Designing for Low Lag

My Family and I (the After Dark Crew) are looking seriously to going full sim in the next month or 2. Being the main designer behind our facility builds and main lag chaser I would very much like to design and build our new facility from the ground up to be as lagless as humanly possible.

This is your chance folks. I am asking for detailed suggestions on how to minimize lag in all aspects of the build (build,texture, script whatever).

Thanks Very much in advance.

There's threads all over the forums about this kind of thing: scripts to avoid, or how to reverse engineer the ones you have, tortured tori, etc.

I imagine if you just search 'lag' you'll hit a bunch. Seems like it's one of the more popular keywords (after 'Anshe' and 'Impeach', that is).

I am aware of this I was hoping to get all these pearls of wisdom collected into one thread not only to help my family but as an ongoing resource for others and maybe a bit of encouragement to build low lag.

Avoid anything physical. I know people love their swans, ducks, fish and butterflies, but they eat too much sim processing time that could be used for better things (e.g. making your scripts run more smoothly). There's an option to highlight physical objects in View menu (under beacons).

Things that helps

:: Avoid having a big building smack middle of a sim, since youre basicly forcing people to look at it constantly and render its geometry

Have a exsample from a sim i was in they had put a huge building middle of it, anyone looked at it forced render 1000's of prims ow ow. (maybe its my taste tho)

:: Physics a no no, it will sometimes just go flop around like a fish.

:: zero listen scripts, make them touch instead,
this is not needed anymore and should be avoided

:: max texture size 512x512 , some textures look as ok in 256x256

----- average ish sizes ------
2048x2048 = 10-20mb
1024x1024 = 4-6mb
512x512 = 1-2mb
256x256 = 0,2-0,5mb

:: Avoid using tooo many toruses, these are very heavy for clients when you use alot of them.

>> bit extreme <<
:: If youre planning on having a mall, be aggressive and make a vendor that all the others has to use , will cut down on odd scripts you have no controll over

Here's a handy link...
http://secondlife.com/badgeo/wakka.php?wakka=lag

The textures I've been using lately have mostly been 128x128, except for the ones from your freebie texture box, which are 256x256. 128x128 should be plenty for random object textures.