How much prim buffer for land?

I've heard it's a good idea to not use all your allotted prims, that you should have a few left over for emergencies, or just to keep the sim lag down. If you do this what is a good percentage to keep unused. 25%?

I have used 610 out of 937 available and want to spruce up the land a little more with better trees (hmmm maybe spruce trees then) and flowering plants. -- KC

Go for it.

Lots of things besides prim count will affect any of the variety of performance metrics that people generally lump under the global term "lag". If you want to reduce the amount of time it takes new visitors to download your area, your best bet is to limit the number and size of different textures you use in your build. If you've used a given texture once, feel free to use it on as many prims as you want.

Limit the number of different sculpties you use. They are like textures; once you've used one once, it's no big deal to use it lots of times.

Lots and lots of transparent or partially transparent prims can reduce render times on the client side computer.

About the only thing you can do to create *server* lag is to have lots of scripts, or to have lots of physical objects. (Or, physical objects that overlap each other... that latter one will sometimes cause the sim to crash!)

Go ahead and use up your prim allotment Users will experience things that get called "lag" based more on the textures and sculipties you use than on the prims.

*Do* leave a buffer of at least 32 prims, so that somebody can fly over your build with a vehicle.

*Do* leave a buffer of how many additional prims you think *you* might want for doing things. If, for example, you want to rez out stuff you've purchased on this land, you probably need a bigger buffer -- 50, 100 prims? Hard to say, as it depends on what you think you might rez.

Ignore the first 'do.' Its your land if you want to fill it, well the flyers aren't paying for your teir or covering those 'spare' prims for you. You don't owe travellers anything and I actually suggest turning object entry off because of greifers shooting ec.

Second one, if you want to keep those prims open do so, I keep stuff on my land, and change decorations alot, but usually within 5 prims of my limit. At the same time though I have no problem pulling a statue intopull out something else.

Thanks for the ideas.

I forgot about the 32 prim vehicles. Yes, I do need to allow for those. The first neighbors who greeted me were on horseback and those might be vehicles. Of course they might be worn which may be a little different.

Anyway I need to allow for that. They may not be paying for my land, but I think of it as a 3d web site, sort of. I wouldn't want to be crashing people who visit my web site.

I think I can leave 150 prims or so and still make a nice garden. -- KC

Are we certain a vehicle can't fly over a prim-filled region? I thought that worked just like someone teleporting in with prim-hair and prim-boots: it "doesn't count." Or maybe I've just gotten lucky and never seen the denial message. I could swear I've flown my 30 prim zeppelin over 16 sq meter ad parcels though, that only allow 3 prims.

All the rest is very good advice, but I think this particular one is backwards: as I understand it, alpha-textured surfaces actually get rendered twice. (Perhaps reducing rendering *performance* was the intended meaning?) To be honest, though, I've never seen rendering time have much of an effect on client lag, crappy graphics cards notwithstanding... but as quite aptly mentioned, downloading lots of distinct textures sure does!

I have a prim riding horse, from AKK (Great product, by the way). If your neighbor's horses are the kind you wear, as an attachment (and most would be), then they aren't a vehicle, and won't care about prim limits if the neighbors are just riding over to greet you.

Vehicles, on the other hand, do need to have prims available in your parcel for the actual up to 32 prim vehicle part. Up to you if you care about that or not.

I personally try to leave 200 or so prims free, so I can rez things without getting a "parcel full" error. In a small parcel, I try to leave about 20% to 25% of the available prims free. The things I or others in my household use fairly frequently I keep rezzed in-world, so they are always available.

Go for it.. unless you're using a lot of scripts, sculptis, or particle effects, you can use every prim you want to. Migh take a bit to rez for some people, but prims themselves don't cause that much lag that I've noticed.

If you have a lot of scripts, then... well.. don't =P Scripts are evil lag-makers... sculpties are too, but to a lesser extent as far as I can tell, and particles are client-side, so wont b og the server, but your friends and such might get annoyed..

Leave a few for things like boxed purchases and poseballs if you want, otherwise... its your choice ^^

Need to leave 2 (or more ) prims for rezzing your bed's poseballs. also 1 to rez a purchased box of shoes et al before taking into inventory.

Otherwise, your paid for prims. Do as you will.

I did some testing last month on moving vehicles into full parcels. My results were that you can move into a full parcel with no problem as long as you don't drop the vehicle... but ONLY if you enter the parcel from within the same sim.

If I entered the full parcel from across a sim border, I was unseated and my vehicle was returned.

So at least based on my testing, you only need to leave the 32-prim vehicle buffer if your parcel is next to a sim border.