What do server numbers mean?

I have been having problems on my island and since I can't seem to get a linden to even talk to me. I have got a variety of different numbers when I have restarted the island over and over again. I have got numbers any where from 17 to 1,000 and something.

My time dilation is very unstable and so is sim fps. My running scripts aren't bad so can't figure out why I am having some a time here lately.

Sexy Partridge

This is YOUR private island SIM? If so,

Did you look in:
-WORLD
-Region/estate...
-Debug tab
for Collisions out of control or Scripts lagging down the sim?

yes it's my island and yes I looked at all that and everything there looks fine.

You shouldn't really worry about which sim# you end up on, because you'll always end up on a server with the exact same hardware specifications.

As to your sim, can you please press control-shift-1, and click the "time(ms)" line at the bottom to reveal the per-frame sim times, and then post the stats to us? That might help us shed some light onto your problems.

The script time ms for my island is running between 11.6 and 13.2. Which I don't consider bad at all? I was always told anything below 20.0 was within normal running limits.

yes what razor said, we are owners of same island. (also live together in real life so he answered for me that question)

Hi,

Correct the time is between 20-22ms but that is total frame time and should include script time.

The logs for the last few hours show script time running between 13-18ms, time in 'other' is between 2-3ms, with the occasional 1ms for physics

What seems to be happening is that an agent arrives and loads the 12,000 prims, which occasionally spikes up the image time to 3-4ms, and agent time to 1ms, which takes the sim over 22ms total upto 30ms in some cases, so it starts eating into the cpu time for keeping the sim running at full speed.

Milo.

What is "Images Time"?
(in the Time "ms)" portion of the Simulator part of the Statistics Window?)
I went to see what was happening...things look pretty solid and stats are good, UNTIL, every few minutes, something causes "Images Time" to hit 3400ms and coincident with that is time dilation of .22, etc.

What is 'Images Time?". What does that measure so we know what to turn off/eliminate?

(there's a note in the Tech Forum Sticky on Lag that attributes this to the arrival of a new Avitar on the parcel...is this true? 'cuz there's not much that can be done about that.)

Sexy, what I was secretly really interested in was the number of scripts in your sim. What's the "Active Scripts" stat at?

Sterling, this sounds like thep roblem that's plagued the grid for at least a year now. I see it constantly in my own sim. When someone teleports in, the Images Time spikes, and usually brings the rest of the sim to a standstill.

Ok milo, so are you saying we are using too many prims with the scripts we have running? That if I want better perfermance on my island to reduce the prims?

and lex, I have 4041 active scripts going. I just went and looked

Hi,

From looking at the stats it seems to be mostly running ok, 0.98dilation and 44fps there does seem to be a few brief dips which coincide with the hourly autosave, these are harder to spot now as save time has been reduced to less than a minute.

Theres so many variables on how various things can affect a regions performance.

Obviously running lots of scripts is one, these range from just memory usage, each script is allocated 16k of memory, but then theres also scripts that use lots of cpu time

Next is physical items, these include objects and also agents, objects are usually worse for a sim but alot of agents in a sim can add up on all the collision calculations

Image time, is the time the simulator spends processing images, either on objects or on avatars, avatars images or their baked textures are mainly fixed size depending on what part of the body it is, but on objects you can place a 512x512 or larger texture on the smallest of object, and that texture is 4Mb of data where you wouldnt notice the difference if you used say a 64x64 texture which is about 450k

Object count matters in that all the geometries of those objects have to be transmitted to each agent.

So as you can see there isnt really one easy solution that fits all, although the easiest is probably to keep a look out for scripts, either heavy usage ones or just unnessesary ones.

Hope thats helped

Milo.

Thank you Milo that was a nice reply and very helpful!
I feel i need to say this in this mess network issues we had to over come and the lindens had to fight with these days 24 hours.......
Thank you Again
Usagi

THAT is your problem. Sims tend to get unstable with that many scripts. Try to get it down to at most 2000, preferably less.

Lex that would be impossible to do. Goodness what is the sense of owning an island if you can't have anything on it. I mean my island isn't over crowded but one of the things I like is that I have not just the mall but things for ppl to come and enjoy that are free. I do absolutely no camping on the island. These are fun things, to get rid of them all would compromise the enjoyment of the place.

to be honest usually I have no lag, or very little, It's only when problem with the server itself when the time dilation drops that we experience issues. I don't like laggy malls so I do without some things to get that for the most part.

LIke also no rental cubes, I keep books and send reminders. *sigh* will hope lindens just get us better servers some day so that issue will be thing of the past.

*not holding breathe*

MILO,
thank you for the Information.
I hear you about the texture density--lower the better.
And I understand the hourly server backup.
I'm still confused, though, about the IMAGE TIME statistic.

What triggers it? Is it CREATING an object (seems unlikely), or is it because:
1. an AVI turns arrives on the sim and thus needs to have the scenery downloaded to him.
2. an AVI turns around or moves in a direction that causes new images to be downloaded to him (view distance, etc.)
3. an AVI Edits his appearance, causing a newly baked texture to be sent to all within viewing distance?
4. something else? All of the above?
AND: Can we do anything other than use low density textures?

Reason I ask, is that in the 20 minutes I spent watching the stats at this SIM, the IMAGE TIME would clearly drag down the sim. Roughly every 4-5 minutes...not periodic, but average over the time. Dilation would fall as low as .22, etc. This is way more often than the hourly server backup.

Sexy, I know it's tough, but I'm serious here... I also own an island, and I've done a lot of studying on how the number of scripts in a sim affects its performance. That's led me to be very strict on the number of scripts I allow running in my sim... and that's resulted in a sim that runs well and doesn't lag very often.

It sucks, but if you think about it, it makes sense. You're asking a computer to do _four thousand things_ all at once. For reference, if you're running on Windows, you'll probably have only 50 processes running at a time, max, and if you get over 100, I bet things would bog down. Perhaps the sim system could be designed to be more efficient (they ARE working actively on a new script runtime to help alleviate this issue), but when it comes right down to it, you really have to care for your sim. They can throw all the hardware in the world at sims, but that won't change the fact that putting too much content in a sim can bring it to its knees.

As far as I understand, the systems running our sims are top of the line, so there's really not any possibility of getting "better servers". We have to work with what we've got. Sims do a lot of processing; what sims do isn't trivial work. The server machines are running at full capacity, constantly.

I know reducing the number of scripts in your sim is tough, but you should see if you can get rid of as many as possible. I'm definitely not suggesting sacrificing your users' experience -- that wouldn't really help at all. There are, however, a lot of scripts running in the average sim that aren't doing anything, and even completely dormant scripts have been proven to negatively affect a sim's performance. If you find a script that isn't actually doing anything, open it and uncheck the "running" checkbox. Some Sit Target scripts, Particle Scripts, and Texture Animation scripts don't need to be running to continue to have their effect.

thanks Lex, I have started going around, on a quick look I have got rid of some scripts but don't see me getting down to 2k but will keep looking and trying.

I was pointed to this thread from mine. I've been having the same problem with my island (Oz) for two weeks or so now. When did your problem start? My time dilation is normally good (1.00 or 0.99) as it has been for most of the year as I keep it mostly empty to develop my games but now it spikes as low as 0.06 ms several times per minute even when there are only 2 or 3 people on the island. The island is running the same scripts that have been running fine for months or longer. I think some of the network changes may be having negative impacts on performance? People used to praise my island for being such a low lag environment. How many other island owners have been having severe time dilation issues?

my island started doing this late last week. Yes I used to actually advertise for lag free shopping, not no more.