Visitor Counter/List Maker Lag?

After reading bits and pieces from other threads about radars causing lag, I got to wondering if visitor counters with visitor list makers cause lag? I have one on my property and was wondering how much lag this can cause?

If it's the type that scans for avatars, then the load is strongly influenced by the scan range and frequency.
Keep the range as low as sensibly possible.
The scan frequency needs consideration. DO you want to log people who spend less than 30 seconds in the parcel? less than 60?, etc.

As to exactly *how much* -I don't have a private sim to test that in. Maybe others have done so.

"Cause lag" is relative. A scan operation takes microseconds of sim's time. Doing that multiple times per second is a bad idea unless it /really/ has to be so, but no single scanner will eat a lot of sim's time even if it does that, regardless of the range.

(I'm not even sure the range affects much -- if I was writing server code, all avatar positions in it would be a linked data structure, this is the obvious way to deal with them. Which means that no matter how high your range is, it has to check through all avatars in the sim to see if any are close enough, and the range limits are to make the lists returned shorter. I'd love to hear from someone in the know how it really works, but until someone explains otherwise, I would say that the range has to be the minimum needed to cover the property you need to count the visits to -- so that it doesn't pick up people who are visiting the neighbours instead.)

However, if you make a building, and each prim in it scans for avatars around every 0.2 seconds, and starts glowing when they come close... One prim nobody will notice, but as their number grows, their demands on sim time will grow very quickly, and a 100-prim building will be a noticeable drain, while a 2000-prim build is likely slow the sim down to a crawl or even make it unstable.

So it all depends on whether your scanner ends up the straw that broke the camel's back. Once every 30-60 seconds definitely won't inconvenience anyone.

all depends on the scan interval. radars have in general a scan interval of less than 1 second, while visitor counters have a scan period of 5 secs or more.
So normally visitor counters should not cause any lag.