R.I.P Lag

I've been on the preview, and the thing the Lindens have done to make it so sims can't be lagged anymore is working a treat. I remember when I was young and so was SL, I used to nip around the sims at superman speed, with nothing holding me back. Lately it's more like a crawl.

In the preview, I noticed less textures rezzing in as I flew, and I went much faster, like superman again. And when I stopped, things rezzed in

So it looks like it's goodbye for the humble lag. I guess we won't be seeing it when the update rolls out.

Anyone with a sucky enough computer can lag....

but that mean loosely defining lag as any type of slowdown.

For those who remember playing Quake over dial up... "lag" traditionally is when your "universe" goes out of sync with the rest of the players. Now lag is often referred to as any type of slowdown of performance.

Lag could still happen if say someone's internet connection jammed up.



What that said... the new features in 1.7 will do SO much more to prevent things from slowing down SL. If I understand it correctly, scripts that heavily slow down server a sim sits on will slow the SCRIPT down before the server takes to much of a hit in performance.

But as I've proven in empty sandboxes ... you can still bring a sim to a standstill with enough physical objects

...and when I build??.. is that to better/faster in 1.7....I have noticed but are not sure... when building for a longer time all get slower and slower... and suddenly I must restart to get speed back..

...maybe wrong threat if so sorry... But maybe some can inform me about this??

I take sim performance on the preview grid with a grain of salt. Its always been better in preview than in the main grid. I'll reserve judgement on 1.7 sim performance until a few days after it hits the main grid.

There aren't nearly as many people in the preview as there are in many spots in the normal grid, hence less time time being spent on avatar related calculations. A number of the sims in the preview grid have less custom textures compared to many real sims.


The word "lag" is centuries old. The word "lag" meant slowness or delay, or the amount of delay, long before it was selected for use in computer terminology.

FPS will continue to suck until the 2.0 gfx engine is out, and THAT is what people usually mean when they complain about "lag."

I've experienced a lot of "Twilight Zone" behavior in vehicles in preview, both when entering a new sim and just flying around the middle of one. I hope that's just because preview is running on old machines.

Quake, OMG. Haha. Being on dial-up (26.4 speed) during my Quake days I had to learn to master the art of LAG and so I did. There was some sense of mightiness being a master of the art of lag.

Even better than learning lag, is learning Unagi, the great art taught to us by Master Ross...

Coder/User Arms Race

Coders: Make things more stable, crashproof, in this case: less laggy.

Users: Find ways to always break things, or lag something to hell.

By doing this we are breeding a kind of 'super-idiot', much in the way hospitals and doctors are creating mutant uber-germs by always prescribing anti-biotics.