From: Marianne McCann
My home sim, Hundertwasser, has been nightmarish the last couple days.
1. On the weekend, my brothers shape broke while there, in a new an unique fashion (only the upper torso ruthed, but not the rest of the avvie). Relogging did not fix: he had to reload from a backup of his shape.
2. There have been numerous sim crashes since Saturday, including a pair of them right after each other last night; the second caused an outage for roughly a half-hour
3. Severe lag today: you cannot move within the sim itself.
Nothing that I can tell has changed within the sim on neighboring lands, and nothing that wold contribute that much lag has been placed on the sim by any of us.
Anyone have ant ideas of anything I can consider doing in this case, or is it out of my hands?
Mari
1. Shape 'Ruthed' - this isn't caused by the specific sim, per se - at least nothing to do with the sim's data. It's lag/asset server/packets that kinda thing.
2. Numerous sim crashes - hard to say for sure. Depends on the kind of crash; it could be issues at the co-lo facility unrelated to the sim itself, or someone could be causing trouble with physics possibly. I'd suspect the former before the latter.
3. Usually this is unrelated to sim crashes, and 98%+ percent of the time due to image cache issues. This *is* sim related but more a function of having too many textures, plus a lot of visitors. If you look at Sim Stats, expand Time (ms) and look at Image time - if it's over 1.0 regularly or spiking to 10 or 100, that's your issue.
Restarts fix this for a good little while, although the more textures you have, the more prone to image cache issues you are in the sim - get a bunch of visitors drop by and you may 'tip the scales' and send the sim down an ever-worsening lag death spiral until it's restarted.
If there haven't been a lot of changes, it could have been that you had a bunch of visitors come by that triggered the image cache mess. I've heard rumours that what happens is that the image cache starts writing/reading from HD instead of RAM when too full, hence the fetch time spikes hard and keeps spiking, and thus the cache has a really rough time 'cleaning up.' But that's all speculation.
Action item: Ask someone (Lindens, Live help?) to please restart the sim for you.
If it's during 'primetime' (i.e. a lot of people on the grid) it may be a while before the sim comes back. I suspect what is happening is this: your sim's relaunch has to find an available hardware server slot to restart upon, and if one isn't available (or there is a delay getting the data regarding what is available) it will be a while before the sim relaunches. So best to do restarts when the asset server and what-all is behaving. Again, speculation but backed up by a *lot* of circumstantial evidence.
If the sim is still acting up after restart and images time is below 1.0, take a look at the number of total scripts. If it's over 2500, say, you may be having issues that I won't get into too deep.
Sometimes, the issue is a new avatar 'visitor' to the sim who is heavily loaded with scripts and loading the sim down like a sumo wrestler riding a chihuahua.
If you have any top suspects, invite 'em to Caledon (or any friendly sim owned by someone you know) and get them to sit on an object you rezzed.
An estate manager can then quietly use the estate tools and 'weigh' an avatar's script lag if they sit down on something easily identified - maybe it's not quite polite, but sometimes you just gotta gently let someone know that they are killing every sim they ever visit.
Rarely do they figure it out themselves, and wow do you improve their SL experience once they fix the issue.
