UNANNOUNCED Scripting Limits? ARE YOU KIDDING ME?????

So this morning we log on to find that ALL of our parcels on the Spiazzo sim have had scripts DISABLED. Every bird; every bat; every ghost; every Christmas tree. NO SCRIPTS ARE RUNNING. In a panic, we contacted Live Help and requested a sim restart. No help. We then went BACK to Live Help who told us that WE HAD TOO MANY SCRIPTS RUNNING SO NOW NONE WILL RUN. We were told to "remove items until the scripts on the others restart." We have now removed 12 birds--and still NOTHING. We have added NOTHING in the past three days, so this isn't something we inadvertently caused by adding "just one more script." ANY suggestions? This could break our business.

there had been rumors of this, first i have heard of it happen.

Couple questions...

Private Estate or Mainland? Do you own the entire sim or only a portion?

what Linden told that info, and did you request a supervisor?

More info please

~Brie

What the heck? Since when have they just turned things off without a warning?

Mainland....we own about 3/4 of the sim; two sides of Linden road. There are three other businesses on the sim--a 1024 with a clothing store; a small photography studio; and a freebie/junk store. My partner talked to Live Help before I posted and was told it was "too many scripts." At your suggestion, he went back and requested a supervisor. They have done something on the LL end to once again allow the scripts to run. "Ethan" is now explaining....will post as soon as the explanation is complete. Scripts were disabled at about midnight SLT.

Lob it back to support and insist on a better answer from them. I just teleported to some land in Spiazzo. The scripts in my attachments keep running, and I was also able to rez a scripted vehicle that worked fine.

looks like mainland to me, judging from the big map.
that means they dont "own the sim" anyways, and its a full region, which shouldnt have script limits at all.

Ethan: I enabled collisions again for the Region, for some reason, that was disabled.



So at midnight last night, for "some reason" LL disabled collisions in our region. As it's mainland, I'm assuming only LL can do that?? Then, a Live Help "specialist" tells us it's because we're "overscripted" and tells us to start removing scripted products. Now we're told it's "disabled collisions"???? Can anyone disable collisions on mainland? Is this something we may have inadvertently done? It wasn't on any one parcel, it was the ENTIRE SIM. Everything we had that was done with a wandering script now needs waypoints reset. This could take all day. I am FURIOUS.

Thanks for the heads up to ask for a supervisor...I was too angry to think that far ahead.

Edited to add:

Ethan was asked how this could have occurred:

Ethan: I'm not sure how, as it would have to be an estate manager or the owner to disable that in Region/Estate DEbug


It's MAINLAND.

We don't "own the sim", we own parcels on the sim--about 3/4 of the sim. Yes, it's mainland.

yep, only LL can do that on mainland.
LL is doing a rolling restart of the whole grid to deploy server version 1.30.2 right now... maybe its a bug in that server version?

I hope that it's something that doesn't eventually have an effect on ALL our parcels on mainland across the grid. We know that we're heavily scripted, and we've waited to see how we'll be affected by scripting limits. I hope this isn't a sign of things to come and was honestly just a snafu or a bug.

the reason i asked mainland or private.. only LL can disable on mainland, estate owners on private.

The reason i asked if you owned all or part.. maybe a neighbor complained on lag or script error, and some overzealous Linden disabled scripts to see if they could find the issue.


I realize that as mainland, it *shouldn't* have script limits. I'm sorry you have to reset it all, and i would indeed push them for answers.

~Brie

If the scripting limits work the way they seem to have in this case then they will cause chaos, so I think it's more likely that something went wrong with the upgrade.

Whatever happened to the stats collection for determining how to set up the script pools? Whats the matter? Stats show more than expected because Lindens don't actually use their product so to skew down the stats to further justify content destruction LL starts jacking up the residents?

Yeah, this sounds nothing like what they have talked about for eventual scripting limits, and exactly what one would expect if a neighbor (or, in theory, any resident trying to use the road, for example) complained about sim performance and LL confirmed (correctly or not) that the scripts on one owner's parcel was to blame. The alternate explanation, that it's related to updating the sim to 1.30.2, would be plausible except that this process isn't supposed to start until 07:00 PDT today. (It's just too much of a stretch to imagine that LL used the fledgling script performance measurements to proactively screen for sims with script lag and do something about them before the update.)

Just visited your place and all seems to be working.You would be a dead duck without scripts that's for sure.

Here's the upshot of the conversation with Ethan:

[07:30 AM] Ethan: Hello Mickey



[07:32 AM] Mickey Heaney: hello Ethan, i was speaking to Sheldon a short while ago as every moving object that i sell with physical attributes has frozen this morning when i logged on...he did a sim restart to no avail, and then told me that the region was overloaded and i needed to remove some items to start the others up......



[07:32 AM] Mickey Heaney: i have since removed many items, and nothing has changed



[07:33 AM] Mickey Heaney: last night all the items were present and working well, so why am i having to delete a lot of my stock to try and resolve things?



[07:34 AM] Mickey Heaney: i was not aware that mainland sims had scripting limits



[07:35 AM] Ethan: let me check something...



[07:35 AM] Ethan: ok, does the object work now?



[07:37 AM] Mickey Heaney: yes what did you do?!



[07:42 AM] Ethan: I enabled collisions again for the Region, for some reason, that was disabled.



[07:42 AM] Ethan: vehicles and some moving objects would stop working with that being disabled



[07:43 AM] Mickey Heaney: how did that get turned off?!



[07:43 AM] Mickey Heaney: i have just removed a lot of my stock, and didnt need to



[07:44 AM] Mickey Heaney: why didnt Sheldon spot that?!



[07:45 AM] Ethan: we could offer you a rollback to an earlier time, if you wish to restore these objects.



[07:47 AM] Mickey Heaney: no its fine, but how did it get turned off?



[07:50 AM] Ethan: I'm not sure how, as it would have to be an estate manager or the owner to disable that in Region/Estate DEbug



[07:50 AM] Mickey Heaney: its mainland lol



[07:52 AM] Ethan: maybe that was part of what was checked on earlier. We can restart a region in a state without collisions being on. If a region has issues with physical colliders before, it might be good to attempt that



[07:52 AM] Ethan: perhaps that was why.


So we still have no real answers, we need to replace the stock we picked up, and we need to reset a lot of other scripts. GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR.

I know it does suck to have this happen especially if you are a business...

HOWEVER,

It disturbs me to see Arielyn admit to knowing that they are "Heavily scripted", which says to me they more than likely know they are chewing up script time on the sims they operate in, which sucks for the other occupants of the sims.

And this notion that mainland should have "no limits" is just farcical.

As long as their is an unmetered resource for everyone to use then it is going to be exploited and abused - many of us know the Tragedy of the Commons, so it is an old tired argument but is still valid nevertheless.

We are looking to buy 1/2 a sim on mainland and people like Arielyn scare the crap out of me - the idea that we could be paying for 1/2 sim tier and have our script use and sim use degraded because of 1 'heavily scripted' object(s) user/business sharing the sim with us.

People really need to start caring more about their impact on the grid and the sims they are in.

I would have thought the Openspace fiasco was enough to make people at least start think about how heavy their script/sim use is and how it affects residents and sims sharing the server.

I cannot believe i am saying this, but i hope LL initiates some sort of parcel script running limits sooner rather than later so we can avoid these kinds of problems and everyone gets rightful use of what they pay for.

Just what exactly is, "heavy script usage" and how does one measure it on the mainland? I can tell how many scripted objects there are on the mainland, but have no measure of the load on the sim. If we had the tools, then we could attempt to manage our load.

If it was a neighbor complaining then it is a horrible way to resolve the situation since the neighbors will also be affected by the same disabled collisions.

If it's the Spiazzo sim, the number of active scripts isn't outlandish and the Script Time is low. However, the Physics Time is very high. The Total Frame Time is just a little above the ideal maximum, on average. So, if that's the sim, the number of scripts isn't too bad, but the Physics Time is.

This happened to me some months ago. (Mainland)
All of a sudden my bows didn't work and my arena dummy refused to dodge my arrows.
Well, not that I could have fired any

Concierge told me that "someone (Linden) was working on the sim" and "must have left physics turned off". They just turned it on again and all was OK.

The sim had not been giving problems previously or even a few hours before I noticed the problem. There was a Zyngo palace in the sim that might have been loading up scripts and caused LL to check it out. 8192 m and only 1 prim left.

If anyone had reported a problem for investigation, it would not have necessarily been on (my) sim. The server box runs four sims, and a massive scripting load on any of the four would cause swapping issues for the other three - as well as for itself.



Perhaps the initial response that the OP got from support was just an example of LL's internal communications being SNAFU.


LL are going to put limitations on scripts at some point in the future, but I gather that is some time off yet.
I believe that before they implement that, they are going to provide tools so that individual parcel owners (on Mainland) can have the equivalent of 'top scripts' for their parcels.

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Statistics_Bar_Guide

The Time section of the Statistics Window seems to be key.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
" Time

The following are the different times listed in the Time section of the Statistics bar. Click Time to hide or display this panel.

* Total Frame Time - The sum of all time values listed below it, this measures how much time it takes the simulator to run everything that the simulator is trying to do each frame.
o < 22 ms - The simulator is healthy, everything is running as fast as it can, and more scripts can be added without reducing the performance of individual scripts.
o approx. 22 ms - The simulator is healthy, but there are probably a lot of scripts and agents on the simulator, meaning that script execution is being slowed down in order to maintain the simulator frame rate.
o > 22 ms - The simulator is experiencing severe load, either due to physics or a large number of agents, such that even by slowing down script execution it is impossible to compensate. The simulator frame rate has been reduced as a result.
* Net Time - The amount of time spent responding to incoming network data.
* Sim Time (Physics) - The amount of time that frame spent running physics simulations. In general, this should be less than 5 milliseconds.
* Sim Time (Other) - The amount of time that frame spent running other simulations (agent movement, weather simulation, etc.)
* Agent Time - The amount of time spent updating and transmitting object data to the agents.
* Images Time - The amount of time spent updating and transmitting image data to the agents.
* Script Time - The amount of time spent running scripts.
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

There is also a "Free Time" not mentioned above.


I don't know how definitive this is.

In Leuran sim, the Total Time Frame has been just over 22 for the past few days, with scripts occasionally running very slowly.
I suspect the Escort Club has some new gizmo.

However, I see the same sort of Frame Time on other sims that do not appear to be script loaded. ??

Briana, we have had NO complaints from neighbors. I know we are heavily scripted because we sell BIRDS. If someone tells us what the limits are for optimum sim performance, we will certainly conform to those standards. In fact, I invite you to come to our sim (yes, Phil, it's Spiazzo) and use your obvious wealth of knowledge to tell us what you think we should be using. Please also visit the other three plots on the sim and let me know what you think THEY should be using. Tell me what will prevent lag; what will be "fair"; and what you consider to be "neighborly." Then you and I can work together to determine which parts of the scripts we've paid to have done (since we aren't scripters) are causing what you deem to be the issues. We can then find a scripter who can rescript those items to be more efficient (you can help with that) and/or we can find a way to advertise the products without them being seen in action (we can meet for that after we determine the other factors).

Telling me folks like me "scare the crap" out of you without solid answers scares the crap out of ME. Instead of complaining, tell me what to do to fix what you think the problem is. Yes we have lots of scripts. How many are ok before you are frightenend Briana?

That is the plan. Memory limits anyway. Remains to be seen what the limits will be.

In the meantime on private islands the estate manager can figure it out if they want to. There is only 22 milliseconds available for the region. If your region never shows any spare time you probably notice walking is a problem and scripts become unresponsive. So if the estate manager adds up the average script time by user then they can pretty much see if someone is using more than their share. Of course then there are the avatars that come into the sim and some of them lugging around various multi tools, radars, resizers, huds, etc. can really drag a sim down.

For instance on Kali Isle I rent half to Blue Blood. They use a nominal 3-4 milliseconds and so do I. So we are pretty even. That leaves a good chunk for avatars and overall it all works out.

Diligence is required to manage a region so it doesn't belly up. And that means a restart every so often to deal with the mono JIT related issues or whatever all is involved in that problem that builds up over time like script sludge. Avatars leave but their scripts stay in memory etc. And watching for script time griefers. Once I had one that refused to go away. This was before we could see who was using a lot of time. So by process of elimination I got rid of someone using literally over 20 milliseconds of script time to grief the region. Now we can see them in top scripts and boot them immediately.

I have no idea how large estates could possibly properly manage this issue since it requires so much hands on effort. So the script pools will probably be a boondoggle for large estates while angering mainland residents that were used to using all they wanted 24*7. Glitzy clubs with loads of rotating disco lights on a 4096 will probably become a historical artifact etc. And chicken farms on small parcels will probably also vanish.

Ann, I understand what you're saying and I agree completely. If we KNEW what we could use and work within those parameters, we'd be more than happy to do so. Unfortunately, no one has told us what the "bar" is before lagging out a sim. Is it separated by parcel size? Is there a resource pool for each sim or set of sims? How do we "dole" that out? We'd be happy to only use our fair share if we KNEW WHAT OUR FAIR SHARE WAS! We have new scripts running as well as old scripts--scripts that we purchased no mod so we can't even give them to a new scripter to make them more efficient (if, indeed, they aren't efficient in the first place--I have NO clue). We are builders, and we are responsible land owners. We'd play by any rules, implied or explicit, if we understood them. I have SEARCHED for information on what in a script determines how much of a sim's resources it uses, but I've come up empty. Honestly, we're not out to screw anyone.