Babbage Linden - Limit scripts PER PARCEL

No, you are missing the point entirely. The goal is for no one to lag anyone else.

The "Tragedy of the Commons" is part of basic Economics 101. There is no excuse for Phil telling his coders to do someting to account for this problem when he decided to build a 3-D world as a social and economic experiment.

I'm not too knowledgeable about computer technology, but I have a ton of friends who are professional computer geeks, and I have been routinely and inhumanely subjected to hearing them talk shop. Isn't every computer network administrator aware of the problem of users hogging resources if resources are not rationed out?

When Bill Gates was originally working on DOS thirty or so years ago, he and his pals put an arbitrary 640K limit on RAM because they couldn't fathom that there would ever be a computer application that could possibly require anything near an extravagant amount of RAM like 640K. They were breaking new ground, they can be excused for the oversight. However, Second Life is not the first place to ever experience the Tragedy of the Commons, not even in a computer networking context.

But if script use is apportioned like prims how's that going to stop the predominant land owner lagging everyone - surely if the same number of scripts are around... ??

This seems to be answered on the Office Hours transcript
http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/User:Babbage_Linden/Office_Hours/2009_03_18?

[4:37] Babbage Linden: you need some kind of overall simulator limit
[4:37] Babbage Linden: and the fairest way to do that is based on parcel ownership

So if that works like prim limits, where the prim limits of all parcels in a sim under the same owner are available to all those parcels, then an island or large parcel cut into sub-parcels for management purposes wouldn't suffer.


There's lots of interesting snippits in the Office Hours transcript.
Like:
[4:32] Babbage Linden: the reason this is being worked on is that currently you can use as much memory as you like for scripts
[4:32] Babbage Linden: where regions have lots of scripts running, they cause simulators to swap
[4:33] Babbage Linden: which destroys the performance of all regions running on that simulator host

So a script hog in one sim is screwing three other sims as well as the other owners in the sim.
Take that to the OpenSpace setup, where the same hog would be screwing 15 other sims.


Or, if for some reason, a number of script hoglets get moved into the same sim then a drain that was distributed thinly over the mainland servers suddenly gets concentrated, and each of those concentration sims starts to swap three random other sims.

The concept of a small parcel with a ton of badly scripted gear lagging an entire sim is as old as SL itself. Although many will argue otherwise, this change is long overdue.

I remember clearly when my family and I had a bit over half a sim in jouppi. We went to extreme lengths to use very little of the script time and keep our texture lag to a bare minimum. Our neighbors appreciated it... until...A casino moved into a 1024 plot and lagged then entire sim to the point of not being able to move (that person also set the price on that 1024 to 500k). This was only one incident from nearly 5 years in SL. It happens over and over again. At some point many people start taking the idea that they may as well use as many resources as they want since if they dont someone else will.

Yes alot of content is going to break. Including some content that I personally depend on (texture organizers). But I think in the long run it is a good thing. It will force people to be aware of what they are doing and give them a motivation to use effcient scripts as opposed to anything that gets the job done. It will also challenge scripters to do a better job of managing memory. Also if we are lucky it will stimulate the land market as people who can't live without their MLP on every stick of furniture scramble for enough land to support it.

As for the per avatar limit...Bring it on! Does anyone really need scripted jewelry with 50 bling scripts and color change scripts? Or color change hair with another 50 scripts in it? When we had a private island I used to be able to tell the instant someone wearing a multitool landed (of whatever brand) because the script times would quadruple. Yeah bring on the per avatar limits they are LONG overdue.

The exact same way that it is impossible for the predominate land owner to hog all of the available prims in the region. You are still allowed a set amount of prims for the land you own. You will now be allowed a set amount of script land memory usage.

This has nothing to do with the quantity of scripts in a simulator or in a parcel. This is dealing with script memory. A single script can have much more impact then 1000 scripts. For a 512 sqm parcel, you may find some scripts you are not allowed to run. That's right, a single script. But the same 512 sqm parcel may be able to run 500 other scripts, all depending on memory usage.

Where did you see this (timestamp)?

If everyone is limited, then NOBODY will be able to lag the sim due to script memory usage. That's the whole point.

The disadvantage is that if Peter isn't using his allotment, then Paul can't take advantage of it. Currently we can do that, and in addition, we can go overboard and lag the whole sim.

Thanks for the clarification, but since I intentionally left "local" undefined, it wasn't inaccurate, just imprecise. By "local" I meant "not global", meaning asset servers and unrelated regions.

I think that it's a good idea. Going from infinite scripts to a limited amount of scripts per parcel and avatar will reduce lag. I guess the million dollar question is how much the limit will be. I know that whenever we discuss the ARC score everyone chimes in with the fact that scripted attachments aren't being counted. Well now they will and hopefully that will allow us to have events with a large amount of avatars without the lag.

I doubt they "couldn't fathom it". The main reason was a cost-reducing limitation of the IBM hardware, so you can't blame Bill. As much as I like to blame Bill for everything.

Back to script memory. 20-20 hindsight. Yup, it should have been forseeable. Proof that they weren't perfect. This is news?

What it isn't easy to predict is *which* of numerous resources will end up being the ones to cause the most trouble. The whole idea of SL was to build it and see what breaks, fix it, and move on. They did say this from the beginning, calling it an experiment. It's also related to the LL policy of letting coders work on whatever interested them. In general, coders like to make things work, not limit them.

I'd say the experiment succeeded. Success always leads to hitting limitations that look like idiocy in hindsight. I've seen this happen in other fields as well.

Well ARC is client side based too so one man's medium will be another man's high and one man's medium could be another man's low, scores vary from PC to PC.

The key is how sensible these limits are, there's a danger of people who know the cost of everything but the value of nothing setting their own quotas, which might be technically brilliant but prove to be an epic fail socially.

This needs to be handled with care.

Precisely. No matter how many prims your neighbor has, you get a fixed number based on your land size, and if you both use your full allotment, that won't lag the sim. The sim might still be lagged, but it'll be due to something other than merely the number of land prims.

They're now just applying the same logic to script memory, which evidently they've identified as a significant source of lag. If servers are thrashing (swapping memory to/from disk cache too frequently) due to script memory, then it would be.

Boy, what a lot of confusion. Bill Gates didn't set the 640k memory limit on the IBM PC. IBM did that, accidentally, by putting the video memory at 640k. If they'd put it at 768k, that's what the limit would have been (and in fact a lot of early DOS-compatible but not IBM-compatibles had more than 640k, more than the 768k that mine did, even).

I don't see anything in Babbage's office hours saying whether the quota will allow overcommitment on a per-parcel basis. It really needs to.

the message i get from LL lately is simple.

do not trust us, we will screw you up everywhere we can.

i spent a few month creating an avatar that is fully animated ( a bodybuilder with a load of muscles, all can be flexed ). this work just became a complete waste of time.

then i created a sexbed, took me ages to make it, LL decides i can´t sell it in my shop because it´s on mainland and they want mc donalds on mainland.

no reason to do anything in sl anymore. it´s becoming an icq clone with dated 3d gfx. in other words: useless and boring... -.-

and as soon as i finish something LL decides it´s evil and needs to be removed.

guess they don´t want me to login

Tragedy of the Commons

"free access and unrestricted demand for a finite resource ultimately dooms the resource through over-exploitation.

This occurs because the benefits of exploitation accrue to individuals or groups, each of whom is motivated to maximize use of the resource to the point in which they become reliant on it, while the costs of the exploitation are borne by all those to whom the resource is available (which may be a wider class of individuals than those who are exploiting it).

This, in turn, causes demand for the resource to increase, which causes the problem to snowball to the point that the resource is exhausted. The rate at which exhaustion of the resource is realized depends primarily on three factors: the number of users wanting to consume the commons, the consumptiveness of their uses, and the relative robustness of the commons."

It absolutely needs to or it will fail miserably in terms of the overall experience.

To be fair I don't think LL said ooooo what is Yuriko working on so we can make it impossible.

That said LL does have a very long history of making major changes with little or no warning. The Adult continent change is still probably a month away and the scripting changes by my estimate we will be lucky to see by Thanksgiving. This is actually a huge improvement over the usual push the button to make the change on Friday as they go out the door and let us bitch about it all weekend method that was the norm not so very long ago.

I am not belittling your hard work merely pointing out the disaster has not quite happened yet. You might be able to rework the scripts on your bodybuilder so they are less of a resource drain. For that matter we dont k now what the individual avatar limits will be. You might be ok who knows?

thanks for the kind words darkness, i am just very pessimistic because i have seen how LL handled stuff in the past.
i expect that avatar to be broken, it has 1 script in each prim, around 200 prims.
can´t only script the root prim because then it will animate one prim after the other, instead of all at once, that would take forever and lag the sim much more than it does right now.

i am very sad atm and have the feeling i am not welcome in sl and not really feeling like coming back -.-

Free access for land? Where?

Check out Maklovar and Boris, they're glorious perpetual train wrecks.

I completely understand the sentiment. I had just finished coding and testing a major multiplayer game when the gambling ban crap hit. There went 2 years of work.

Because I had friends and family I was able to refocus on other things in world and regained my interest after a time. But I did take a 30 day sabatical to get my attitude towards LL in check after that one.

it wasn't speaking of something in their control..i was speaking about the actual power grid that you use if you have a computer or not..
he talks about actually not having enough energy resource for it..
it's in most of his interviews..i would try to find one now but me and blender are in a battle at the moment and i just stopped in to take a break from pulling my hair out lol

Here's the snippet:
Also, apropos being able to share the memory quota across same-sim parcels with the same owner, this part is encouraging:
Depending how deeply they model script limits on those of URL resources, this also may be reassuring to those of us worried about vehicles. See http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/LSL_http_server#Resource_Limitations for details, but here's a snippet:

I have no idea whether that is encouraging or not, since vehicles rarely have to use HTTP so it's hardly a worthwhile precedent. Also, if they're measuring script's *potential* usage, instead of scripts *actual* usage, this means someone with a bunch of tiny scripts will get screwed.