Question re: Openspace Sims

Hey!

I have a question that I am hoping y'all can help me with. We are looking to buy/rent some very private land and I have found an awesome island at an awesome price, but it is within an openspace sim. It is 8192m2 with 468 prims and part of 10 sims of open water.

This is what I do know about openspace according to LL...

"[the entire sim is] limited to only 3750 prims...normal estates run on their own dedicated CPU, the Openspace regions run four per CPU; this limits their performance, as you would expect. 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, I know that LL has to say certain things...but I am wondering what the real deal is. If we rent this and use 450 prims (which I know is very limited for the amount of space), are we going to be dealing with lag and rez issues?

Thanks for your help!

Coco

Rather than say a bunch of stuff, just go check out some of my openspaces to get a feel for lag. Caledon Primverness, Caledon Greystoke, Caledon Middlesea, Caledon Cymru for instance. (all fully occupied, not for rent)

Basically I don't think you'll find much lag at all.

A big part of the reason why, is that the density of prims is a lot lower, and thus, also textures. So you don't get that nasty image cache lag and so forth.

As for scripts, well, reasonable usage - especially residential, you are probably going to be just fine.

Sure, there's always someone with this ultra-scripted gardeny poofy thing, or one of those color changing mecha suits with a script in 587 prims standing by to turn blue instead of black on a whim, but for anyone reasonably sane about scripts they are not bad at all.

I'd be more worried about being on a standard region, next to a texture shop or a clothing shop with dozens and dozens of scripted vendors personally.

I've considered purchasing an open space or two, if I could have all my open spaces on the same server, say if I purchased four, I think it would be a goer.

However, some people are complaining about laggy neighbouring open spaces having a huge impact on the performance of their open spaces (there's a comment in the blog).

Others, as Desmond exemplifies, are having no real issues. If you're renting, then that's the low risk way to discover if the open space you're on is viable. I think it's something you need to experience first hand.

Thanks Y'all!

I have found that OpenSpace sims are exceptionally laggy.

Even a few avatars around, and the sim starts to crawl.

Script performance? VERY poor with any load at all.

Get on a server with a few other busy OS sims sharing it? Watch your ping times go >1000ms.

Like the knowledgebase says.. LIGHT use, not residential, DEFINITELY not commercial, and performance can be highly variable, based on a lot of factors.

If you are going to be the only one in it, then maybe it might be bearable, but I feel for those who are renting a small percentage of the space of one; one of your neighbors has a party, and suddenly you are awash in molasses.

I should rightly qualify: "class 5" openspace region.

The warnings and restrictions were written up back in the days of class 4 openspaces, which do have much more limited performance.

For an active class 5 openspace, check out Nova Civis Caledon during an NCI class (just check their class schedule there).

It's really not that bad - I've literally had 100 people in a class 5 openspace with no special restrictions, and time dilation in the high .90's. Ask Carl Metropolitan about that one; he was there too.

I am talking about Class 5 OS regions, too.



They still apply to all OS regions, regardless of Class. If you have performance problems, it doesn't matter if they are Class 4/5, don't expect any support for it.



Well, yours must be magic, then. Out of the 20 or so OS regions I have participated in events within, NONE of them could handle more than 25 avatars without crippling lag. Scripts just stop dead. People in a brand new OS region at the Isle report 1000ms ping times with 2 people in the sim, and nothing else running in it.

Frankly, Openspace region performance is the equivalent of running OpenSim on a cheap virtual private server.

It's a very thin server slice to pad out region crossings and add a bit of green when going from Point A to Point B, and enough for a personal sandbox. Any other use is really just fooling yourself.

The one I'm on must be magical then too .

It's certainly much better than the other regular sim I rent on since everyone else's stuff there is what causes that one to act up from time to time.

Perhaps the provisioning of each sim has something to do with it?

Since these regions aren't (I believe) getting a dedicated core, whereas full regions tend to, I suspect there's much greater volatility in performance.


Just a hypothesis, anyway. I have the same issues with my own VPS every now and then.

Must be, but then again, I *DID* say that the performance is highly variable. Not just a static state, either. You get on a server with another few busy OS sims, and performance WILL drop through the floor.

*shrug* Just giving my experience with them, and it has been nearly ALL bad. I wouldn't have one for anything but what they are best for: sailing, flying, or other light, temporary use.

So if you are not supposed to build, script, or put more than a handful of prims, and it has 1/4 processing power. What really is the point of buying one?

Padding out one's land empire.

Before, when they were only 1875 prims, they were used mainly to add sailable water to estates and to protect the borders of an island. Now that they are up to a full quarter sim of prims, they are more viable but still should be used fairly lightly. Residential use should be viable, especially if it is just a handful of people living there.

The difference here is that on a regular sim you have areas where you can investigate the cause, on an openspace it's not so easy because you don't generally know who the other three sims sharing the cpu with you are, and even if you did, what are you going to do if you or your landlord don't own them?

I own 8 void sims, and they do just fine, even with a lot of avatars. Large numbers of scripts will make script execution slow, but doesn't seem to affect anything else. They seem to be very robust.

The new scripting engine, Mono, is just around the corner, dependent on when viewer 1.21 is released (yes i know, 1.20 is still in RC lol). There is the theory that Mono will improve script performance in void sims, but it's yet to be proven.

I've begun pushing LL to test Mono on void sims before release to at least ensure it's not going to cripple them. But that very old description of how they should be used seems to be the guiding document the Mono development team will use to assess what is acceptable performance for Mono in a void sim. Thus my expectation of better performance is somewhat tempered.

I would think you would reboot it and hope it comes up on a different server.

In my experience they are fine to wander about on, chat, sit on things, build and such. They are _not_ fine for any sort of scripting more advanced than touch items and vendors and so on, so do not expect to be able to have your fully-interactive pneumatic sexbed security train system with optional campbots and chocolate buttons running there. But opening doors should be fine, or other scripts which don't do an awful lot most of the time except sit there and wait for people to interact with them.

I would imagine (or at least hope) that the sim server processes on each CPU ran entirely independently, and could be terminated and restarted independently. It would, certainly, be possible for a sim to take over the resources of an entire hosting machine, but most of the problems are from bugs and issues within a particular sim, rather than on the machine itself, I believe - if you see what I mean.

I am currently renting an openspace sim and have full estate manager priviledges. I check the scripts and the performance ALL the time.

It does experience times of latency, but I attribute that more to LL backbone, than the sim itself. I live on the sim, it is my home, so I am not using it for a business or anything of the like.

I enjoy my sim very much, and have absolutely no complaints about the sim itself. Now, LL's backbone, that's another story.

For what it's worth, I've been trying for 18 months to 'nail down' any sort of performance trouble in one of my void regions that is ostensibly caused by another void on the same server.

I've never been able to, nor have I been able to see it.

That's not to say the problem doesn't exist. I'm sure it's possible. The trouble is, void regions are typically so empty that it's hard to even find a test case to measure.

60,000 avatars in 20,000 regions, worst case - that's an average of 3 per region. But wait, it's worse than that. For every region with 30 people in it, there are nine that are just plain empty.

And as anyone with grid experience has seen: typically the really desolate ones are the voids.

So there it is - it is literally extremely difficult to even *find* interference.

* * * * *

I hereby open this search to all archenemies, forum pundits, evil-doers, grey-hat griefers and anyone else: Find me some numbers!

Seriously, I could rent out another half a dozen voids in a sneeze - demand for these things isn't a problem, you aren't going to affect my estate one way or the other.

I would sure like to see, however, some evidence of 'different void, same server' interference and get my head around it.

The biggest stumbling block has been finding the void's "partners" and loading them down - I have been looking with Max Case's app and never seem to be able to 'corner' a region on the same server at the same time, when I'm able to do a good test.

http://neighbours.maxcase.info/index.php

Any of the "performance is terrible" camp want to tackle this? I'm eager to know.

I'll be gone a bit this week and next, but if anyone wants to chase this down in the near term I can offer estate access for testing purposes, plus probably easily roust out about 50 avatars or so to help load things down.

There was an open JIRA on problems with time dilation on openspace sims - has this been resolved now? I don't have the number unfortunately.

LL did some work on this, it's not nearly as bad as it was. Apparently they were allocating too much memory for the sim software, and it was swapping to disk a lot. Since they fixed this, voids are in pretty good shape.