Should we do it just because we can? A question of considerate settings.

oh I'm not defending bots, I'm just saying you might be surprised at how little performance difference it might make to remove several zombie bots from a sim.

but if you want a number... 5, the official total of allowed accounts per person (or is it household? I forget)


I dunno if/how it impacts other users' experience, but it sure improves mine lots =)

Oh come on! Please don't start a meme that convinces everyone that high draw distance is somehow affecting anyone elses performance. You have nothing but conjecture backing up your position. If I start seeing clubs that insist I turn down my draw distance I'm going to blame you for the idiocy.

I didn't start this meme. But here's the argument that it does:

The more stuff the server has to download, the more work it has to do.

The amount of stuff it has to download goes up as the square of your draw distance.

Increasing the amount of work the server does for you decreases the amount of time it has available for others.

Do you have a good argument that it doesn't?

So the question in my mind isn't "whether", but "how much". Feel free to measure it and let us know. I'll be happy to help. Anyone interested in a lag party?

BTW, the most likely effect of the lag we're talking about here would be slow scene rezzing. But I don't remember the details of server CPU time allocation well enough to say specifically what the effect would be on other things.

Finally, blame me for any idiocy you want, if it makes you feel better.

I wrote a big post with a bunch of conjecture on why this is all nonsense. But I honestly can't stomach people picking apart my guesses with equally baseless guesses of their own so I'll have to bow out.

As I noted, I don't think you are likely to ever have enough avatars with high draw distances in a region at once to have any perceptible effect.

But Elanthius is certainly someone who has the tools to do a test.

Swings and roundabouts.

An avatar with a short draw distance has to move around to see the content of a large area.
An avatar with a long draw distance does not have to move as much. It can cam.
I would guess that a moving avatar would be more of a load than a non-moving one.
They might both end up downloading the same amount of prim and texture data into their cache.

I seriously have some issues with SL now and I can not use highest settings at this time...

display driver stops responding, audio gets stuck in a loop and my pc freezes... ya know all that fun stuff crashing while camming.. etc etc

I agree, and I agree with your analysis about the special conditions where it might make any difference at all.

One is advised to reduce network bandwidth at certain RP sims, and at least it's a thing to which the server responds (somewhat), so unlike the local settings for "eye candy" rendering, it could matter a bit, sometimes, maybe.

Of course, in an area crowded with avatars, it's much worse to force them all to download tons of data *from* you, than it is to just download too much data yourself (because they've got you outnumbered ). But I'm not even gonna mention the three letter acronym for a slightly relevant measure.

I understand that it was just a joke, but I'd be interested in having this rumor confirmed/denied by tests - or by LL's words - so call me if you do such a test.

I cannot check it now, but an article was recently posted to the official blogs where residents are asked to write in comments their favourite SL rumors.
This could be definitively get in there...

By the way, Prospero Linden mentioned yesterday during the Beta Office Hours that bots cannot be used instead of actual residents for benchmarking and performance tests, as they're no way active as normal residents, and we don't have enough information about the 'average' resident activity to setup an 'active' bot.

I don't know so if I get this wrong, feel free to laugh. is all positional data for my viewer generated by the sim I'm on (via some kind of forward request/mechanism between the sims with the home sim correlating the data), or are extra-simulator properties requested, then passed from the sim containing directly to my viewer? or possibly just bounced from external sim through my current sim and correlated as an offset by the viewer? because as I see it, each of the those scenarios would have a different level of impact. I don't know enough about how the servers stream that data to guess myself (though the intermediate seems to make sense

although I can say that there's one assumption in there. my increased load isn't going to considerably impact anyone else UNTIL processing or bandwidth is saturated, before then it's just a matter of running the hardware/software at a higher but still sub peak load (at least presuming cycles/bandwidth are not scaled by usage percentage among all components)