Lag and Scripts

Could a high script perf number be a possible cause for lag on a sim and what would be considered high? This is an residential island estate and I am seeing 4060 active scripts and over 100,000 for script perf. It seems very laggy, and the packet loss bounces up and down from zero to double digits. I went to Living Tree to see if it was my ISP and everything seemed ok there in terms with zero to little packet loss.

I believe, that as a rule of thumb, a class four sim supports 4,000 active scripts (depending on their nature and how well behaved they are), a class five, 5,000 scripts. I visited a sim over the weekend, class four that was so laggy it almost was impossible to have a sync'd conversation, it had over 7,900+ active scripts on it.

Have the estate owner/managers hunt for the lagging scripts

as AWM said, sims can hold thousands of script but in the end it comes down to the scripts behavior, 100k ips is very high and most likely some scripts have gone rogue

There are potentialy 3 basic types of scripts.. Activated scripts that require some user interaction before they operate (vendor, door opening etc), static scripts that are continous (texture swapping, rotating etc) and listeners.. these are always active and searching for avatars to trigger their functions without user interaction, such as those wonderful automated NC,TP givers, Welcoming chats etc. One of the three are classed as passive and you can have quite a few of those, the remainder require constant CPU cycles.

Consider additional running scripts like Radar, Security systems, and HUDs that are worn by visitors/residents. Once an avatar TP's into the sim, their scripts are then run from the SIM server. Hence why many organisers of events ask that people remove all scripted objects and of course the heavy primed hair ect, during the event.

If you're seeing an unusually high IPS while scripts seem unresponsive or slow to respond (a contradiction in itself ), but nothing else seems amiss on the sim (time dilation and rezzing is fine, no non-script lag, etc) then a sim restart should fix everything up already.

It's an odd (and old) bug in the sim.

---

If you tp to a different sim to see if you're getting packet loss there as well keep in mind that LL uses two different colocations (SF and Texas). If you tp from a SF to a Texas sim you won't know whether the cause of the packet loss is your ISP (bad connection to one colocation, but not the other) or the colocation itself.

To get any useful information you need to tp to another sim hosted in the same colocation (sim classes are a good guide, otherwise compare the IP of the two sims for a quick-and-dirty check: if the first half of the IP is identical they're hosted in the same place).

If you get packet loss in one sim but not the other you can rule out your ISP (or any hosts along between you and the datacenter) and blame LL, if you get packet loss in both you need another person to try the same (who uses a different route to get to the colocation so preferably using a different ISP, or even better a whole different part of the world). If they also get packet loss, the problem is likely on LL's side, if they get no packet loss the problem is on your end of things.

Scripts and lag is not a simple subject. There is are many good discussions of the topic on the forums:

/54/5a/243029/1.html

Basically, scripts have the lowest priority and only run after the sim has finished all its other processing. So a high script perf number generally indicates the sim isn't doing to much and has a lot of time to dedicate to running scripts. Unfortunately the situation is made more complicated by interaction between scripts and the rest of the sim. e.g. A script rezzing and removing a bazzilion prims per second could easily cause significant lag for clients in the sim. Also, i don't think scripts, unless there were just an unreasonable number of scripts simultaneously attempting out-of-SL communications, can be a source of packet loss. Though its possible that high packet loss could cause problems for running scripts.

Interesting but what about a mainland sim?

A class 4 tops out at about 1500 scripts before TD sets in. Then it's a matter of how much TD you can stand. Up to 3000 scripts is generally tolerable but noticabley laggy. I keep my sims at or below 1500 scripts in the sim itself, then having 10 people over it's at 2500 or more. MOST heavily laggy sims are laggy because of the 100-200 scripts on /average/ that most people wear on their person as they travel around

A Class 5 sim can take 3000 or more with zero TD.

Both cases assuming "normal" physics load.

Mainland is a class 4 sim?

How does one go about knowing how many scripts are running on his/her parcel and the sim as a whole for mainland?