Do "rezzers" affect sim performance dramatically?

I bought three fish rezzers a while back and was told by a good friend, who has since left SL, that by placing them out, it would mess up my sim's performance. Before I go any further, I am a total spaz about SL technology, so answers in a low-tech-literacy form would be greatly appreciated.

I thought a rezzer was just a type of a particle generator, except the particle has a texture (the fish image). Yes? Or do the textures lag up the sim? Or is it that there are three of them out at once? If I only use one? But then what if everyone on my water sim used one?

So are particle generators/rezzers sim laggers, too? If so, why does LL even allow them?

I should have thought that particle rezzers while contributing to client lag, would not affect the sim apart from their script load.

Prim rezzers repeatedly rezzing temp objects do impose an appreciable sim load.
There have been threads on this. recently-ish?
I do remember a member of the Havoc 4 team saying that prim rezzers caused more problems in H4 than in the previous level.
Search may be your friend.

It depends a lot on what they do, and how they work...

I have seen fish that are just prims rotating around a center point. They actually don't self-rez, so are no worse than any other small rotating collection of 3 or so prims.

I have seen fish rezzers that just rez a handful of particles. You can tell those instantly, because the fish look the same from all angles. You can't change the angle you seem to be looking at the fish from.

Most fish rezzers that I have seen create 3 to 6 temp-on-rez prims, which bob around for one minute, and vanish. Then the base, often a piece of seaweed or coral, rezzes a fresh batch. These have some negative effect, but just two or three of them usually won't have much impact. 30 or 40 in the same sim could cause lag spikes and other issues.

A sim will stop doing whatever it was doing while rezzing a prim. So if you were to rez a 100000000000000000 prim object then the sim would freeze for a day or two.

I carried out some tests on the rats in a sandbox and here are my test results:

5 prim="..."
100 prim="dude, what was that?"
250 prim="OMFG! SL SUCKS!! I@M GOnNA GO PLAY WOW!!"

Generally, rezzed objects with very minimal designs (a few prims rezzed) don't impose an appreciable load on the sim on their own.


The problem exists when people [ab]use Temp On Rez for "display models" of their products, which usually leads to several hundred prims being rezzed and then derezzed simultaneously. This sort of behavior will hork just about any sim on its own for a couple of seconds.

Multiply by the number of people using them and suddenly you have a serious problem.