New Features? Big Deal. Fix the LAG

It's nice to see that Linden is obviously receptive to adding new features to the UI, building and script modules, but where is work being done to make our in-world environment more efficient? It's incredibly annoying to me that the company has obviously chosen to ignore the basic issue of performance -- lag.

We all constantly wrestle with performance issues and it has gotten to the point where our constant buddy, lag, is an integral part of the game. We simply have come to expect that dancing at a club or playing a game of Tringo will be an exercise in dealing with a stuttering, headache inducing user experience. That's not acceptable. Several observations:

--There's no way I'll accept that having 30 avs on a sim should cause it to slow down. As the service grows, you can be certain popular locations (Bad Girls, Ice Dragon's Playpen, Paradise Island, etc.) will grow ever more popular. I think it reasonable that a sim should be able to support at least 100 avs with no decrease in speed. Does simply TPing to a sim really need to cause such a massive performance hit? I ain't buyin' it.
--Why should repetitive animations (such as dance pads) cause performance to suffer for everyone on a sim?
--Why am I forced to sit through the downloading of textures for sims that have not changed? I've not modified my house, for example, in weeks. However, every time I log in, I sit though the regeneration of all shapes and textures. I have my cache set to the highest setting. Isn't it reasonable to assume that when I land at a sim I've been to before ONLY the items that have been modified should be downloaded? Aren't many textures common across sims and, if so, why should they be downloaded each time I TP?
--Why shouldn't I be able to set a cache size of, say, 25 Gb for textures. SL shouldn't even bother communicating with the servers if I have a texture loaded in my cache.
--Why must there be constant communication between my workstation and the SL servers? Take a look at your modem lights when you're on SL. Even if you're standing still in an empty sim that has fully generated, there's constant activity going on. Why?
--I've messed with my graphics settings ad nauseum to find the perfect balance between performance and display but there's still no rhyme or reason as to when I'll be subjected to numbing lag. I've been to relatively busy sites and had the service performance smoothly, been alone in a sim and am lucky to get four fps. Why?

And, just to let you know that I'm not whining over an issue that may be on my side, I run SL on a machine with a 4 GHz processor, 4 Gb of RAM, a top of the line 512 Mb video card and a 10 Mbit connection.

Well it's the residents that are responsible for the content in the sims, you can hardly blame LL for people filling up a sim with dance pads. I was in a sim with about 70 avatars last night, and though it did take a while for things to load up, once they did, the performance was fine. Are you having these probs in particular areas? I'm not sure what you're asking to be improved.

Didn't they just do an upgrade back in like December that lowered the overall FPS of sims, and they said all sims FPS would be the same. No matter how many people or scripts were on the sim?


well I swear they did, it didn't help obviously, I have top of the line computer and components. Texture rezzing is a huge one for me. Not to mention lagging thru sim lines and then d/cing.

Stop adding eye candy and focus on the real issues.

No it didn't mean that all sims would run the same, the sim's performance is still dictated by the content within it. They changed the way the sim runs scripts, so that one script could not take more than its fair share of resources.

I suppose you can argue that maybe there should be a limit on the number of scripts that can run in a sim, but that still misses the point: With the exception of the very first time I visit a sim, why should it matter? Why not download the scripts to my workstation, cache them, then have their processing be handled locally?

It would be interesting to know whether lag is caused by processing done on the servers or because of the contant bandwidth usage necessary to keep my workstation updated as they execute (probably some combination of the two).

Either way, it's "take a deep breath time" for Linden to sit down and rethink the basic architecture of how this service allocates server and bandwidth resources.

If stuff was run on your own machine, everyone would experience sl in a different way. The very thing that makes SL different is how things are done on the fly and then constantly streamed to you. If you didn't have it constantly streaming, you wouldn't see the prim your buddy just created. And running scripts on your side? Well aside from what I have mentioned above, no-ones IP would be safe, and it also opens up huge security problems. Do you really want to run scripts written by anon users on your own machine?

Good point about the local running of scripts. Touche.

I wonder if there's some way to "gate" scripts. So, for example, certain actions -- let's say animations -- may be disabled when bandwidth on a server reaches a particular threshold. So you're av doesn't squirm around on a dance pad -- too bad -- at least the poor blighter trying to play his Slingo game won't suffer for your camping. Just a thought.

My teory on lag specially on iced. when there and lag happens it usual on the stat bar under time shows that images are using time thus stealing time from script making everythig slow down.
so aint the main factor to lag if too much textures have to load and reload?

But animations are played on the client -- the av squirming on the dance pad isn't using any bandwidth. On the other hand, that Slingo game...

USERS create lag, son. Since every "tourist" in SL wears sh*tloads of cr*p that's scripted for bling and whatnot, you get LAG.

Stop wearing scripted junk and you'll decrease the lag in your immediate vicinity.

Textures are an immensely large contributor to loading time

Darkness's Reciepe for lag reduction

No textures larger than 256x256.

No listens on open channels (this means on AV attachments as well folks)

Only allow scripts that are absolutely necessary

Avoid excessive hover text

No flexiprims (including hair and clothing)

No prim hair

No Bling

And 30+ AVs in one sim IS GOING TO LAG. The only question is how many of the other things you do to make this lag as small as possible.