Valuable Article on Lag

There's one bit of (temporary, we hope) misinformation in that article that could lead to considerable lag, and that's the cumulative effect of scripts (specifically Mono-compiled scripts, it seems).

Although the article is quite correct about how the sim tries to schedule scripts as the lowest priority of anything happening on a sim, the running of a script has side effects on the sim itself. One bad effect is the swelling of the total amount of virtual memory the sim is using--and this can lead to disk swapping to the point of thrashing. That's why script memory will be restricted per parcel and per avatar in the mid-term future.

Right now, however, there seems to be an even worse problem, with Mono scripts somehow degrading sim performance just by having executed. Deleting the script and the prim in which it resides--even if it successfully removes the script from the scheduler--is somehow lagging the sim until it gets restarted.

At the moment, we're seeing this (in spades!) on Zindra: lots of folks with scripted attachments have passed through the sims. They're long gone, the avatar count is low, and still the sims are desperately lagged until they're restarted. (We're likely to see an even more dramatic example of this at SL6B, unless they restart the sims at least daily.)

So, the point is that, right now, AOs and other scripted attachments are not as innocuous as the sim design should support.