Openspace Announcement Discussion with Jack Linden

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Argos Hawks
Eclectically Esoteric

Join Date: Jan 2007
Location: Chillin (24,7,365)
Posts: 869

"We're long overdue for a Class 6 server. Bringing in a new wave of faster, more capable servers should really open up the possibilities."
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It was reported 5 or 6 months ago they are working on Cl 6 servers these will be 64 bit machines but this is a major change to the operating system as it also has to work at the 32 bit level certainly not a cure all and not an easy conversion.
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"You could even let sims scale up the other way, charging roughly double for 256x256 with 30,000 prims and double the processing power. Limiting the Total Frame Time on sims (like regular sims are currently limited to 22ms)"
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Well again this would be a great idea but for comparison you have a 1 gallon ( or liter) bucket that equates to frame time. You can not extract more or less from the container or you destroy the contents. Frame time is exactly what it says the time to draw a single frame on your screen. Decrease it and guess what you have either lost sync or the size displayed on your monitor. For want of a better explanation it is hard wired. While you can control the number of prims allowed as they are not a calculation of frame time scripts take what they need from the frame and can not be limited.

You are only limited to 22.2 ms of frame time because that's the time allocated to the video in a single frame. Total frame time is more than 22.2 as it is also composed of the structure to support the picture. i.e. a sync signal chroma information then 21 lines of video. So we have to live in the structure of the signal.

Of course you can go out and buy a new video card that scans at 2 or 4 times the rate of your current one )) then you can have all kinds of frame rate time.

Oh by the way the last time I purchase a line quad unit the going price was $4000.00
so this is not really a good solution.

Lets say you have a dual nvidia 8800 setup with 756k of memory on each. Well this is a lot of over kill since your game fps will register on a good Sim 80 FPS well guess what you just do not get to see the 80 FPS most likely your monitor is set to 60 hertz vertical rescan therefore you get 60fps at best. Even if you can make 75 hertz work it is a match with the base signal of 60 hertz and you will get a headache )) from the jitter and pulsing.

Many time when viewing movies in a native format you can use a 72 hertz refresh as it is a multiple of the base film frame rate of 24 fps. So while a frame rate indicates a very successful processing of the video signal you do not get all of it for the pleasure of viewing

Right now I am hovering above a full island (15000) prims laded with 86 campers

Conover of 336

Frame time of oh you pick it 30 to 50 ms
sim time other of another pick 12 to 18 ms
script time will vary from 3 ms to 8 depending on what the priority items will allow

This is a major abuse of the grid and while Open Space has its own set of problems there is no excuse for this oh yeah they have a traffic of 110574

It is time for you at the Lab to also take these places to task. This is a flagrant abuse of the system and should also be addressed. Traffic below 10,000 is expected traffic above 100,000 is not and there are many. You want to talk about excessive use of the limited resources.


Take action across the board Jack...

LL has the ability to limit avatar count, they limit texture size, they EXPANDED openspace prim count, and police it with a cap everywhere. They can control the execution of scripts, and there are many functions with built in pauses. There are really no aspects of second life that aren't clearly defined and limited technically.

But this "abuse" thing, they can't tell us what it is, really. How many scripts is overuse? Can i tell on the statistics screen? No, it's the same one as we have for regular sims, so who knows? Have they defined "abuse" at all in any legally binding, Terms of Use way? Nope.

Can i use 1/4 the scripts as a normal sim? 1/16? How many? If we're talking water trees and rocks, am I allowed scripts at all?

They can't claim that any of this was unforeseen. Openspaces aren't being used any differently than before the push to sell huge numbers of them. They just kept right on taking money, bragging about how many were being sold, all the while, in my opinion, knowing the situation was unsustainable.

Openspace owners have the right to a reasonable term of use, and a reasonable shift in pricing when the time comes, and not some punitive farce for breaking a non-existent rule. To revise what they were offered after taking a non-refundable setup fee, based on a non-existant standard, and almost doubling the price, restricting resale of what was sold as resellable... it's heinous bait and switch.

This is all just window dressing. Here's the real problems:

1. Bad engineering analysis.
2. Bad business analysis.
3. Bad business decision.
4. Bad communication and public relations.
5. Ignoring the user base throughout this process.

Conspiracy theory? Nope. Just incompetence.

LL, rethink you're processes,and you motivation. Follow accepted engineering practice and at least consult with your user base before making pronouncements.

Admit you made a mistake, LL, and come up with acceptable and viable fall back positions, which are also known as "alternatives."

Concur.

Accounts running traffic falsification bots should be permanently deleted with no warning.

It is a matter of ethics. No ethics? Why should anyone consider any words out of your mouth or published anywhere to be the truth since you lack ethics and therefore may legitimately and fairly be assumed to be a liar 24*7? This has always been baffling to me.

I'm not sure how you can say that. At the very, very least, go back to the post about openspaces that has been cited.

*They were addressing overuse, so they knew there was overuse.
*They took no steps to put any technical limitation on future openspace overuse
*They didn't even bother do define overuse.

No, they kept right on smiling, bragging, and taking gross amounts of money, all the while, I believe, knowing the service they were selling was unsustainable as it was being marketed. I think they knew that very soon they'd would be forced to alter the service in a way that would make it less desirable.

Maybe I am wrong. Maybe they didn't know they were going to eff the whole thing up with the price increase and such. But they did know that the sustainability of the service was in question, and took no steps to make people who were buying it aware in the purchase process.

You can't tell me the guy standing up to his ankles in water doesn't know the real estate he is selling might end up being less than what he's marketing it. No, this goes beyond incompetence no matter how optimistically you look at it. Given that most of these changes don't even ADDRESS "overuse", i tend to be far less than optimistic.

Let me put up a small technical note. Trying to set the limit for scripts by pure number of scripts is not valid. DOing it by the actual amount of script time used by the script might be.

TO illustrate let me give an example.
A long time ago I used a commercially available vendor in our texture shop. If I remember correctly its script time from the estate tools was about .6

Given the size of our texture shop that was killing us. SO I took it upon myself to write my own vendor. Total Script time .012.
Both vendors used 3 scripts each mine was actually considerably lighter on the system.

So simple number of scripts is not a good measure as there are well written ones and poorly written ones. Its the actual processor time used in executing the scripts that matters.

Just a FYI

Instead of creating tonight I am visiting Full Islands (15000 prims) that have a population over the 40 standard that are reasonable.

#2 68 users Frame time 33ms with all the other stats

#3 64 users Frame 40ms other 18 ms script 2.5ms conover 141 traffic 92,000

#4 56 users Frame 22.3 - 400 ms traffic 78000 traffic oh now this is a special case it is
an OS this person is a definite abuser

#5 22.7 to 56 ms frame so damn slow it will not even register 74000 traffic

#6 24.7 to 40 frame 73000 + traffic users 54


There are 230 sims with a traffic over 10,000 in the search for camping most are full Islands This is a massive load on the grid

How about doing something about this Jack

Most that I visited tonight were so lagged that movement was not possible this has to hurt the system to the degree that the OS Sim is not of consequence Next try a search for sex and look at the numbers over a 10k traffic

Lets get real where the lag is it does not reside in the OS Sims or even in the bots it is the camping Sims generating massive grid loads. Just a lot of users sitting around creating a massive load.

Want to cure the problem pay them not to camp and kill the traffic stat as it is a worthless number and just creates this problem kill it tomorrow and watch what happens

Delete all stay awake scripts and watch what happens.

There are certainly many other places where your grid is loaded than from Open Space Islands.

All it takes is a little due diligence to observe where your problems exist.

I am sure you know that term it is what you do before an investment is made.

No boys er bots )) just noobs camping for lindens ))

Many, MANY of us have been crying for the total death of traffic for YEARS!

That is one bandwagon I can happily get on. It has been gamed since day 1. No one has ever been able to come up with a traffic system that can't be gamed. They took away the monetary bonuses for high traffic several years ago thinking that would fix it. It didnt because of popular places and later search rankings.

It just needs to go totally.

Search sex over 300 Sims with a traffic over 12,000 we will give them a little latitude since they do do more traffic )) that's a lot of islands punching the performance line.

So time to spread the blame a little Jack

Oh, I agree completely. That's part of my perspective on the whole thing, and why this use argument for punitive pricing and bait and switch behavior is a farce. The complexity of what really lags the grid is not something that even LL can define for us. Odd, then, that they would expect the owners to know what excessive is.

The fact that jacking up the price, restricting resell ability, revoking the non-profit discount, etc., does nothing to address use, though, and in fact favors those who are perceived to be "abusers", is quite telling, don't you think?

Nope, he's an obama alt redistributing the wealth.

Sure. But rate limiting that on the server side should certainly be feasible (if it isn't, LL has deeper problems--no distributed simulation system can survive resource starvation).

It surprises me that a company whose business directly depends on a distributed simulation running on a fleet of a few thousand servers could have this problem in the first place, actually. Regardless of the impact on residents and owners (which is a customer retention issue), it doesn't say good things about the LL grid's ability to scale up (which is a corporate survival issue, even if they've managed to work around it with private islands and dedicated resources for a while).

If I were an LL engineer (which I'm not), I'd be really worried that my salary depended on something that falls over so readily when people use it.

You know the funny thing I spent a couple of years looking at what did and did not make lag on the grid both mainland and then when we moved to the island. Several Lindens actually studied what I did to fix things. The reduction is allowable size of uploaded image was a direct action based on stuff I pioneered. I played hell with people in the forums telling me I was full of it with my findings. Now the stuff I found is part of the official lag reduction guide and most on the grid use my findings to reduce lag. Just a humorous note on how much of this world is user driven and how often the ones that work stuff out are left behind.

I agree they should be able to limit based on the running time for the scripts. I do believe it will take some coding so may not be instantly possible.

I was simply trying to get people to think before they demanded a hard limit on the NUMBER of scripts (which I have seen many arguing for). NUMBER is irrelevant and easily gamable.

1 cpu = 1 full region = 256*256 = 65,536 sqm
1 cpu = 4 os region = (256*256)*4 = 262,144 sqm

My question is:
Does configurable (terra-formable) land place a certain amount of load on the system all by itself?

and, if so;
Does this load quadruple in regards to 4 os per cpu -- regardless of prims, scripts, avatars, etc.?

and, if total land-area IS a factor in load on a cpu, perhaps it should be something to consider in all this.

Just curious.

P.S. I know this won't excuse LL for their lack of proper communication and sensitivity with their paying customers. However, if the above is true, then at least it makes the issues here a little more understandable.

I suppose I am a total pessimist, but I simply cannot believe, looking at their response, that use and lag is really the motivation here. If so, why doesn't the response address use?



The second is fine, the last is fine. 1, 3 are the most controversial, and they totally FAVOR people who overuse sims. After all, people who profit from their sims are more apt to be able to pay their fiddy.

The fourth is one that is really sticky and overlooked, I think. That is something that would not be adjusted because of overuse, not adjusted because of, say, inflation, or a slow time for LL's sales, etc. That is just an overt change in the agreement those buying the service expected, and only a few months, or less, since they purchased.

I understand talking lag and use, but in the end, i really can't believe that is the motivation. I have to look at what they are doing, which seems to be very counter to what they are saying. This stinks of bait and switch, regardless of the motivation.

I have no statistics to back this up at all so PLEASE take it with alot of salt.

I would suspect that it does in some way affect the load (although I have no idea if it is client side or server side)

4 sims with customizable land textures. If they are not the same from one to another on the core that's an increase in texture processing (nor sure if its client side or server side or both).

4 sims with thier own terraforming geometries. Geometry = polygons = processing time. We can see that with simple prims versus tortured ones. 1000 cubes wont crash a sim 1000 twisted tori will (read badly overdone hair). THis one I suspect is both client and server side.

How much it contributes to the problem I dont know. But notice LL is way happier with folks that make thier OS all water

I see alot of CPU and rendering talk going on here. People its not a performace issue. The only thing that was under performing was the accounting dept at LL. I say Im not willing to give up anything. Private Island sims cost L$5.3 per prim per month to maintain, and Mainland is even lower. The new pricing places the OpenSpacs sims at a whopping L$8.8 per prim per month, and offers worse performance than a parcel on a private island that offers the same prim count.

Actually I am trying to dispell some of it. And answer curiosity from some.

Demanding caps on the number of scripts is useless. And an honest question about what might be causing lag is never missplaced.

Read through what alot of people are demanding. Caps on the number of scripts, prims, avatars. Number of these are not the issue. time used by them might be in the battle for efficient use.

I'd bet that whatever happens hard limits are coming for ALL land. Might be a long ways out. But they are coming. A little education is never a bad thing

Jack, you talked of an analysis, Show us the analysis. I think you have some Bad assumption s or your analysis is wrong. Based on your pricing and the cost of processors these days. Your Wrong, Plain and Simple, Unless you can show us the users your analysis. The only conclusion is Your trying to Rape the Users for Profit..

I myself would love to see the numbers. I have spent years working to optimize performance for myself and those that work closely with me. Such numbers could be quite educational on MANY fronts.

I want a refund on my void sim that I've barely USED let alone ABUSED. I'm so angry about this, I doubt there's anything LL can say at this point to smooth things over, but you're welcome to try.


Thanks to the price increase, I've been having a TON of fun with OpenSim technology. I can't express how much I've learned as well. Thanks LL.