Initial Misc 1.7 Findings

This thread is intended as a "here's what I've experienced so far"-- but without whining or griping. There are bound to be some bugs in 1.7. Let's be patient.

Initial findings for me:

* Some things seem to work very fast (inventory! Woot!) while "lag" seems to appear in other areas... sometimes on a pattern basis. Will have to give the traditional few hours to see if cache evens out.

* Most notable things: new stat box. Anywhere LL has posted what the new figures mean? (Need this info to report further on things such as sim performance)

edit: http://secondlife.com/tiki/tiki-index.php?page=How+do+I+read+the+sim+performance+stats%3F

* Our "active scripts" figure jumped from 551 to 2705. Since I seriously doubt that 2200 active scripts suddenly appeared on our sim, and also doubt that 2705 active scripts could possibly exist on our sim (what is that... 42 scripts per 1024m?) then this figure seems to be unlikely.

* The "Objects" figure changes constantly.

Overall, for me 1.7 seems to be running fairly well... but only have about an hour of largely-IM-filled time online to test it. More to come later, and would like to hear other "1.7 initial observations".

LOL check the sticky in this forum (up there) - has a link to a page with new information regarding stats. It was helpful but there are those (like me) more technically impaired that would appreciate an even a more basic and detailed guide. I am more the "walk through" type *hehe*

I've just discovered my 1.7 installation installed with incorrect read-only permissions on my Mac Powerbook, I'm hoping this is the cause of the many many crashes and non-persistent prefs between logs I've had since yesterday. Changed the perms ( in ~/Library/Application Support/Second Life/ ) to read-write and I've been logged in for a while now with none of the problems I've been seeing. .... fingers crossed ...


apart from my crashing too often ...

Map ... super!

Lag ... much less! I can fly smoothly almost everywhere.

[edit] "much less" is probably an exaggeration, but it does seem less.

Building and adding a texure or skin, I've noticed it won't load (grey). I will close it down, try again, and it loads quicker. Never had this trouble before 1.7. Viewing JPG lags.

My only note regarding "lag" thus far is this:

1. I'm not sure what the posted 22ms TFT figure as being "ideal" for sim operation is based on. <22 is great, 22 is ok, >22 is excessive? Seems initially to be a tad bit narrow in scope. This said...

2. Our sim was running at 22.3... (and remaining in the range from about 22.3 to 25.x) and doing fairly well. Then... 53.1! 69.4!! 82.6!!! 91.3!!!!...

This lasted for about 10 seconds. And as quick as it came, it disappeared... 27... 22.5... 22.3...

Since there were only 2 avatars on the sim and we were just basically walking around, I have to wonder where that sudden surge came from. When it hit, an otherwise operating-just-fine sim suddenly turned to thick molasses. Will be looking at this further as 1.7 settles in.

As you saw in the guide when it says active scripts in the window it means active in that sim, in 1.6 only scripts that were in the root of a prim were counted, in 1.7 scripts in the child prims of objects are counted as are the scripts being worn by the av's in the sim, any script that is running will count to that number as they all take resources.

For the rest im also seeing laggy but not for sim or pc reasons, and textures are not loading properly or being cached.

So much for not crashing anymore.

Fixing the permissions fixed the prefs problem though. But I just crashed again. This time I noticed my cache was full at 1Gig, heard tell elsewhere of caching problems.

Lag:

Seems to me that generally it's no better than 1.6 except after staying in one place for a long while. Once the local area is in and cached 1.7 seems noticeably faster than 1.6.
( probably just imagining it ! )


Sound:
After a while online ( I think when the cache fills up), my mac version at least, loses local sound This is an old bug returned !

Shiny:
Far too shiny ! Never thought I'd say that, but it is. It looks silly.

Not sure if this is a problem with 1.7 overall, or just how it has affected my sim. After I log-in at my home, nothing rezzes, not even my avie. Stood there for nearly 2 hours yesterday and nothing rezzed in at all in that time. Though I can see the map, chat in IM, etc. Figured it was just 1.7 settling-in blues and would fix itself.
Tried again this morning, and again nothing rezzes in, not even my avie, so I have no idea where I actually am in relation to the rest of the grey, semi-transparent world around me.
Then a friend tp'd me over to their place to see if it was my end or my sim. Almost as soon as I got to where I had been tp'd to, I rezzed in. Still had minor issues with things in the distance not rezzing, but otherwise was fine.
Went back home after a while, and again nothing rezzed, my avie disappeared, and all around me was just a grey semi-transparent blob.

Not sure what the problem is, but at the moment it has made my home unusable, and unless a friend is on to tp me somewhere, I never rez at all.

My experiences are comparable (to Wayfinder's).

Playability is not terribly bad considering it's an update, but long term, some things need to go.

#1: I presume they are going to fix the cache issues anyway - this is my #1 issue in terms of playability.

#2: Shiny needs to be fixed, especially the huge difference between 'low' shiny and 'none' shiny that exists now.

Those are by far the biggest issues I have at the moment.


An odd way of measuring the 'health' of the grid might be this: I noticed that a few customers came by to shop within 24 hours of the update. It totally surprised me that *anyone* would, in light of current grid issues.

Which indicates to me that for many, SL is 'playable' enough. Yet no consolation for people that this upgrade may have left behind. Upgrades are a painful, painful thing anywhere.

Also having image lag. When I open 'find' to look for a place or whatever, the image displayed starts to appear just fine, then suddenly blurs and doesn't come back. Gah!

Further findings:

Our sim is experiencing more lag episodes than was experienced in 1.6. Experiments have shown this lag apparently to be coming primarily from SL image processing problems, although without more sophisticated testing tools, it is difficult to tell.

I have experienced textures in the same room in which I am standing taking 5-10 minutes to rez. Some never rez. Others which rezzed before-- suddenly unrez. So it's pretty obvious the texture system is messed up, as LL has acknowledged. They are asking for patience in this; fair enough. I can give them some time to work out this bug. No one expected 1.7 to be bug free. But one does have to wonder why this didn't show up during extensive beta-testing.

One major irritation with the new version is the removal of the MAP/REGION sim listing. In 1.6, this option presented a list of every sim available on the grid. Now, LL has decided to go with a "region search" which kicks in at the entry of 3 letters... making it virtually impossible to find a sim if one does not remember the precise name.

Linden Lab claims this change is because the region listing was 'too long to be useful'. I disagree; I used this function every day. Users often used the region listing to visit sims they had not visited before. It is a shame that LL decided to remove such a useful feature.

If the listing was "too long to be useful"... then they could have substituted it with a "reduction listing" feature, which would list all sims starting with a specific letter the moment the first letter was entered... then reduce the choices as successive letters were entered. The new system, imho, is just another example of "halfway programming" and removing a truly useful feature for one that is nearly worthless.

I would like to add my observations and hypothesis about 1.7 here, rather than start a new thread.

I've seen thread after thread about the performance issues and crashing, and have also talked to people inworld about it, and I think I see a common problem.

From what I've seen, almost everyone using a Windows machine that's having issues is running Windows XP. Even brand-new powerhouse systems are having major issues with framerate and crashes.

That being said, I am running Windows 2000 on a less-than-average system. Here's the specs (seriously, don't laugh):

Pentium 4 at 1.3GHz
Intel 845 mobo
1 GB 400MHz RAMBUS (again, hold your laughter)
ATI Radeon 9200 w/128MB (c'mon, gimme a break)

Before 1.7.0, I was getting about 20-25 FPS (peaking at 35 FPS under some conditions) when I had 2 avatars logged in on the same box. Yes, I do have some graphics settings dialed down such as view distance (128m), but for the most part the client still looks good.

After 1.7.0 (and its subsequent releases), I have been getting 12-16 FPS with 2 avatars logged in. That's a significant performance hit, but SL is still 'workable'.

Sure, I've had caching problems like everyone else. But it seems with build 54 those have mostly gone away. What's really unusual is that I have had complete mobility and have been free from client crashes since the patch.

Nope, I'm not bragging (especially with that system!), but I am curious if there are other Windows 2000 users out there that are experiencing the same thing. Perhaps Linden Lab can look at this and see if there's a correlation between OS and performance?

Granted it won't help the Mac folks, but I have to wonder why machines that are almost 3 times faster than mine with much better graphics cards and other subsystems are having so much trouble getting and staying inworld.

Maybe I am just lucky, but believe me, my luck isn't that good...

My thought regarding this is: Since Windows XP is the most widely used operating system in the world and people using that system seem to be crashing regularly-- that needs to be addressed by LL.

(As a note, I'm not crashing at all... experiencing severe lag on a regular basis, but not crashing. But I have a high-power system. With so many people reporting crashes, top priority for LL is to figure out why... which I'm sure they're doing at this point. At least... I hope they'd be doing so at this point).

Win 2KPro SP4 - 3.2Gig P4E - 4Gb - Nvidia 6800 Ultra 256

1.6 I had 25-35 fps most places (except mall/casino/club/xingo sims) with al the goodies on

1.7 I have 6-8fps with the same settings

The thing is less powerful machines don't *seem* so badly affected because they were generally set to quite low settings anyway. The people who are taking the big hits are those who have been able to use higher settings - until now.

I don't think it's an OS issue because of the above and the fact that people with Uber Macs (G5 dual 2.7 fully loaded with the Nvidia 6800 Ultra option) are suffering the same problems.

I have a theory (one which is obviously very difficult to prove with the limited tools of 1.7... but a theory nevertheless)...

I have a hunch that in 1.7... LL has intentionally slowed down the response times for the system all the way across. Why do so?

One possibility is that by reducing all sims to 45 fps... they share bandwidth more equitably. However, since LL repeatedly states that sims do not affect the performance of one another and that bandwidth is virtually unlimited-- then this possibility plainly cannot be the case.

A second possibility that comes to mind is so that otherwise-trackable server issues are now not measurable. Another possibility is that users get used to a constant frame of performance, so LL no longer has to deal with "my sim is running slow... and I was just at a sim running much faster". If all sims run slow... it's not so apparent. Both of these possibilities have the common theme of hiding system deficiencies.

I have to wonder why anyone would "set" Sim FPS to a constant 45 when before it was running in the hundreds and sometimes even thousands. To me, as a systems analyst, that hints at data manipulation. I wouldn't allow such in any setup I serviced.

Not accusing mind you, just stating a theory. I calls 'em as I sees 'em.

Hey Wayfinder.. ^^

Just wanted to say thanks for explaining in technical terms exactly what my thoughts and suspicions about the new 'upgrade' are, but my 'not so techie self' so far has been unable to express!


Try this one too... Force your sim to Sunset.... and look at your AV... what's up with that?

Well, I bit my lip and waited for someone else to float this... but yes, it occured to me too.

How many times do you see an organisation declare that an apparent change for the worse isn't really a change at all, it's just an illusion caused by a 'change in reporting' or 'because we are gathering data differently now'?

Maybe introducing an update that delivers a massive performance hit AND changing the only measurement tools we have wasn't a terribly smart idea? I mean, if we could quote verifiable figures to compare 1.6 and 1.7 we'd know exactly how bad things are, wouldn't we?

At present it's largely subjective, apart from the 75-90% drop in personal fps being widely reported - and how long before either that's changed, or we are told it isn't measuring the same thing any more?

Then the only measurement will be purely subjective - hence easily dismissed...

The primary idea was to sync the world updates (your position, animation, object status, etc.) with the physics engine (which always ran at 45fps).

As I understand it, these world updates never ran faster than 45fps. I'm very certain they didn't run in the thousands of frames per second. As such, the prior simFPS was simply not correct.

It's like if your computer's CPU reported as a 453GHz processor when it wasn't running a 100% load. You can still use the (incorrect) number that comes up to measure something, but it's not what you were tracking in the first place. Using the 1.6 simFPS to track performance was the same way; at best it roughly indicated load.

The new script counts look correct. To be sure, though, I'll go grab a simstate today and count the number of scripts in it, and compare that with the inworld stats at the moment of save.

Most regions I'm going into with performance issues are image related. Since (especially with today's rolling update) each region has been restarted recently, I hope giving the sim time to build up a useful cache will clear things up.

Ah ... Im reminded of the days when I commuted from Baltimore to DC by train ... Amtrak would pull the train out of the station and stop ... waiting on passing freights as I recall ... for some undetermined period of time. Often just beyond the platform, so you could see the train, but not get on it.

They did this so they could book an "on time departure" ... and hope to make up the time along the way to scrape in an "on time arrival" ... so their numbers would look good; even if the user experience actually was completely hosed.

I guess airlines do that too, come to think of it.

Anyway .. your post reminded me of that; didn't mean to sidetrack the thread

Just logged on with 1.7.1 after being away for a couple of days. Seems much better now.
Much less lag, Mac client is more stable although I'm still seeing one of the bugs I reported.
This is actually feeling like an update now instead of a downdate

If scripts truly are a major lag item... something that would really assist users would be a SCRIPT LIST tool including who/what/where/how much etc.

Such a land tool would show:
Name of script
Name of object where script resides
Owner name
Location of script on sim
Amount of processor time script is taking

This tool would be available in the ABOUT LAND feature as well as estate tools, so that both the entire sim or just an individual parcel of land could be checked.

This would be valuable because right now... we have nothing. The little "script finder" tools available on SL are underpowered, buggy and really of no use in determining sim script status. It's one thing for a user to know how many scripts are on a piece of land. It's another thing entirely to know what to do about that-- especially on private sims where a number of users may be building and setting out scripts totally unknown to the sim owner... and currently unfindable.

In order to control scripts-- we have to know the above information. We would like to establish a script limit per 1024m on our sims (just as we set a prim limit)... but at this time have absolutely no way of doing so. It would be good to have a "script counter" that works the same way prim counters work, ie, tell us how many scripts are owned by whom... and it would be good to know where those scripts are located.

Still, I have to contend... it's a bit difficult to believe we have 2750+ scripts on our sim. That figure is really beyond ludicrous and into plaid. 42 active scripts per 1024? I don't think so Tim... especially when that figure, as well as the objects figure, is changing on a continual basis, from minute to minute. I'm not saying 2750 is absolutely impossible-- just very unlikely and hard to accept as factual.

It'd also be nice to have an "avatar script/prim detector" device at telehubs that would measure avatars as they enter a sim. If an avatar is carrying more than a sim-owner defined number of prims and/or scripts-- it will not allow the avatar into the sim. That might encourage users to drop the excessive bling and gadgets and get down to reasonable avatar design. I know we'd probably set our sims to 100 prims per avatar and 10 scripts maximum. Either that... or it would be nice to have a "shut down avatar scripts" option so that AO devices, guns and other avatar attachments could be depowered at sim owner preference.

These are just some of the ideas I'd incorporate in a system where lag was a major issue. No sense setting land prim limits to 117 / 512m while letting avatars walk around with 400 prim bling and 30 script AO devices.

There's been a bit of discussion as to whether the new "active scripts" count, which includes child scripts and attachments (previously left out), is actually correct. Personally, I believe the developers, but I decided to see for myself.

I pulled up Elvenglen's simstate file from 10/26/05 12:26:36, and exported it to text. I then opened up the text in Word.

From my understanding of simstates, a script is saved with a header and the script's UUID. The entry then contains all the variables and states of the script, so it can pick up where it left off. The only references to this header that I see (to the extent that I can analyze a 56MB text file in a few minutes) are headings for individual scripts.

Searching for the script header in this simstate produced 2726 results. At 2:49pm yesterday, Elvenglen reported 2624 scripts inworld. It seems pretty likely that the inworld statistics are correct.

There is an existing option to not allow outside scripts. Unless you are talking about something else? 100 prims per avatar ... hmmm, not very generous really if you start counting every little prim to objects. Hair, jewelry, clothing, etc ....

One thing that might be overlooked here...

With the change in Active Scripts reporting, the previous guideline of "500 scripts or less" no longer applies. I'm still trying to benchmark several private islands and work with the developers to give island owners a new guideline.

Standard clothing doesn't count as prims. 400-prim bracelets do. As for hair, excessively-primmed hair has been one of the continually-proven lag issues on SL (I know personally of one hairdo that at one time could actually crash a sim).

100 prims on an avatar is really pretty generous... especially when one considers that an entire 512m piece of land is supposed to be able to have a home with furnishings for 117 prims.

One girl once announced to a group standing around her, "As long as I look good, I don't care how much the system lags." (Yes, she was serious... and tried defending such a position when folks pointed out that might be a teeny self-centered). This kind of "me-first / me only" attitude is what causes a lot of problems on SL. All it takes is people re-thinking their personal perceptions to make things better. People know that AO devices severely lag everyone around them-- but they use them anyway. A person doesn't have to have 100 prims on an avatar for that avatar to be presentable and functional-- and even very nice looking. As I mentioned to a user once who was blinged to the gills (to the complaints of folks around her)... it does no good to look fantastic if you cannot move and people leave the area due to excessive lag. It is possible to look fantastic without excessive bling and AO devices.

I make avs as a business. Even my most complex full-prim avs don't total 100 prims. I imagine some of the highly-sophisticated tech mech avs might do so- but they might also be able to be trimmed down and still have decent effect. It would surey have better overall effect if 50 avatars try to enter a sim at the same time.