Sim Owners: Has performance taken a hit lately?

I spend almost all my time in Second Life in my own sims, and it's difficult for me to get a sense of what's been happening on the grid at large without talking to people. Anyway, performance in a couple of my sims has been pretty poor lately, and despite weeks of diagnosis and pruning and testing, I have not been able to attribute any of the lag to problems with the residents or objects in the sims. Observations:

- Beginning in the last week of June (an update week, if I remember right), my public class 4 sim started experiencing the worst lag we had ever seen there. We're talking time dilation in the point-tens and single-digit sim FPS. After some scrambling (and posting here) I learned about Max Case's Sim Neighbors site, and that helped me to find other sims I was sharing space with. Armed with this new tool I quickly discovered that when I was suffering from lag, it seemed to be because I was sharing a server with overpopulated, laggy camping and gambling sims. Restarting my sim was enough to fix the lag. CONCLUSION: Something seemed to have changed that increased the effect that other laggy sims on your server had on your own sim. My sim had been restarted many times since going online in 2006, and I had never had problems remotely as bad as I did beginning that week.

- Beginning after the Friday rolling restart on the first week of August (when Voice went live), restarting my sim no longer helped. Despite the fact that I had actually removed prims and scripts from my sim since the initial June lag issues, my class 4 sim's performance was still faltering and even diagnostic steps like sending all users home and disabling scripts did not improve things. Around this same time my packet loss indicator began showing a lot of red, and my friends have reported the same thing. CONCLUSION: Something else happened the week voice was introduced that affected sim performance, and perhaps connection reliability between clients and the SL servers.

Like I said before, all I see is what goes on in my own islands. I can tell you this though:

- I have disabled scripts, sent users home, rebooted the sims, and not seen any improvement in sim performance during these tests.
- I have two class 5 servers, similarly populated, with equivalent script loads. The newer one has pretty consistent lag (not as bad as my class 4 sim, but worse than any 2-week-old sim should see). I wonder whether this new one is hosted at a different colocation facility from the acceptably-performing one.
- I have REMOVED many scripts, and prims and textures from my public sim and yet its performance has steadily declined (while traffic has remained consistent... my SLers are a tolerant bunch).

I know I'm not crazy. I also know this started before voice was officially introduced. And I know it's not all in the client which clearly does have some serious issues right now. I'm looking at sim/server statistics, and the numbers have not been pretty.

Sim owners, what have you seen?

I've had an estate manager ask Spike Linden, and yes they are working on a few things with the sims right now.

What I see in Caledon is that the sims are more 'fragile', or, more prone to overloading and lag spikes when a lot of visitors come, even when there are roughly the same number of prims and textures as before.

Also there are presence problems, which I think has more to do with networking. Things like rubber-banding back to former locations, occasionally falling through the ground, and stuff like that. Which may be more of an asset server issue or colocation facility issue - I'm not really sure.

'Fragile' is an excellent way of putting it- that's just how it seems... they appear to be more susceptible to influences that previously didn't affect them so much.

We've also seen the rubber-banding and falling through the ground you mentioned. I pay a lot of L$ for my boots and it's annoying when they're ankle-deep in Linden land.

I've got a little stall on a fairly inactive island which up until a couple of weeks ago was totally free of lag or any of the other problems stated.

But now, I'm seeing all those problems - even with only me on the island trying to rearrange things in my stall.

And as far as anywhere else I've been, it's been way, way worse.

Yeah, the last two weeks have not been very good at all - anywhere (that I've been).

Two of my mainland sims have crashed and had to be restarted. First time yesterday, and then again today. Before that it was at least a week of quirky behavior on all 4 of my mainland sims. Weird lag spikes, TP and rezzing problems. (All class 5)

I keep the sims fairly light in occupation..they are meant as open space to give neighbors relief from the overcrowding on the next door sims..fly balloons, sail a boat, that sort of thing..there are few scripts or residents on at a time. In fact I was afraid they had been move to some really crappy server cause they aren't heavily occupied but if you are having that problem, then I guess not.

My island home hasn't been too bad but I don't do much there right now but I did sink to my knees while standing on the surface. Is that rubberbanding?

Anyway, Desmond, can you provide more info on what "they are working on sims" means?

Object rezzing is not working.