processing power of the region, it won't matter where you go in it, it's still 50% loaded. The texture cache of the region (serverside) is the same way.

However if you see the stuff near you, you bet, that will lower your clientside frame rates as well.

Even regular sims are effected by what is happening in neighboring sims from personal experience.
If you're neighbors got 40 plus people over by next sim and has tons of scripts on the other side the child sims affect the parent sim on mainland.
Having that problem right now in the sim I have my shop in. And LL can't or won't do a thing about it.
I would assume it work the same with those islands but maybe I am wrong.
I always thought those type of islands were meant only for light use i.e few people using it as beach or to rezz a few boats for sailing trip, and some trees, wave scripts.
They weren't to be used as regular sim.
They just extra land and buffers to stretch out the island from how I understood it to avoid some of issues we get in mainland.

You are right but trouble is there will always be some that think they can fit a Quart into a Pint pot

All those crosses and garlic hanging about are sure to cause problems eventually....

Its even worse than that. Everything I have read so far has indicated that the word CPU in this paragraph actually refers to a single core of a quad core server. 4 openspace sims per core making 16 openspace sims total on one server.

At one point, I had a build with a kind of "visitor tracker" that monitored comings and goings and watched where avatars wandered. When they got within some reasonable viewing distance of certain locations, it would tell that location to start temp-rezzing its stuff. When they wandered off again, it stopped the temp-rezzing.

For that particular application, it dramatically reduced the amount of rezzing going on, while still showing off lots and lots of prims--just not very many at the same time.

Something similar could be useful for times when everybody's up in the skybox and there's nobody to see anything being rezzed on the ground.

(Incidentally, one thing I learned from that experience is that scripts inside temp-rezzed objects are very, very bad. Maybe it's less dramatic with Mono-compiled scripts, I don't know, but on the old Mainland class 4 where this was running, just a few left-behind scripts that didn't really do anything could create massive lag spikes when their containing objects were rezzed, and removing the scripts helped a lot.)

That doesn't surprise me in the slightest, wont be long till they start flooding the market where people take them on without knowing the full facts and then they drop them after they find they aren't much use for anything other than the intended use

this system would work better lag wise if you don't rez temp prims but normal prims that autodelete when nobody has been around for a bit, that way you can still share prim alotment without having to rerezz every minute, this also helps reduce the script lag in temp prims. offcourse this doesn't alow you to use more then 3750 prims at a given time on a open space sim but using more just adds to lag anyway.

600 is plenty of prims for a skybox though

Just using normal prims.

Right, but I took the numbers to mean that the 600 were free *with* the use of the prim savers thing, so there might not be enough prims to simultaneously rez as permanent objects everything that's already there.

Abigail is quite right that permanently rezzing things wins over temp-rezzed if they'll be sticking around for a few minutes. The slight trade-off is that perm objects need llListen()-llDie() scripts inside to make them go away, and even scripts with no active event handler seem to make the initial rezzing scarily expensive (or, at least, it used to). But usually, yeah, temp rezzing would be laggier, if spare prims will always be available for permanent rezzing.