Show updates - how to use it ?

I've searched all over this forum and in the knowledge base - but only Google returned a (very short) explanation on what the debug setting "show updates" is indicating:

http://secondlife.com/app/help/menus/debugmenu.php

I'm still wondering if the feature is useful and if so how to use it.
Does anyone here have further explanations/insights ?

Thanks a lot.
Noctua

Lol all that does is show strange looking red and blue poofs of smoke around everything.. It's really annoying..
In other words, as something updates on the screen, depending on what it is, it will show a red or blue poof around it.. it's a waste and not really sure what the purpose of it is except maybe for a programmer..

Noctua,

It's really useful if you're conscientious enough to wish to know what impact all those attachments you wear may be having on sim resources, or tracking down very active scripts on land (all possibly creating 'lag'). Obvously, the more 'smoke' (as some people are calling it) you see the more load on the server simply because it's updating at a fairly constant rate.

From memory the colours were red, blue and green. Red being the worst offenders as they are full updates to and from the server so using the most server resources. As an example, when you come across something scripted that is invisible due to the number of red cones rising into the air you can be pretty certain it is impacting the resources at a high rate.

As a land owner I find I use this a lot when actively trying to keep lag to a minimum. I really despise sloppy scripting.

(for the purposes of this post the term lag has been used very loosely)

~B

Thanks for the answers so far.

I forgot to say that I'm a scripter myself - that's why I am interested in this feature.


@Bellissa Dion
You are mentioning that more red cones would mean more server lag - in fact I am not sure about this..the link I posted before says that red indicates (for example) that a script is running.

But a script that does a sensor scan every minute and a script that adds +1 every minute would both only run 60 times and hour, but the sensor would cause much more traffic on the server.

I hoped it would be possible to learn more from the cones displayed

It seems that the colour will almost alway be red, but will only indicate that a script is active (or even other changes), which is not very helpful.