The truth about vendors?

Hi all.

Is it true? Do vendors *Really* cause lag on a SIM?

I have a little merchant area set up on my sim where people can rent shop space and sell, you know the deal.

I`ve been saying "No vendors, sell only from prim boxes" because I was under the impression that the vendors cause lag.

But now im thinking its possible I was misinformed, I know I really do not understand how vendors work and the impact they may have on a SIMs performance.

Does anyone have the answer? I`ve also been told that someone renting and using 100 prim boxes to sell their items causes more lag then if I let them put up a 10 prim vendor, for instance, to sell out of.

Perhaps, are some brands of vendors more laggy than others? If so, which brands should be OK for me to let my renters use?

Look fwd to hearing the truth about vendors. Thx!!

Everything can cause lag.

From vendors to that little online dector.

It's all runing scripts and the amount of scripts that are run that'll start making visible lag.

Most vendors however wont cause that much lag from them alone.

But yes 100 prim boxes is going to cause more load and video lag than one 10 prim vendor

I see, so a few vendors here and there on the SIM would probably not make much of a negative impact compared to if I had hundreds of vendors on the sim? (theres a particular mall I used to frequent, most everyone sold out of vendors and the lag was insane)



What type of lag would a vendor produce?

vendors cause some stress on the simulators computer, thus when in numbers the sim will start to slow down

in the 100 vs 10 prim example tho, it takes your computer alot less video power to render 10 prims rather than 100 prims

Ty but...
Im still a bit confused.


Let me ask this, maybe it will help me:


Which scenario would a shopper have a better experience in:


A. A sim with 20 small shops all selling from 100 prim boxes.

or

B. A sim with 20 small shops all selling from their own 10 prim scripted vendor.

C. Depends. Why?

------------
I understand the 2000 prim boxes will take longer to load.......but whats the impact like versus 20 'machines' running off of scripts?

Depending on the vendor script (most of the newer ones are pretty coded nicely).

However, even then I'd suggest B.

2000 prim boxes would take awhile for your "shoppers" to load thus they might just up and leave.

Many malls have more than 10 scripted vendors and lag is just video from what i see.

I would think it depends mainly on the size of the textures showing on these boxes. Some commonality means fewer textures to download.

Personally, I hate scripted vendors. People aren't polite and just start browsing through the one you're using (or worse, the vendor auto-cycles textures on its own every other second), it takes forever for every new texture to rez instead of just standing and waiting 2 minutes for everything to rez, no easy way of browsing through anything and they're the first thing to break and not give you what you paid for, etc.

As far as lag is concerned, most of it probably comes from things the vendors are doing that are unrelated to vending (guesses: calculating commission, sending sales reports, checking/updating from networked vendor, auto-cycling items) and every script contributes some little bit to lag, whether it's being useful or dormant.

As a person who sells a networked vendor...here's what I can tell you:

1--Not all vendors are created equal. Some are much more laggy than others.

2--Boxes hanging on the wall can be more laggy than a vendor in high enough number

WHY does a merchant use a vendor:

1--They have a prim limit on their rental. Maybe I have 30 items but only 20 prims available in my stall. I'd need a vendor to put the items in.

2--They don't want to visit EVERY location in which they have items to update. Network vendors allow you to simply drop an item into a 'server' and auto-update everywhere at once.

3--They like to keep detailed transaction records/etc that a few vendors allow.

WHAT should a sim-owner look for in spotting troublesome vendors?

1--Texture rotations. Loading texture after texture over and over is not friendly to graphics cards. The same holds true with 'single item boxes' that have texture rotations

2--"Temp Rezzers" (these are ESPECIALLY bad)...just as constantly reloading textures is bad, constantly reloading an entire 'rezzed' display object is worse.

3--If you own a private island, check the 'script time' on vendors. You'll see some with higher script time than others. I've seen network vendors as high as 0.064, though most of them average at 0.030....mine run at 0.006.

In the end, we can again break 'lag' into two areas:

script lag: delays in script responses...push a button and nothing happens for a moment, etc.

graphical lag: rubberbanding, trouble walking, not being able to turn around, etc. Most commonly experienced and usually the result of things visual rather than scripts (though a script can cause visual displays that end up lagging you--see Temp Rezzers).

100 prim boxes = graphical lag

10 vendors = a lot less graphical lag (unless it's 10 vendors that display 10 pictures at once each--watch out for those), a little bit of script lag.


CONCLUSION:

Vendors are a huge boon to merchants who need to save prim-space and be able to update ALL their locations from a central server. Also a giant boon for profit shares, etc. The right vendors are low-lag and not a hazard to mall owners...things could be much worse.

a 10 prim vendor will be easier on visitors than 100 boxes loading 100 textures.
modern vendors cause minimal lag, and they can really be dialled down if certain automated aspects of them are prohibited, such as automatic cycling, automatic polling and so on. oh, and the constant vendor chatter can be annoying, prohibit that too.

On the same note re: rezzing.... if you can ask your merchants to put smaller textures on their boxes, stuff will rez faster. If they're all putting 1024x1024 pix on their boxes, they'll take forever to load. If your merchants use 256x256 or 512x512, the pics on the boxes will rez much faster, causing less frustration for the shoppers.

Thanks everyone. Especially Ken, that made alot of sense, I get it now.

I`ll let people go ahead and use vendors.

Can anyone tell me a brand(s) to "ban" from my sim? I have no idea what "modern-day" vendors are as apposed to the older ones that cause a ton of lag.

Unscripted "Linden" vendors, i.e. prim boxes, don't cause any script lag. However, they cause as much lag in a prim-heavy area than any other additional prim.

Calls to the asset server for texture and prim data, then the texture download plus client-side graphics lag due to the additional texture that has to be kept in the video memory. Finally physics lag, if the prim is not set to phantom (vendors should always be set to phantom of course). A scripted vendor adds additional lag.

I have no doubt that a scripted vendor with 10 or less prims can be less heavy on the sim resources than 100 unscripted prims, when the script is rather lean. But it depends on the script and the nature of the 100 prims. If the 100 Linden vendors share only 7 textures (16 vendor displays per texture) and are set to phantom, they will cause less lag than a heavily scripted single prim with timed events, listeners and whatnot.

Most scripted vendors are not paticularly laggy, generally, they're just sitting there waiting on a money event to occur, and aside from that, not doing anything else. Personally I vend from one prim (scripted) vendors, and have about 80 or so on my lot, and they do not seem to affect things all that much.

I don't know which ones you should ban.

But to recommend a good vendor that I'm using, The JEVN vendor, I've been using it for a little under 2 weeks and haven't noticed any additional lag then I'm used to.

The freebie 1 prim vendor from Hiro someone isn't bad either.

Nat

Obviously 100 prims worth of vendors is far worse than 100 prims set to sell their contents.
So if you havnt changed prim limits, allowing vendors may increase lag.

This is critical to shopper experience and almost always overlooked. If there's any way you can restrict vendors to show no more than, say, 3 products at a time (currently selected, previous, and next), the vendors can be a significant win. Anything more and the texture loading lag approaches the equivalent number of set-for-sale boxes--with the added overhead of the vendor scripts hitting the sim.

One other thing: Most vendors now in use are networked. This is very slick technology for the seller, and works fine for the buyer most of the time, but it does rely on inter-sim communications (at least), and that adds a bit of vulnerability to network glitches and delays (beyond the seemingly endless and sometimes related problems with the asset servers). So, when SL is being cranky, shopper experience can be worse with such vendors than with the for-sale boxes.

Providing the prim boxes aren't textured, your GC can handle creating 1,000's of 3d boxes per second, and that has little load on the system, and it's localised to the individual sim server code. Add textures (especially different ones to each face, and per prim) and the sim server has to poll the asset server database for each texture and send it to your client to render, checking the UUID and cross referencing it, this infomation includes shading that create the shadows for a 3d environment.

Scripts are dynamic and will normally react to the user, this causes additional serverside loading as it will have to decide exactly what that script wants doing. Lets say it changes/cycles through another mass of side pane textures, again more interactivity with other parts of the network, the changes in textures also has to be transmitted to any viewer within range to update their client as well. If it is to buy something, it checks permissions, polls the account server to gain permissions to make the transaction, even whether to trigger a drop down confirmation box of the recipient, if they are online.

Your own system can handle greater load than the LL servers can throw at you, for the most part. To create a 3d prim (cube), takes 7 small number sets (one for each visible corner (4 at the top, 3 at the bottom), consisting of x,y and z coordinates), add colour and luminance and you are talking about a couple of bytes of information. Throw a 512x512 texture to the prim, now you can be talking about 512kb-5mb of data that has to be downloaded before rendering. Throw in a script or two and the lag increases.

As yourself why the likes of BareRose doesn't use vendors? Yes the sim is laggy, but not only are there a few thousand prims there each with textures applied, but it also includes dance club, DJ equipment etc etc.

Seconded...if I tp into a place that's nothing but vendors, I generally tp right back out again.