The dangers of temp rezzers...

I thought that seeing as this relatively new phenomenon is sweeping across SL and I am getting many enquiries about it from my students etc, I thought a nice detailed post on the topic would suffice. They are also known as zero-prim rezzers.

To clarify; I am talking about the objects that constantly re-rez a temporary object to make it seem permanent.

What is a temp rezzer?

Second Life allows a scripter to rezz ("create" an object out of another prims inventory. That object can be set to be temporary. What this meant in the past was that the prims that made up that object was not counted against the land owners prim usage as Linden Labs decided, since temporary objects only last a couple of minutes at most, there was no need. This has recently changed so that at least some value of the prims are counted against the land owners prim allowance, but still not all of them.

A temp rezzer will then rezz an object from its prims inventory that is set to be temporary. It will then wait for about one minute and destroy the old object, rezz a new copy and no one is the wiser. The temporary clock on the server is reset back to zero. Prim counts stay lower than they should be, and no one even noticed it happen it happens so fast.

The problem

Prim counts were created by Linden Labs for a very good reason. The more prims there are on a sim, the more work the server has keeping them all in world. So a limit was instituted to stop people essentially overworking the servers. The use of temp-rezzers negates that restriction, allowing land owners to use more prims on their land than they are allowed, thereby causing additional strain on the server.

Also, because these objects are destroyed and re-rezzed every minute, that produces a lot of extra lag on the server.

Why is it dangerous?

The danger I want to point out is to the scripter creating, or the land owner using, a temp rezzer system. As described above, temp rezzers are really a hack, or for a stronger word, abuse, of the temporary settings of prims. They were never designed to be used in this fashion. Believe me when I say that Linden Labs is aware of these objects and that they are undoubtedly trying to find ways to counter them. Linden Labs has four options open to them:

1. Leave the situation as it is and see how widespread it becomes, its affect on the grid, etc. It would seem that Linden Labs has not chosen this due to point number 2 coming up.

2. Find a way to, in the short term, make these objects less effective and see if that will bring things back under control. Linden Labs has done this by making temporarily rezzed objects at least count to some degree to the prim usage on a land owners land.

3. Remove the temporary prim property completely. This is the easiest way to solve the problem but probably unlikely to be implemented as there are many valid and perfectly legitimate ways that temporary prims are used. Taking this course of action is very heavy handed and would lead to massive discontent in the community.

4. Find a long term solution that can detect and disable/remove scripts that perform the temp rezzing themselves. This is the most likely route and one I wouldn't be surprised to learn Linden is working on already. This is also very difficult because scripters are actually pretty clever at finding ways around restrictions, so it will be a constant battle between LL and the scripters to get these kinds of devices working.

Conclusion

So, the whole point is if you are currently or thinking of using a temp rezzing device, my advice would be don't. Linden Labs is sure to find a way to disable the features of temp rezzers making them useless and a waste of money. And the negative effects on sim servers, even if Linden never did a thing about temp rezzers, makes it a bad idea anyway.

I have talked numerous people out of these devices due to the uncertain manner in which they will be supported by LL in future. I hope this little article helps clear some things up for people.

Good post.

It's too bad that the "these put undue strain on the servers; stay within the limits" argument isn't good enough.

The limits chafe, sometimes, but we have to realize that when we do something that goes past them, we are doing it at the expense of somebody else. It's too bad that that isn't argument enough to convince people that they shouldn't do it. But, the self-interest arguments you post are, alas, necessary to convince many people that they shouldn't be using these things.

Thats exactly why I focussed on that. Those who use temp rezzers are often not interested in hearing about limits they are exceeding and what the impact of it is ... that is the reason they use them in the first place.

One argument that may, or may not, help people realise the negative side of these kinds of devices as well is that the abused/hacked use of temporary objects and rezzing objects from a prims inventory will make Linden Labs less likely to support further advances in this area of scripting and/or even start removing features to limit the abusers, thereby negatively impacting all those that have used these features within the restrictions it was meant for.

I can already see makers and users of these devices replying with "Linden made it possible for this to be achieved ... why should we not use it?" Well, thats kind of like saying well, the pavements there let me pee on it ... when in fact that is a pretty disgusting abuse of the pavement (sidewalk for our American cousins) and really makes it uncomfortable for everyone else using the pavement (the smell will probably be atrocious).

Anyways, nuff said, need to get some work done

Just to clarify, temp prims aren't counting against regular prim limits but have their own limits (unless this has changed again).
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Temp objects do also have some valid uses. Bullets for example can travel into "no script" areas which would make for quite a mess if using llDie() to tidy them up.
More here: http://rpgstats.com/wiki/index.php?title=TemporaryOnRez

Having said that, using temp objects to rez something that is supposed to appear permanent is a bad idea. Just because a person doesn't notice the re-rezzing does not mean it has no effect on the server (which has to recalculate everything each time the object is rezzed).
Temp rezzers also rely on repeated scans to detect when a temp object is cleaned up, and I think most people know that the over-use of scanners is a bad thing.
As mentioned above though, a lot of people either don't know how much lag they cause or don't care.

Not to mention re-transmitting the objects parameters to any clients within draw distance, effectively a full object update approximately once per minute.

Glad we finally have someone else to complain about other than landbots and campers

/me goes off to start 10 anti temprezzer threads.

I would have to agree with Nexus that there are some negitive effects produced by temp-rezzers and here's my experience with them . Way back when the idea of the temp-rezzer was new and a novel concept , while living on the mainland in the sim of Ambulyx which at the time was mostly made up of small tropical islands , I had cover'd my islands with tropical plants and tree's , I'm talkin' jungle . It looked great and was a popular spot for folks flying by to stop and explore . Then I got the idea that more was better so i wrote up a temp-rezzer and went wild with it to the point of creating a thick tropical jungle . It looked great however upon placing the last of many rezzers , I notice I could hardly move , in fact any one who came to the sim was stuck in mud going no where fast . After numerous calls to live help and lindens coming out to check it out , no one not even them could figure out what was causing this lagging stuck in mud like effect. After 3 days of this I had thought to myself , maybe I caused this and started deleteing the temp-rezzers , sure enough , that was the problem and the sim return to normal instantly . Since then I have not used the temp-rezzer and I don't recommend the use of them.

I remember reading in the Police Blotter of people being suspended for excessive use of the temp rezzers. I couldn't find anything current, but I did find this one about my second pet complaint camping:
Date: Monday, March 26, 2007
Violation: Community Standards: Disturbing the Peace, Scripted Objects
Region: Green Goblin
Description: Excessive use of camping chairs.
Action taken: Warning issued.

temp_on_rez scripts used to circumvent prim limits (such as to rez a mall on a 16sqm parcel) is abuse. An abuse report will remedy the situation, same as abuse reports of over-sized prims usually gets the prims removed (on mainlands of course).

If using temp_on_rez scripts to break through prim limits is actually abuse (which I honestly hope it is...I'm just as against them as everyone else here is), maybe someone ought to find the section of the TOS that they violate and post such a notice on SLExchange and SLBoutique where people are selling such things.

So I'm going to cop an abuse report for using 20x20floor tiles? LOL

We all missed No5 option for the Lindens.... Make more prims per server? Or is SL stuck with this amount and these ospec servers for the next 10 years seeing they have 6000 oddd of the things.

There is another course of action open to LL.

The mechanism that makes zero-prim rezzing work is the abilty to destroy a temp prim then immediately rerezz another. If the time taken between destroy and create is extremely small there is no noticeable flicker. However, if the time is is not small then flicker occurs and this can be so annoying as to render the zero-prim rezzer unuseable.

If LL were to introduce a time function, whereby a temp prim could not be rezzed within X seconds of a temp prim being destroyed, the zero-prim rezzer would die a natural death.

Rock

I haven't seen anything from LL saying that using zero-prim rezzers is an ARable offence, just some algebra about how they restricted it all to kill Starax's wand.

People in one sim where I share land use temp-rez to generate sections of their permanent structures, and the whole sim dips time dilation like clockwork when they respawn.

I think that LL wont entirely remove temp objects because that will cause guns to be about worthless ue to the fact that in a war sim the prim count will instantly sky rocket to the point the sim is full, i agree that we shouldnt have temp rezzers but if we do it shouldnt be a sim lagging script, if you have a script that taxes majority of the sims resouces in a temp rezzer you will end up killing that sim, eventually it will probably cause more sim resets because LL needs to keep the servers running and when we have constant scripts running in "permanent" objects that shouldnt be there then the servers get more and more bandwidth used until SL is so laggy that unless you have a T3 you cant even play.

so overall keep temp objects, disable certain functions for them




since i dont know exactly how many prims count in temp objects im just going to say this: if the servers are trying to handle twice as many prims per sim then they should, they will break, thus causing sims to crash(maybe permantly) and more lag to SL



lol, MMORPGS have the ability to be hacked, but guess what(im talking to you stupid people) that doesnt mean you are supposed to. In a way society has made it possible to go on a mass killing spree, but should you? No...... its wrong
The government has made it possible to buy dangerous chemicals, but does that mean you should fashion it into a bomb? how about strap the bomb on your chest and be a terrorist for the day? Nope, just because you can do something doesnt mean you should, now why do i sound like my parents.......

The ethic is "if you don't actively prevent me from doing something, that's basically permission granted to do it."

I agree with you, but without some social leverage (using temp rezzers for permanent structures being clarified as an abuse of TOS) you're always going to hit the brick wall (sadly not temporary) of "you can't break the code, because then guns/whatever won't work".

I had thought about getting a temp rezzer to exceed the limits on my tiny plot of land but after reading the first post of this thread, I've decided not to do it...

So that's one down. =)

- Infrared

Very nice Rock. There are already pauses in scripting, such as after using llInstantMessage where the script is paused for two seconds after using it to prevent abuse of it, that this can definitely be a feature to incorporate. I cannot see a legitimate use of temporary rezzed prims where instant re-rezzing after die is called is required. I may be wrong of course seeing as I haven't scripted every different type of device (yet ) ... but a very clever idea indeed.

Until I saw this thread, I was an enthusiastic user of zero-prim rezzers.

I make shoes, and I can sell a lot more when I can show off a 3D version instead of a photo. When i discovered I could rez a 50-prim shoe in my store I went wild. I had 10 of these devices in my old store, but concluded that the lag in the sim came from a recently opened nightclub. Imagine my surprise when I relocated my store to a nice new empty Class 5 server, loaded up my store with rezzers, and the resultant lag was awful.

So, no more rezzers for me. Pity, though. All those 50-prim shoes lined up - they sure looked great...

Eponymous (Epy) Trenchmouth

The problem is the same work arounds used to by pass the inbuilt LL delays for email, IM's etc. will also work in this situation. It would have to be handled on a prim basis not a script basis.

Temp rezzers aren't all nasty. I use temp rezzer for my sim scanner because I felt it was nicer to not send permanent prims over other people lands, even if i would llDie() them after a while... A delay wouldn't break my code, most other changes would. The big advantage of temp prims is that they aren't returned to the Lost+Found Folder.



My scanner rezzes all its temp prims at the same position, I don't know how you would determine it is a legitimate use programmatically.


Or even on agent basis, as a temp prim could rez another temp prim.

This is related to Grey Goo Fence i guess.

I'm not sure why the problem happens, but I can sit and watch (and experience, unfortunately) the region time dilation drop in accordance with the blink of buildings I know were temp-on-rez.

However, we use three "rezzing platforms" at our island store- not temp on rez, just regular objects rezzed by script with llDie commands to clear them off. No apparent spikes or problems even when some people are hammering the rezzing system. It's comparing mainland to island, I know, but I have to wonder if there's some property of the temp-on-rez in objects, or whether it's the specific system the people are using that causes these really obvious and regular blows to sim performance.

Eponymous, you need a temp rezzer vender. Ive seen them where it will rezz the 50 prim shoe, you can select next, and it will rezz the next shoe in the vender, so instead of 10 rezzboxes displaying your shoes all at the same, its only one at a time.

I use a (as in SINGLE) temp-rez'er to show off my jewelry. It allows me to have all of my inventory "in sight" for the customer to review before purchasing. Right now, it constantly cycles through everything I have in its inventory, delaying perhaps a minute between items. I have contacted the manufacturer to ask if we could avoid the product cycling and only display an item if the vendor is in use and if a new item is selected, to remove the old one. This way, I can help to limit the load it causes and still be able to have my wares on display.

I notice this too - Time Dilation drops from .98 to .88 or so every 1.5 mins or about. New builds nearby apparently are temp on rez, and every time they blink off/on, the time drops too. This sim has never had lag since at least last November.

The irony, they display a big sign that says: "Now with more bugs than a roach motell" and "Got Lag?" and "Second Life" but they are contributing to the lag themselves!

I finally got sick of time dilation dropping (I think 10% every 30 seconds is kind of beyond reasonable) so I AR'd it.

The AR was resolved with no action taken. So if you want to use temp rezzers, I'd take that as a reasonable assumption that you can do what you like with them, and that the existing coded restrictions are considered enough.