limiting scripts/avatars per parcel to combat lag, especially lag by clubs

Howdy y'all

I've noticed that some residents have complained about lag from clubs and other 'resource stealing' parcels lately.
I have some sympathy for this, so I've decided to draft a proposal for the feature voting tool which may help combat this problem.

Please read the proposal below and send in your comments.

----------- <proposal> ---------------------

TITLE : Per-Parcel avatar/agent and script time limits

This proposal is designed to stop script/avatar-heavy places such as clubs from lagging the rest of the sim they are in.

To stop popular or script-heavy places such as clubs from lagging the sim for everyone else, we suggest per-parcel limits on agents and script time.
This proposal is designed to counter two possibilities :
Problem A) club which owns 20% of the land in a sim using 100% of the sim's agent limit or script time.
Problem B) small landowner in sim full of big landowners not having any guarenteed resources to work with.

We propose :

1) Limiting script time per parcel.
Each parcel should have a script time limit which is proportional to its size. This means that small parcels should not be able to use as much script time as large parcels.
Without this limit, a club that owns 20% of a sim can use 100% of the sim's script time, thus making the sim lag for everyone in the sim, even people on other parcels.
Script time should be capped or at least limited such that a small, script-intensive parcel cannot lag down the whole sim.
If someone wants to have the power of a whole sim for their club... then they should have to buy the whole sim! It really is that simple - if they want that much resources, they should pay for it. They should not be able to get away with 'borrowing' the resources of the whole sim and making life miserably laggy for everyone else living in that sim.

2) Limiting agents per parcel.
Some clubs take up 100% of the agent limit in a sim, preventing anyone, even other sim residents, from using that sim.
This is unfair.
To solve this, we need to have per-parcel agent limits.
I propose that the Region/Estate->General setting "Agent Limit" be split into "Sim Agent Limit" and "Parcel Agent Limit".
Any parcel which has reached the parcel agent limit cannot be moved into or teleported to by any avatar except the owner of the parcel. Anyone else trying to go there gets a "parcel is full" error message and is stopped.
Estate owners and managers should be able to change this setting on a per-region basis.

3) Give island owners an override for the 'Run Other Scripts' setting.
Let Island owners turn 'Run Other Scripts' off for the whole region.
Island owners should have a region-override that allows them to force the "Run Other Scripts" setting to OFF for all parcels on their sim.
Or, even better, they should have the ability to lock this setting to "off" for specific parcels.
This would dramatically help the whole sim if, say, a club moved onto the sim. By forcing other scripts to off, it would disable the scripted attachments of club-goers thus reducing lag for the whole sim. If this could be done on a per-parcel basis, the lag from the scripted attachments people take to clubs could be countered.

4) Give island owners an override for the 'auto-return' setting.
Bluntly, many parcel owners do not know how to set auto-return to on in their parcels. This is a problem because over time, their parcels get filled with junk.
Each region should have a 'minimum' and a 'maximum' value for auto-return time, set in the region's control panel.
Estate owners could set the minimum value to 1, and the maximum to something like 9999, to force parcels to use some value of auto-return.
Similarly, estate owners could force auto-return to be disabled by setting the maximum to 0, say, for sandbox regions.

----------</proposal>---------------

As to why I chose these ideas :

1) I'm fuzzy on the details as to how we could limit script time per-parcel in a way that when the sim is starting to lag, it slows down/stops scripts which have a different owner to the land they are on first, and can get quite aggressive with doing this. After trying this, it tries to throttle scripts based on land owned - the more land an owner owns on the sim, the more time their scripts get. This ensures that in conditions of lag, priority goes to landowners scripts, and in times of extreme lag, priority goes to the scripts of the people who own the most land on the sim.

2) I thought of altering this to have a percentage based per-parcel factor, say "__% of the sim's agent limit per parcel". I also thought of having a per-parcel agent limit based on how big the parcel was. In the end I abandoned both as I suspected they were too complex.
The idea of having agent limits per parcel depending on the size of the parcel, for example, went like this...
Suppose we give each parcel a percentage of the sim agent limit according to how much of the sim it takes up. This would mean a parcel that was 50% of the sim could use 50% of its agent limit. Unfortunately, this would mean that sim agent limits would have to be huge, in order to give 512 parcels (which are less than 1% of a sim) a reasonable agent limit.
We then get into questions about having a minimum agent limit for all parcels, say, 5-15 avatars, and questions about why we bother to have a proportional one at all, when what we're trying to do is not limit all parcels, but rather stop a few over-eager parcels from taking all of the sim's agent limit. To stop a few parcels taking the whole sim's agent limit, we really just need a maximum agent limit per parcel.
That's why I chose the max agent limit per parcel, and why it is a simple integer. It should do the job and it's simple.
I considered the idea that clubs would split their parcels up.... but then, I realised that if they do this they are going to end up losing traffic counts as a result, which while not a perfect solution, is at least a helpful motivator to them to move to a different sim that is set up to allow clubs.

3)
4)
As for 3 and 4, well, these are just helpful options I think would help reduce resource hogging and rude behaviour such as littering and excessive scripted attachments. They would only apply to private islands anyway, as I can't see LL adding these options for the mainland.


In summary, I'd like your feedback on a few issues :
A) Can you think of any better (and fair!) way to limit script time and agent counts in sims?
B) Can you think of anything else that we should limit to get greater fairness in the allocation of sim resources?
C) Can you please suggest places I should link to this topic? I'd think there are a lot of people out there living near clubs and other large attractions who'd welcome this proposal, and I welcome suggestions about how to reach them.

Thanks!

This is something I'd love to see on mainland properties as well. A sim has X percent resources divided among all the land in the sim. Resources given to a sim should be based on parcel size in relation to the size of the sim.

There are many instances of a 4096-1024M parcels sucking up the entire resources of a sim. It should be no different than prim allocations.. your given X% of the server reasources based on your property size.

A 1/4 sim size parcel of campers should not block access to residents to enjoy their land, nor have to deal with induced lag of a club next door either.

Good proposal!

I agree in principle, that a club or other attraction that owns a small portion of a sim should not be allowed to consume most or even all of the sim's resources. But a limit per parcel on agents based on a percentage of parcel size versus sim size simply can't work.

One sim equals 64 1024 M2 parcels, if fully split out. One sim can hold no more than 30 to 40 agents at a given time, depending on performance issues. With a limit of 30 agents per sim, it would be impossible to have parcels smaller than about 2048 M2 in size, and those would only be allowed one person in them at a time.

The simple fact of the matter is that in most sims, most of the residents are not present in the sim at the same time. Thus under normal circumstances, a sim could have 128 each 512 M2 parcels in it, and any one of those parcel owners could, in the times that they happen to 'be home', manage to have several guests.

Rather than setting a limit based on direct percentage, a guarentee that a resident (property owner) can always acces the sim, even if one other resident is using all the resources, is what is needed.

Or perhaps a limit that ensures that no one landholder who owns less than 3/4 of the sim can use any more than 3/4 of the sim's assets? Or some similar ratios?

Ceera Murakami, that is a very good summary of the reasons why I did not opt for scaling agent limits to parcel size. You expressed it better than I did.
In the end I opted for a maximum-agents-per-parcel setting, because it would stop parcel owners from taking up the majority of the sim's agent limit (unless they split their parcel up, which would destroy their parcel's traffic count!).
I realise however that it might stop a single large landowner (say, someone who owns 90% of a sim) from using as much of the sim's agent limit as would be fair for them. I realise this, but I figure that this option would be mostly used for sims with lots of small (<1/4) parcels. It is not intended for use in sims which have parcels greater than 1/2sim in size.
It's not a complete solution to the problem - I don't pretend it is. I hope it helps though. Better suggestions would be welcome
^^^^ Solution A

Maybe the best solution is that the EM/EO can set a custom limit on each parcel, individually... and he can turn on/off the ability for residents to split/join their parcels. That would be the best solution.
^^^^ Solution B

I diddn't propose it originally as :
1) I know the Lindens are busy and I don't want to give them any more work than really needed.
2) This really good solution relies on there being an EM/EO active. This solution (B) fails on the mainland due to lack of active EMs there. Something like solution A might work better there.

Possibly a feature where mainland sims default to using option A, with a 80%-of-sim av limit per parcel... and private islands use option B?

Really, the best solution of all might be the idea that when the sim is full and someone teleports into the sim, someone else is teleported OUT to make room. The person teleported out is a person who does not own any land in the sim, and is not in the group of any land on the sim. In short - boot the person who has least connection with the sim.
If nobody can be booted because eveyone is in the group of at least one land's parcel or owns a parcel on the sim themselves.... THEN give the "sim is full" error.
The reason I avoided this "possibly best" solution was that deciding the algorithm for who to boot would be contentious. I don't want to get into a flame fest over this, I just want a workable, practical solution to the problem. I don't want to get into debates over who should be booted first in conditions of high sim load, because I figure everyone probably has their own opinion on that.
^^^^ Solution C.

So... we should go with solution B for islands and solution A for mainland parcels?
Or...?

Better and simpler solution. Remember that in general quota systems shuld allow a fair amount of overcommitment, depending on the variability of the use. In SL, where there's a LOT of variability overcommitment of 4x or more is quite reasonable.

So...

A parcel owner that takes up 1/N of the sim could be limited to 4/N of the avatars on the sim, or 1/8th of the avatars (5) at a minimum.

That way if a club has 1/4 of the sim, they can still fill the sim up... and that's going to be reasonable in all but the most extreme cases. But a club on a 4096 (1/16) would be limited to 10 avatars on a typical sim.

I'm thinking of something along these lines:

Every parcel on the sim should allow the owner in regardless of any other circumstances. If the sim has too many users, the owner of any parcel in the sim should always be able to walk or TP in to the sim. When this happens, the most person who most recently entered the sim will be removed. So the way to guarantee your spot in a party is to be there first.

If the owner of a parcel wants to invite a guest, the TP request should be queued. When a resident has left the sim, the TP request will be sent, and the slot will be held open until the guest has accepted or declined the TP request (with a reasonable timeout).

Also, if Time Dialation ever drops below .9, the sim should be considered full and the above rules will kick in.

i had an idea about estate scripts that would allow, lets say in a private estate you are hosting a party, you activate an estate script that, for each script that 'start" in the sim, you freeze it
this way, when hosting a party or a game that doesn't require attachments you could apply a blanket freezing to them.

and making it scripted allow it to be flexible. this is a simple example but it could be much more complex

this example would involve 1 custom events and 1 custom command:

integer estate_script_start(key script starting,key owner,integer attached)
{
  if(owner != llGetOwner() && attached == TRUE)
     return FALSE;
  else
     return TRUE;
}

return false will refuse to the script the right to start and will put it in frozen state (like a no script zone)

It seems that this limit could perhaps not cut in until the sim was (say) half full or (as someone suggested) time dilation got too high.

More people are requesting this, again.

Please guys, lets work on this and turn it into a workable proposal that is fair to all around.
Then I can stick it on the FVT and hopefully it'll eventually get put into SL. Hopefully.

Seriously... if nobody drafts their own version of this soon, I'm just going to draft a version myself and put it up on the FVT. Please draft your own versions and post em here

As a club owner, I have a different perspective.

My place is about 4000sq and has on average 10 to 15 people.

People complain about avatar count, however they do not affect your frame rate when they are not within your draw distance. The simulator simply treats each avatar as one physical box and all the rendering of attachments is client side.

I think the bigger problem is that there is no way to tell who is using up the sim resources.

A while ago I removed all my scripted items and the script time stayed pegged due to other scripts running in the sim.

We need a way to tell where the resources are being used by letting us list who has the highest...
1) Script ms per land SQ
2) Script ms per avatar.
3) Image MB per land SQ
4) Image MB per avatar.
5) Number of physical moving objects per land SQ
6) Average prim updates per land SQ
7) Average prim updates per avatar.

Note the SQ numbers would be for all SQ owned regardless of how it is divided. In other words use the prim bucket as the divisor.

Script time would include a small fixed time per script in order to factor in scheduling time.

People forget how much sim load prim updates have. Each prim update is the same as a moving avatar in the sim

I have also seen many avatars with lots of scripts and textures.

There are many other ways to reduce the effect of clubs.
1) A better cache system.
2) Underground builds.
3) Better pipeline code.

I agree we need better tools to tell us where the lag is coming from : who is using up the sim's resources. I also think, though, that it would be a good idea to have ways of actually enforcing sane usage limits.

15 avatars on a remote parcel in the sim might not affect your framerate if they're out of your draw distance. They will, however, affect the server's frames per second, which will result in the dreaded "slow walking" if there are a lot of them moving around or doing things.

Also, very popular parcels have the potential to fill the sim's agent limit and make the rest of the sim completely unusable as people simply cannot go there.

The most damaging form of resource use aren't client FPS... although that is annoying. The most damaging form of resource usage, IMHO, is consuming the agent limit, or having so many active scripts on your parcel that you push the whole sim well over the 6000 active scripts limit, thus causing the sim to lag for everyone in it, regardless of where they are in the sim.

"Top scripts" is useful, but :
1) it needs to include scripts inside attachments, and allow EMs to 'detach' the prims containing those scripts remotely if they're causing lag.
2) it needs to have summaries... e.g. : total script time used by each agent's attached scripts, and total script time used by each resident's rezzed objects.

I agree that "script ms per land SQM" would be a great idea.
This would let us tell the difference between parcels with high script usage and parcels with low script usage.... even better, it would allow us to tell the difference between big parcels with high script usage and small parcels with high script usage.
One thing though : these tools should be usable by anyone. Disabling scripts or such on a parcel should be limited to EMs though.

As to your suggestions 2-7... I agree, those are good ideas also. I may draft a proposal based on your suggestions there.

Maybe a system that tracks these stats, and allows (but not requires) the implementation of quotas too? E.g. we could quota total script time for all scripts on a parcel based on the parcel's size....

1) Limiting script time per parcel.
I agree with the percentage of land == percentage of run_time you get (when needed/throttled). As brought up, parcels should also be affected, in their run_time quota, by visitors that are running scripts (attached/rez'd) on said parcel. Every parcel owner needs an override (or !script functionality that actually turns OFF scripts, regardless of the state they entered the parcel in). No Z axis limitation either. No Scripts means NO scripts, period. Let me point you towards a sandbox, or the land tier system... :p

2) Limiting agents per parcel.
I'm not so concerned with this, although it does have an affect on the server (network in particular). As mentioned I agree with *always* allowing a land owner to enter the sim. Rationing avatar limits per land holdings seems logical to me -- as long as it's throttled only as needed.

3 & 4
I'm not so concerned about island owners, but more tools == good imho.


As a scripter I'm inclined towards fixing the free-for-all cpu time sharing that has always existed in SL. I think it was over a year ago I heard the rumor that landholdings==script run_time "soon", since then I haven't heard a thing. Lately the issue has seriously pissed me off (perhaps you read my post which I posted just before this one popped up). While I'm not a perfect scripter (who is?), I try hard to make sure my toys are as server friendly as possible, but more importantly I strive to keep aware of sim performance (as hard as that is in SL). I just want to scream when Active Scripts jump by an additional 3000+ above the "norm" for my sim (and only 3 other avs in sim!), and performance drops to a crawl. ooh I'm ranting now so I'll shut up, hope for the best, but expect absolutely nothing from LL on this. Maybe it'll happen sometime after Havok2-4 :p

--Bos

Counting residents who bring in scripts opens the way for griefers to deliberately lag down parcels at critical times (eg, parcels with vendor servers on them). And having "no script, no way, no how" land would devastate the market for mobile gadgets. That'd be almost as bad as saying that attached prims should count against a maximum limit, thus wiping out much of the jewelry and prim hair markets.



I agree with you, and I try to do the same in my scripts. But actually throttling script ms to land ownership would still be bad because it's unbeatable - no matter how much you optimise, your scripts still can't run as fast as they could on a larger parcel, because the same optimised code could just run with more CPU time.

Well that's already possible, add in that it's the visitors ("transient") avatars that quite often cause the lag in the first place -- with their multiple thousands of "transient" scripts. If you want to allow others to run scripts (and I, myself, do want to), you'll have to police it. Informing/educating others on how it share resources.


I don't fully agree. If I want my land to not allow outside scripts to run, then I mean "do NOT allow scripts to run, period". If they enter my !script parcel, the script is suspended (saving its state) until the av exits the parcel. Perhaps I'm testing something and I need steady cpu time, I might opt to banish those outside influences. Or perhaps I'm just a grisseled old fart and don't want children running their dildoanomics on my land. My land, my tier fee$, I want my slice o' cpu pie -- and I may or may not want to share that slice.




No, they'd run fast, and many times faster than they would under the current system. You get a "guaranteed" percentage of cpu time. If you own 10% of the sim, you will always get 10% of the run cycle. This only needs to kick in when processing scripts gets backlogged (typically I'd say around 4000 active scripts running in a sim).

Example... Say a sim with 4 residents. A mall owner, two fair sized parcel holders, and one smaller holder. Now the mall, being a mall, has a huge amount of scripts (no doubt coded efficiently :p). Everyone else runs what would seem appropriate...

Sim is at 5000 scripts, and runs like a pig.

Mall:
50% of land
3000 scripts - 70% of sim total

Player2:
20% of land
800 scripts - 16%

Player3:
20% of land
1000 scripts - 20%

Player4:
10% of land
200 scripts - 4%

Player2 and player4 are under their quotas by 10% in total.
Mall is over it's quota by 20%. Sim can give 10% (unused quotas from Player2&Player4) to the Mall (until player2 and/or player4 use more). Mall's now at 10% over it's quota, and the Mall's scripts become queued up and thus slow down much more so than anyone elses.
Now imagen the 20 people that show up for the "Free Money" even the mall holds in which to make minions out of noobs. Those 20 people are wearing approximity 4500 scripted gadgets doing god knows what. Mall is now running ~78% of the script processes and only the mall's cpu slice o' pie is affected. The mall runs like a pig, noobs evacuate to the next grand event in hopes of upskirting while dancing anamatronically to techno beats.

All the while player's 2, 3 and 4 enjoy uninterrupted script execution because they remain within their quota.

oh hrm, I do see your point, large parcel holders would mostly likely get more execution. Well hrm more like large parcel holders AND large quanity of scripts. If Parcel1 has 4500 scripts and 80% of the sim, and parcel2 has 1500 script and 20%

P1's only running 75% of scripts (cuz they own the majority)
P2's running 25% of the scripts, although much less than P1, they're still over the quota.. hrm would suck to put in an actual compiled script limit... but that probably would be required to make a cpu sharing routine "balanced". Blah, catch-22.

Hrm 1 script per 16^m = 4096 scripts in total.. about what the major lag out point is in SL. Might work.
512^m = 32 scripts1024^m = 64 scripts
4096 = 256 scripts
1/4 region = 1024 scripts
etc...

Okay I say script limit regions, in public sims. This will suck for many people, including myself, but wtf -- make it fair for everyone.

You can't split the "CPU pie" that easily - it works with plenty of other things than scripts! Say you have 1/4 a sim, and the sim supports 30 avatars, so you'd be entitled to 7. If you literally got only your "fair share" of the "CPU pie" then your parcel would always behave as if there were 23 other avatars present in the sim (not fun) - not because there actually are, but because the CPU time reserved to deal with them isn't part of your share.

And, again, the system so far has maintained that, in spite of the rule that landowners are entitled to control their land, there are no limits on attached prims. Imposing one would seriously hurt sales of prim hair and jewelry. The same applies to external scripts and gadgets.



Except that the mall has 15 avatar slots. So everyone else's framerate, etc, will be as if there were 15 other avatars in the sim at all times. On the other hand, if there are not in fact 15 avatars in the mall, the mall will have that extra spare CPU time free for scripts.



Without considering the avatar ratings.. the mall runs like a pig. However, what this means is that people wait around for longer. The queues for the event dispatchers get higher, memory usage for the scripts gets higher. With all those people teleporting in with extra scripts, the scheduling algorithm has to run over and over again, and that doesn't count against anyone's slice...



Not quite - if the CPU is going slow then the CPU is going slow!

First draft of proposal posted here.

Can you sat "1984"...........No I will not say yes to this. Its hurts the small land owers and lets biggers player have even more control. I voting no on this sorry..........

If done right, quotas should not effect small landowners unless they're consuming more than their fair share of the sim's resources, and this is having a negative effect on the rest of the sim. Put bluntly, it's ok to use all the resources when they're not in demand, but when they're in demand priority has to go to the people who paid much more for their land, IMHO. To say otherwise allows a small parcel on a sim to ruin the sim for everyone else.

How about this? We leave the system as it is, and simply have a tax of N percentage of the entire tier cost payed out by the popular parcel that takes into account time and number of avatars, then pays out to the other owners to cover their teir or portion thereof.

For example:

Lets say a person who owns 512 m wants to have a party that will last 3 hours and hopes to get 30 people to attend.

Lets also assume that the tier cost of the entire sim is $195 US per month.

And we can assume for this calculation an avatar limit of 40 total per sim at any given time.

On average there are 43,200 minutes in a month, or a tier cost of .00451 USD per minute per sim, or 1.17 lindens per minute per sim. (at 260/USD conversion rate)

so, if a person has 40 people on their parcel(s) (not including themselves, of course) their "popularity tax rate" would be 1.17 lindens per minute. That would fluctuate as people came and left.

In this way, your tier would be calculated by the number of AVs you had at your place and how long they stayed. In the case of a party that averaged 30 people at any given time the rough calculation would be :
(30/40)*100 = 75% useage *1.17= .877 L$/min * 120 min = L$105 which would then be divided out as a discount to all the other parcel owners based on their various percentages of ownership of the sim.

Now, this may sound like a complicated calulation to make, but computers turn out to be pretty good at making realtime calculations like this really easily. I bet the impact of this overall would be very minimal, but it would ensure everyone was ONLY paying for what they were using at any given time, rather than unvoluntarily supporting their neighbours.

Thanks!

You certainly have my full support for this idea. It really is a fair solution to the issue.

The only issue is that avatar presense isn't the only way to suck up sim resources.
There's also:
physics
Scripts
objects

Currently teir basically is the number of objects your allowed to have.

The only other issue I see with this is people being unable to predict how much ussage they might have. My cell phone is bad enough.

As well as opening up an avenue of grief. What would stop me from starting a party on some random parcel in a sim and costing the landowner money without their knowlege?

No, no no no.

Bad emough they've killed traffic incentives, now you want to punish people for having a popular build? Especially when they may have no control over a mob of avatars appearing on their land! This would just become a new kind of griefing.

Look, almost all the time, almost every sim is almost completely empty.

This is a situation made for overcommitment quotas.

Here's a simple one:

If the sim is less than half full, and there is no time dilation, then there are no parcel limits.

If the sim is more than half full, then:

Parcels 16k or smaller are limited to half the maximum number of avatars.

Parcels 8k or smaller are limited to one quarter of the maximum.

Parcels 4k or smaller are limited to one eighth of the maximum.

If there is time dilation at 0.5 or lower for more than 5s, then scripts are temporarily disabled for the all parcels 1k or smaller. If time dilation stays below 0.5, then 2k, 4k, and larger parcels get suspended until time dilation stops.

In both cases, all parcels owned by the same person or group are counted together. This way when the sim is performing well, nobody suffers. When it's performing badly, you get more resources if you paid more. This is much fairer than fining someone for a flash crowd he may have no control over.

Well, the fines I am proposing are relatively small. Even 3 hours of 30 avatars would only cost $105 lindens, or less than 50 cents. A flash crowd of 40 that gathered for 5-10 minutes or even an hour would cost less than 20 cents.

The idea of "griefers" taking up tons of their time to just sit on someones land randomly for several hours is unlikely. I think they tend to like the "hit and run" approach, and any parcel owner should be able to kick someone off their land if they are just sitting there wasting their time.

I think my idea could be implemented over a certain amount, for example it might not kick in until there is, say 20 people in a sim. That would be easy enough to implement as well, and would probably be even less drain on the system overall. It could also be made to take scripts and avatar prim counts into account.

The SPIRIT of the proposal in this thread is to have the person who is using the most resources take on proportionate costs. It is a complex problem and will obviously require a complex and flexible solution in order to work properly. The system that is in place now is clearly not working, and needs to be made more sophisticated.