Sim Hardware and Sim Crash Lotto - Again...

Well... For those who haven't seen the posts on this in the past *year*, I'll frame this very simply:


From SL v1.0 to SL v1.2, our sim, (Well, the sim that we own a good portion of) - Lusk -, was wholly unusable. More than three or four people in the sim would cause time dilation and low simFPS (sub 100) that basically earned Lusk a bad name. We couldn't hold events, and when people came by, -we- got ridiculed for the low quality and unusability of "our" sim.

We were on sim8.agni, for that entire time.

Enter SL 1.3, when some things changed. Lusk suddenly shot up to 750 simFPS, and suddenly we actually could *use* the land that we had! We could have people over. We could have events. We could build. Life was good. We were sim250 or so.

Around 1.4, things got even better. Sim450 or so, with the new 'dynamic allocation' program, - well, sometimes we got sim408, sometimes sim452, whatever -- we were on one of the new hyperthreading machines (indicated by a 'cpu 0.50' statistic) - simFPS would sometimes fluctuate between 800 and 900.

Life was even better. We never saw time dilation.

We did notice however that some sims would come up on ridiculously early sim numbers after a crash - there were times that we would crash and come up on 'sim6', and wind our way down to 50 simFPS or so. Lusk would become unusable again, but in those cases, various Lindens would reboot the sim, and get us onto useable hardware again.

At one of the town halls, we asked Philip about this phenomenon. He told us - which has been the official company PR line since - that there is virtually no difference in the hardware, the problem, he said, is content.

To this, I said -- Oh really?

sim8.agni. 80 simFPS. Time dilation 0.85.
sim450.agni. 800 simFPS. Time dilation - never seen.
sim455.agni. 5000 simFPS. Time dilation - forget about it.

Older DNS name... Older hardware (indicated by the presence of hyperthreading or not), SAME CONTENT (that's right, SAME content, Philip) - but VASTLY different statistics and visible performance.

But, there's no hardware difference, right?

The *older sims* show *slower statistics* .

NO DOUBT you can feel it when attempting to do something stupid like, you know, walk around. Forget about building. Forget about having more than a few people in sim.

But LL still will not admit that.

They told us that simFPS wasn't important. They told us that the sim wasn't "really" at 65 simFPS. They told us that the "time dilation isn't real" - whats really important is "how the sim feels" - which seems to be an ethereal and vague judgment call, where a Linden entering for 2 minutes says, "Seems fine to me!" - but those of us who "live" in the sim, well, it's pretty evident.

Anyways, for us, until a week ago, this wasn't really an issue anymore. We figured that LL took the REALLY ancient sims out of line. I mean, they have to have upgraded SOME of their hardware at least ONCE since *beta*, right?

Wrong.

We had the misfortune of someone crashing Lusk. We came back up, from a perfectly useable sim4xx.agni, to a glorious sim12.agni. SimFPS was 200 when empty. For those Lindens who say "200 is plenty." - yeah, okay, maybe when empty. With a "mind blowing" population of an entire 5 (yeah, five) people in the entire sim, simFPS drops to a wonderful 90-100, and time dilation is at 0.85 to 0.97.

But, LL still will not even acknowledge that this is happening. There are several posts regarding it; it seems that ALL LL has looked at when comparing the harware is the raw MHZ of the processor; not memory, not FSB, not any other variables, and moreover, they seem to be ignoring the in world performace statistics that are evident on these obviously older pieces of hardware.

Is it simply a PR disaster to admit that the old hardware is still in the pool? Can LL (even with this new round of funding) not afford to at least upgrade some of the lower sims to perform in a SL 1.5 world vs a SL 1.0 world?

We haven't gotten an answer to this, and I have a feeling we won't. The only thing we can hope for is another grid reset where we may get a good number in the 'sim lottery'; but that could be trashed by somebody getting a wild hair and causing a crash once again. Then we'd be back to square one, and SL 1.0.

Unfortunately I doubt I'll see a response from this request, and if I do, it'll probably be what seems to be a company line again.

But, simply, the older sims being in the pool are a serious problem. LL can't sweep it under the rug continually. LL said that with 1.5, they were focusing on scalability; where does that leave content creators and land owners when they get put on a sim that was essentially good only in the old days of SL when no more than 20 or 30 people were on the grid at a time?

Hoping for a reboot,

(But I won't cause it, since I don't know how and it's against TOS... - but as I predicted, some people may start engaging in this practice...)

It seems that some of the void sims have better hardware than we do. Why not move these lower numbered, ancient machines to the void sims?!

Michi Lumin.

well asides from a cople of number hiccups (the opteron (newest 455+ class sims) was about 1800 not 5000 (the 5000 was the neighboring sim in perry)

the 200 is a rule thing is a serious problem tho from LL. because guess what.. when a sim thats 200 *EMPTY*... its gonna be 50 sim fps and time dilating wildly with even a few people.. and forget about *EVER* hosting an event.

The content of the sim is stable.. lusk is an *old* sim.. with only two real landowners, and hasn't really changed in a good 6-8 months easy... but in those 6-8 months we've seen everything from 50 fps and time dilation with 5 people... through 1100 fps and damn amazing response with no dilaiton.. with 20 people

the only *consistantly correlating* variable, being what hardware sim is being run on

So hold an event in the sim, then take screenshots of the Alt-1 info. I'd come, but I need large quantities of money in my account again before I can rejoin SL.

I was there when Lusk crashed most recently... at first I asked eltee if it was the "particle magic", but he assured me it was client-side and then he was busy trying to figure what crashed the sim.

There seems to be a lot of ambiguation about this and I'd also like to hear what's really going on here regarding wildly fluctuating -- and hence, unreliable -- performance.

Id say its a problem, but for an important reason. You cant scale you content to work on a certain speed server. You make content that works fine on your spiffy new server and then they can swap. They should have been grouped by speed class, so sims continue getting the same speed servers. I guess if you never known better, it wouldn't be a problem. Our sim was fine for quite a while, but now you never know. I've given up trying to work at home and work in the sandbox now, not bad as long as ppl aren't trying to crash it :/

To be perfectly frank I don't feel that Linden Lab are even being economical with the truth about the 'no difference in hardware' between sim numbers. I actually think they're plain-faced lying about it. Why? Well, if they admitted that there is a huge disparity in the quality and speed of hardware on the grid they open themselves up for people to start asking difficult questions such as "Why should I pay the same for my land today as I did yesterday when it's so obviously not of the same quality as yesterday?" or "Can you please clarify the complete lack of consistency in service?" or "Why should I pay the same as Joe Bloggs when my land's on older hardware so I'm not getting the same service level?". Difficult questions indeed.

Having my island as a sandbox it's been crashed quite a few times and comes up on various different sim numbers. I check which sim it's on pretty regularly, generally when I see a big difference in FPS. It's interesting to note that the base FPS with little content varies wildly and directly in accordance to the age of the sim - the higher the sim number the better the FPS.

They won't admit it though currently, although I do feel that pressure should be brought to bear on them over it. Obviously they cannot keep every single sim up to date to the same specification, that's is totally unfeasible. But, this is likely to be a problem that gets worse not better, as the specifications of the sims will end up varying more wildly the larger the grid grows (there is bound to be a wider spread having more hardware to maintain).

There is only one solution that I can currently see to this and that is charging monthly land rates directly related to the hardware your land is hosted on. Taking the current land tier as the top value for the best sims, a percentage of your land tier charge should go down if your land ends up on inferior hardware, related to the amount of time in that month that it was on that inferior hardware. I don't for a minute pretend that this is an elegant or easy to implement solution, but then the situation we are currently in with sim reboots isn't fair on the land owners.

Of course there could be one other solution. It's probably against the TOS but, if inaction and untruths from Linden Lab continue over this, it may be an action that some are forced to take. Purposefully crash a sim until it comes up on a higher sim number. Actually, although it maybe against the TOS on the mainland, as the owner of a private sim, if I was to crash my own sim for this reason, would that be against the TOS? How could it be?

2 words

Beowulf Cluster

This happens in DaBoom also... especially at the worst times ( Events ). Sim25 just is not good enough for even 10 people!

I've contacted the lindens directly via IM, but they just say to email support. I believe Jenna (owns over 1/3rd of Daboom) has called them up a few times as well, but when they are closed for thanksgiving, that doesn't help at all.

At least Haney was nice enough to email the right people for us...

There is plenty of proof that all sims were not created equal, and with the prices we pay, they should be.

maybe we need some new "small" (128x12 sims to be run on these old POS servers

Or make them into 128x128 free sandboxes.

or forcefully lock them as void sims... they'd be great for that.. and it would allow the lindens to create more buffers between sims as they come up, which also helps to reduce lag somewhat

I do agree with moopf though... paying $200 a month for a piece of crap sim feels pretty crummy when someone nearby is payin that much an gettin somethin lightning fast.

The biggest issue here also isn't processor speed... i agree that the lowest to the average probably don't differ much processor wise.. but their respective whole machine architectures and such seem to make a large difference (aka different ram, different chipset etc)

Well... Today, Lusk had a whopping 10 people in it (10 agents, 6 child agents) - and simFPS was brought down to 10. Yes. Ten.

As a result of this, I couldn't log in. As my 'last location' was Lusk, and my 'home location' is also Lusk, I -had- to force the system to log in to a different server.

Upon re-entering Lusk, Time dilation was at 0.18-0.24. Chat was getting mis-ordered, you couldn't move, you couldn't even interact with the system.


Ping Sim was showing 29291 msec! This isn't my connection, since other sims were showing sane numbers. (0.0% packet loss.)


Now, if LL is going to come back and tell me that with 10 people in the sim, this is all just fake, a placebo, and the numbers mean nothing.... come off it, guys. I really, REALLY would be less upset about this if LL just said, "Well, sometimes you're going to have to deal with a slow sim, and we're not going to do anything about it" .. At least that would have been honest.

Just like the old days, I guess. Lusk was JUST BEGINNING to get over our un-eraseable bad reputation for lag, thanks to being on a newer server since 1.3.

"If you want Lag, come to Lusk!" they'd say... People would make jokes about it, and if we asked people over, they'd say "Lusk! No way heh, let's meet at my place" ...

Now, that reputation's coming back. I really don't want to start having to answer the "lol how come you guys' sim sucks so bad" questions again.

But, I guess we're going to have to.

how do you check the sim you are on?

i use the iptraf of my router but it give me the nearby sim adress too

any other way?

Please enter me in the sim crash lotto. kthxbye.

The simplest way is probably to toss the following line in the default state_entry() event handler of a LSL script and run it:

llSay(0, llGetSimulatorHostname() );

See: /111/a3/25483/1.html#post245001

The old hardware can be taken out of the lottery pool, and still have plenty of very good uses.

no,.... the simplest way is to click Help: About secondlife... and it will show it right in that box