Bots?

Hi Forum - hope you'll forgive that a lurker finally comes out of the shadows and posts, but perhaps it's time.....

Since the weekend, many of us have suffered the "high volume/restricted logins" agony. We've seen the "I'm Premium and so's my wife" debates, and the "I'm more valid than you because of reason x, y or z". But there's one question I haven't seen posed or addressed (and forgive me if so) ..... is it the Bots?

I'm sure that I'm not alone in being able to name, without breaking sweat, a number of locations in SL where there are a dozen or more "Battery Avatars", crammed into a little box, and generally up at 700 meters. And what are they doing? Gaming traffic - even still, gaming a system which (thankfully) has seen its day.

Given that a lot of the debates over the last few days have centered around the "value" of residents, and how to decide who should or shouldn't be allowed in at times of traffic volume crisis, I'd like to propose a different way of looking at it - let's see it in terms of who contributes more to the community in general.

And ... well, what DOES a bot contribute? It don't build or create, it don't provide any form of entertainment (apart perhaps from the ability to hunt them with Weapons of Mass Destruction) - it sits there, hogging resources, doing nothing, nada, bupkiss!!!!

So, what about it? Isn't it time we started to look at this question, and perhaps take it a stage further. Unfortunately the TOS doesn't allow us to name and shame Bot Camps, at least on the forums. But elsewhere?? All it would take is a blog and someone to run it.

And, on a more realistic footing ... how can we convince LL to adopt a simple "call and answer" type strategy for when things are approaching overload? Would it be too difficult to launch one of their famous blue dialogues with a wording such as "Given the volume of traffic, inactive accounts will be logged off the grid in five minutes. In order to prevent from being logged out, please click on the OK button below"?

Anyway, just some thoughts .....

I for one would love to see bots kicked. Here, let me get my boots on, I will do it.

Some bots have valid uses and fill the gaps in LSL. Prime example: the group invitation bot. This bot automatically sends out group invitations after transactions.

Granted, that is an understandable use, however...should that bot for group invitations be allowed to remain online and in the grid over a live playing person? Oh lord, if the bots start posting I bet I am in big trouble over that bit of discrimination. Halp.

Traffic bots got no reason
Traffic bots got no reason
Traffic bots got no reason
To live

Is there any reason to think that a bot uses up more resources that someone who isn't a bot, but rezes a bunch of prims with huge textures everywhere and runs a lot of scripts?

Though SL's problems seem to coincide with high logins, that doesn't necessarily mean that the logins, in and of themselves, are causing the problems. Linden Labs always attributes the problems to database issues, not issues at handling logins.

Assuming that Linden Labs is being honest about the fact that it's a data load issue, then logins are just one piece of the load that causes breakdowns. Limiting login totals, by itself, may not be a terribly efficient means of dealing with the problem.

Think about what you just said!! All that data flying around in SL is generated by the avatars that are using, seeing, searching, dancing on some camp pad, chatting, building, scripting...........the list goes on and on. If it were not for the havy log in load that data would not be sent to every avatar in sight.

It's a concurrency thing........always has been too.

Just in case people haven't heard about it yet: sometime in the future logging on and being simulated in a sim will be two separate things so you'll be able to have bots that will log on but won't be simulated anywhere on the grid.

Of course they'll still be stressing the infrastructure by sending mass amounts of group invites and whatever else not, but it'll give bot advocates more ammunition to defend what they're doing.

Ya they should get rid of shoe shopping bots gawd thats annoying and the drama queen bots man what a drag they are same thing with the blingtard bots talk about system resource hogs


..on a side note.. I wonder how many that complain about bots even know what they are and how they work...

I doubt that a camper bot parked 1000m in the air out of sight has the same database load as I have when I'm logged in and out and about in Second Life.

well probably not.

But that ignores the fact that you can log on yourself and still run bots concurrently.

Generally humans are limited by how long they can stay up / how much SL they ca stand, etc

Even if LL would have to log out 10 bots to equal the typical human controlled AV, that would still be more "fair"

A camper bot parked 1000 meters in the sky takes the same resources as a live camper parked 1000 meters in the sky. Wherever the bots camera (think eyes) are pointed data is being sent to the bot..........some avatar or another bot comes into view the data is sent.

Bots consume as much data as an avatar controlled by a person. A bot that send group invites uses data too. A bot running a scrpt to dance or listen for chat uses data.

Concurrency........bot or not, is the issue.

Yep. those traffic bots are pretty low impact, they aren't fetching all those assets that the regular viewers need to grab. Land bots, on the other hand, will eat up resources with their searches and hopping around between sims and making transactions.


The live camper would use more because it has to fetch and display other campers and the surrounding area.

You can explain it then .

It's easy to show that a bot has less impact on a sim than a human controlled avie, but the effect of all bots combined on database load is nothing but speculation on either side.

well more or less.

Lets say a camper bot uses 1/10th the resources of the average active user.

Then obviously 10 camper bots would use the same resources as ONE average active user.

That's the way I thought it worked.

So just targeting "bots" isn't a particularly efficient way of dealing with the overload on the Second Life database servers.

I don't use bots, so I don't particularly care whether they exist or not. I just doubt that outright banning them- are more accurately, attempting to ban them- cures the problems, or contributes significantly to curing the problems.

Well, NPIOF folks can post to the forums now, so you're in big trouble! I'm gonna sic my Puppet Army on you!

Unsure where you have gotten this information and perhaps you might be a bit confused on the situation, but here is the situation:

A bot in the actual sense of the word will use the same data flow usage as any other av in the area...if they are on the same exact settings (IE. Draw Distance, Particle Amounts, etc etc. ) So yes, in that comparison you would be correct, but that is where the comparison ends. The reason being is that the typical bot user would not setup a bot to use the same draw distances, particle renderings etc that you would on a reg AV. That would simply be rediculous. They would set them to the lowest settings possible as there is no and I mean NO reason to have them up high, unlike a real AV.

As for your last statement which you seem to be compelled to repeat in multiple posts - Concurrency. I am afraid that is NOT the issue in this case, nor in most cases of SL downtime. If you please refer to the actual blog and/or Grid Status reports that actually explain what is going on (if LL is actually telling the truth) you will take note that most reports of failures, such as today's are listed much like the following:

Logins have been temporarily disabled to address the following:

We have identified a technical problem with our database. We are investigating and will keep you updated. This affects all in-world services. Please do not conduct transactions until we give an all clear.

Now that statement shows it is a database issue. Database issues and concurrency issues are two completely different factors. Granted we do tend to see more of it as more AVs are logged in, but there has yet to be a post that I have seen in my time of SL in which LL has stated flat out that the level of concurrency is the direct cause of the database issues.

It would be neat if the Lindens could give us some kind of idea how expensive each kind of user activity is for the databases and file servers, but on the other hand they probably wouldn't think that's so neat because it would make life easier for griefy types. :/

Guess I'm going to have to search the blogs from about a year and a half ago when LL was talking about throttling logins durring peak times to solve the "data base" issues due to heavy concurrency.

It's an ago old problem and judging by your join date in the forums I know you are aware of it.

Yes Peggy, I am quite aware of the posting you are talking about. It can be found at:
http://blog.secondlife.com/2007/02/16/contingency-measures-to-ensure-service-as-second-life-grows/

Please note that this post was setup back on February 16th, 2007 when concurrency was at 34000 avg users and we were still on class 3/4's.

Please also take note of the following: "While we love that so many people are enjoying Second Life, there have been some challenging moments in keeping up with the growth, resulting in the now somewhat infamous message “heavy load on the database”. When this happens it usually means that the demand for transmission of data between servers is outstripping the ability of the network to support it." So yes, technically at that time they were giving a direct correlation between the amount of users online and the amount of data being passed back and forth between servers. I stand corrected that there was a post regarding this a year and a half ago.

However, you will read further and note this "We hope that we won’t have to implement this contingency plan. As you know, we have regularly improved the Grid’s ability to manage higher concurrency rates, and have comfortably doubled our capacity in recent months" So it was not set in stone that they were ever going to actually do this at all.

Also, you will see they had goals set up for improvements such as:
- additional caching systems
- reducing write load on the central database by partitioning or removing data
- addressing critical bottlenecks
- deploying more internal ‘web services’.

These things have been done as well as the upgrades to class 5's. But we have also almost doubled our avg concurrency, so here we are again. My previous post acknowledged all of this. It also clarified that there is quite a difference between an AV data usage and a bot's data usage due to settings put in place by the user. That held true then and still holds true.

Unfortunately a lot of people get caught up in the whole bots are evil debate and do not stop to realize that the real load on the system is the live AVs with 10's of thousands of inventory items bogging down the database which must pass that data to the AV every time they make a call for an item etc. Typically you would not load up a bot with all that inventory, hence less database load.

Just my two cents

If you throw away bots, the gaps will be filled with real human controlled avatars, so the problem stays the same. Or even worse, with the latter, since human controlled avatars move around (rending cost goes higher), attach objects (rezzing, asset issue cost), teleport often (again, database load cost), chat more (irc transport cost), inventory search (asset database cost), buy stuff (data server cost) etc etc..

a bot primarely does one thing, what it's programmed for, on ONE spot, not walking arround, like a human controlled, not seeking inventory, not attaching things (except "performance tester" bots from LL themselves), do not (most of them) teleport often.

As you can see, bots are less consuming then human controlled av's, in general. Exceptions occur, but that's why they are called exceptions, their out of the ordinary.

my two cents.

I'm not defending the use of bots by any stretch, but I don't think they're a particularly huge load on the asset system. They're logged on already, so they're not clogging the login servers. They're not sentient people, creating stuff, and pulling stuff out of the inventory all the time... yes, there are some bots that do do certain things that access the asset system, but overall, I don't think that's where the problem is. Also, during the time that the load was high, the concurrency wasn't overly huge. So, it's anyone's guess I suppose.


http://www.secondscripter.com/

Folks I have maintained for a very long time that its the HUGE inventories of the "average" user that create alot of the load issues.

A year and a half ago a 10k inventory was considered outrageously huge but I have read posts in recent months of many with inventories nearly 10 times that size.

Every item has to be in the database, crossreferenced and searchable. Concurrency is not the only number that has gotten out of hand. The shear number of database entries is astronomical.

I don't think I've ever seen a bot. Am I disadvantaged??