how to tell sim lag from client lag?

I had someone complain to me about lag in their home. I was not lagged. I pulled up the simulator statistics, but what are good numbers? What would show me that the sim would lag? Is 45 FPS bad for the sim? What number is bad for time dilation? What should I be looking for?

Time dilation goes from 0.0 to 1.0. You can think of this as 0% to 100% of the operations the sim needs to complete are being performed. A sim that is running at 0.8 time dilation is essentially only able to do 80% of it's needed chores. Any number below 1.0 is not good, but extended periods below 0.5 are very bad.

I believe 45 fps for the sim is pretty decent. Some of the other numbers are harder to interpret, such as script performance (script perf). That one shows the number of instructions per second being executed. With no scripts in the sim it shows zero, but with enormous time dilation or other problems it can show at or near zero too. The best way to judge script perf is to check it on a regular basis and see if it makes any unusual changes.

For example in my home sim we normally have about 5,400 scripts running and a script perf between 20,000 and 30,000 ips. During the extreme time dilations events, that dropped to less that 10 ips. On another occasion we had a rogue script running on our sim that took ips up to the 700,000 range and that also essentially stopped all other scripts and made it impossible to move or do much. Extremely high numbers are always bad.

The best thing you can do is just to check the numbers now and then and, after a while, you will get a good feel for what is out of the ordinary.

45 is the best that it gets for sim fps and physics fps. You'll never see either go over 45. Wasn't always that way but has been for at least a year now.

IMO, sim fps is always the first thing to look at. If that's low, I look under the "Time (ms)" section (bottom of the stats bar) to see what's causing the FPS to be low. I think the sim will give any extra time to scripts so don't read too, too much into that one..