Sculpties=Bandwidth usage?

HI..question..Ive been playing SL for years on a sattelite ISP. Basically its highspeed and quite reliable(when its not snowing) but there are things i have to do in game to "check my self"

I'm allowed a threshold of 400 megs daily of downloads.Once I reach that alottment. BAM I'm knocked down to dialup speed while my modem takes 24 hours to "recover". If i can log out and disconnect from BW usage before that threshold is met the recovery time is less.

I have learned over the years that If I don't teleport to 5 sims in the course of hour,if I don't enable particles..if i don't upload high rez textures..if i keep my draw distance to 64..if I don't hang out at a club or TP point...and recently if i do not shop(forcing transactions of lindens seems to be BW intensive) that I can average about 40 megs of downloads per hour. All of this is quite the norm for me and I have a very fulfilled SL existance BUT......

Recently I've been using 150 megs in an hour just standing in my apt....and..the "only" thing I can guess is that the sculpties I've bought and acquired and used in making beds and furniture in my apt . are using up my BW. Any one know for certain whats up?
I need to figure out because as a builder having ten hours of work time cut down to roughly 4 is devastating to my game play.Oh and i do get 3 free hours nightly from 3 am - 6am est BW usage that is not credited to my bw usage threshold(which I use religiously)

~Lana Tomba

To be honest - I am not sure, but logic tells me that the BW should be lower with sculpties, although they do cause huge amounts of client-side lag if in large numbers. here is my logic:

1. Fewer prims, fewer textures -> less BW.
2. Increased processing drain to draw/decode the sculptie map -> more lag

I would love to know the answer to your question, so I hope someone who is more expert can answer.

I'll assume you're not listening to streaming music and/or a QuickTime stream since those will easily eat up chunks of bandwidth.

Next would be things that constantly cycle textures (a picture frame for instance).

If you're in the habit of clearing cache and refetching your inventory with every log-in that can be a big drain as well.

Finally, check for prims that are constantly/regularly being updated (moving around, changing colour, etc - although llTargetOmega and texture animations are local so you can leave those out). Examples would be a walking prim pet, a dancefloor, ...

Client / Show Updates can help with this, along with having View / Statisics Bar open. You'll probably see blue/red "smoke" (partial/full updates) coming from a lot of objects every now and then, but the one that's draining your bandwidth should stand out from the rest by flashing rapidly/constantly.

You'll get object updates for anything within draw distance, whether you can see it or not, so you should be looking at anything within a 64m radius around where you are.

(Edited to add that it could be a temp rezzer as well. If it's temp-rezzing 500 prims worth for instance, that'll eat up about 30Mb/hour. Or it could be a combination of any of the above)

yea I don't listen to streaming music or watch streaming video..I've been working on a project with sculpties though and they're scripted to change the uv map so they appear animated.

I only clear cache in those golden hours(3am - 6am est). Is there a way NOT to fetch inventory?I have a rather large inventory (40,000 plus objects) and thats a big possibility.

I may just need to do some major cleaning of my inventory..what about flexis?...are they constantly updating? like if they are..my hair and a skirt might be a bad idea. Ive also been on a project working with waterfalls..no particles enabled but the smooth animated textures are a constant.

Thanx for the tip on viewing updating objects.Ill do that this evening.

Hmm temp rezzers..i don't know of any around but i'll take a look see.

~Lana Tomba

Every time you change something about a prim, be it through the edit window, or through a script it'll cause a 1Kb object update per prim of the linkset. If it changes 10 times per second, that's 10Kb/prim of the linkset. Things add up very quickly, especially for large linksets.

You didn't say if you spotted anything that looks like it's causing a high rate of object updates with Client / Show Updates?

As long as you don't type anything in search, or touch the "Recent Items" tab your inventory shouldn't refetch after a 'Clear Cache'.

Logging on and just fetching my inventory and logging back off with my 10k inventory eats up 40-50Mb already though. 40k+ is bound to be worse on an entire refetch.

Flexi is entirely client-side, as are texture animations, llTargetOmega rotations and particles as well. None of those will cause network load (beyond the initial load time).

Thankyou for the info. I haven't been able to log on..I'm still waiting for full recovery. I have been using recent items in my inventory heavily though. I bet anything thats whats doing it. The sculpties are one primd koi but there are 8 different UV maps to cause the animation effect...so thats prolly 8 updates in no more than two seconds(for ten fish I have rezzed) so..Ill work on them during my golden hours.

I really appreciate the tips. I've found that if i can keep my BW usage below 40 per hour..I can stay on sl almost nonstop for two days. I really appreciate the help in letting me refine my habits.

~Lana Tomba

Sculpties are rendered through the use of the texturemap that is attached to them, and as fara as I know, the rendering itself takes place clientside, so I do believe (as in this may not be 100% true) the only client hit for drawing a field of rocks that all use the same sculpty, for example, is the initial download of that one texture that the sculpty is formed from.

wow..ugly ugly ugly..the amount of red flashes coming from those little fish was un real

I also have flexi flags with a random script wind in them..and they were flashing constantly..but not as big and red as those fish.

Thanx again.

~Lana Tomba

HughesNet? I just switched to Wild Blue (actually, Dishnet which resells Wild Blue). The FAp is about the same, but it is computed on a 30 day sliding window rather than a 24 hour fixed window. Performance has been great, so far.

Glad you narrowed it down, sorry to hear it's the fishies if that was the project you're working on though .

leave it to me to create a product to sell that Ill not be able to use myself lol.

~Lana Tomba

i started creating a skeleton with sculpted prims. the more prims i added the more lag i got on my parcel. finally that bad that i couldnt walk around anymore. i was really wondering about the lag and where it comes from.
checked all and finally i put the skeleton back to my inventory and the lag was gone
i also went to a shop to buy hair. they have many sculpted rocks there. it really looks great but lag makes it impossible to move. the only way to shop there is to move the camera.
this was something what proved me that sculpted prims cause bad lag.
not sure if anyone had such experiences too