Script Perf numbers on land - script lag

EDIT: This issue has been resolved! See bottom of thread for details. /EDIT

I noticed that my scripts were running really slowly on my land, so I pulled up the simulator info (ctrl-shift-1). The Script Perf field shows 2.5 million ips with about 5,000 scripts running. Under the "time" tab, it shows frame time of 22ms, with scripts taking 20 ms. omg.

The neighboring region has about 3,000 scripts and only about 5,000 to 10,000 ips in the Script Perf. Scripts run perfectly fast there.

Is there anything I can do about this? I love my land but I'll have to sell and move if my scripts continue to lag so badly.

I think (but could be wrong) that sims want to run at a constant frame rate amd if they have idle time they'll spend it running scripts. Seeing 20ms script time isn't necessarily a bad thing.

Could this be something like an asset server slowdown instead? Do you know what the slow scripts are doing?

This sounds weird..

Having that kind of Instructions Per Second stat, I think, means that the scripts in the sim are running pretty fast. If the sim was hurting, it wouldn't be able to run scripts as fast and that number would drop. Also, since a sim wants to run at a constant 45fps, a frame time of 22ms is just about right.

What kinds of things are your slow scripts doing? A lot of database stuff? Physics stuff?

My scripts are not doing anything special. I believe there are some other scripts in the region that are lagging it out.

I think the Time field is important. The scripts were taking up almost the entire 22ms allowed per frame. In the neighboring region that runs fast, the frame time was 15ms with scripts taking about 4-6ms.

I've found the script perf value to be almost meaningless. Though 2.5million is so high that might indicate something strange, possibly some scripts running in endless loops. If you have estate powers use the "top scripts" debuggiong window to track them down.

What is REALLY killing your sim though is just having 5000 scripts. On a class 4 server it only takes about 1600 scripts of typical random complexity to put a sim into time dilation. 1600 scripts == about 17-18ms and then everything else added up == about 22ms the point at which the sim starts to lag. A class 5 sim will go up to about 3000 scripts before it starts to lag.

Above that, the scripts run slower and slower and the sim tries to keep up but then if one of the scripts actually DOES something or people log in an out and scripts are added or removed the sim will just practically HALT for several seconds. Other things the simulator needs to do also get very laggy, physics engine hits etc as the sim tries to juggle being severely overloaded, and script messages go slow so script reaction times go down more and more.

If you are diligent you /may/ be able to reduce your script load in half pretty easily. Halt all scripts in all opbjects that are merely using animated textures. Also seek out and halt scripts in plants or other objects where stupid builders have needlessly put them to make them phantom or whatever. Also look out for jacuzzis that have 200 scripts in them also because of poor coding. Replace them with better ones.

Finally, keep an eye on people that come to your sim and when you get those people that are wearing 800 to 1500 scripts on their person, politely tell them that they are single handed sim laggers, most of them will apologise having no idea and remove the offending items, if not... boot them. The very idea that a single av can come into a perfectly running sim and lag it to hell is annoying... "Accidental Griefers" I call them

Thanks for that info, but unfortunately I don't have estate powers, and I only have about 3 scripts running in my 512 acre plot.

I was wondering if this is something I should bring up with SL support.

Also, is there a way for me to tell whether my region is on a class 4 server?

I dealt with this exact same situation on a mainland sim that my group owns a big chunk of. That Script Perf number is indicative of something wrong. In my case it was several cager/orbiter devices of some kind stuck running somewhere, which makes sense since the nastiest of those devices reportedly use LARGE numbers of scripts firing LARGE numbers of commands as fast as possible, in order to slip past the constraints of the physics system and shoot someone to 3548943589735 meters.

Ths sim I'm standing in right now has 2358 scripts, and the Script Perf hovers around 11,000, with occasional gusts into the high teens. The sim in question has 4000-ish scripts, and Script Perf was upwards of 20 million before removing those devices. Now it's in the 20,000-25,000 range. Sure Script Perf might correlate positively in some way with a healthy sim, but when you get up into the millions it's a different story, something is wrong.

Unfortunately the best advice I can give you is contact a Linden during office hours and hope you caught them on a good day. This sim sat for a month after support requests by myself and a fellow group member went unheeded, and my partner finally approached a Linden in-world and he was gracious enough to pop over, use the Linden equivalent of the estate tools to pinpoint the problem, and remove the offending objects. In all honesty though, this happened just before the new Help and Support systems went into place; maybe it's better now. Good luck.

I've seen huge script numbers like that on my home sim as well. I think it means that some script is stuck in an infinite loop. The challenge is to track it down, so you can remove or fix the offending object. Alas, the statistics don't tell you anything about which scripts are using all the cycles

An inexperienced programmer could probably do bling and color changing with a half dozen or so scripts, per shoe. It takes a real genius to do it with a hundred.


I understand the number of prims, but a script per prim? Whatever for? The only thing I could possibly think of is resizing.

The script per prim is ususally for changing color. Though I saw one brilliand builder that wanted a 200 prim jacuzzi to be able to bring up a menu where ever you touched it. So yup, a menu script in every prim, not realizing that a SINGLE menu script in the root would have sufficed :/

LL recently added a new LSL command to be able to set all primitive params for one or all prims in a linksent from the root so in a lot of cases the script load could be reduced /severely/. However a lot of people seem to not know about it yet. Just saw a brand new unicorn av which, with prim wings on had well over 1000 scripts in it. All called "xxx color changing script"

With the llSetLinkPrimitiveParams, things like color changing, textur changing and sizing can all be done now from the root prim only (though slower than the old method). It should be used whereever possible

It's really neat that normal, non-coders can play around with stuff in SL but, some of the hurt they cause can be pretty extreme at times And unfortuantely a lot of coders do not own sims or have access to estate tools to be able to actually do a good job "profiling" their creations (even if they know that they need to). There should be much better tools for profiling in SL with warning if your scripts per link set exceed some number, scripts taking up too much time (endless loops), etc. A lot of people simply do not know the effects their creations have on sims.

Totally agree that we need these tools, but the irony is that the people who need the tools the most probably would never look at them. Only the clueful scripters who actually care about efficiency and lag reduction will use them.

i have seen it i laughed hard but it does happen same with hair

I can't remember the shoes that do it but i watched someones posted chag logs of it once and it was funny as hell i think in one shoe there were like 40 scripts

also a hint would be these are not coders doing it these are people who dont understand but who have a script and do it.

I stay away from any colour changing blinging item for this reason.

anyhow I have seen a couple of lag nightmeres in bling shoes they were nasty and crashing everyone around em they were nice shoes as long as no one wanted to like "move"

This is interesting and describes the performance of our sim (or lack thereof). Is it possible to determine how many of the sim scripts are yours?

I wish there were a way to let new folks know about this kind of heavy scripting that lags.

I recently bought a super cute but complex (96 prims) hairstyle that color changes with a series of menus from any prim, and I'm guessing that it might be part of my recent lag issues. (since it's the only scripted item I wear- not a big jewelry fan and my shoes are un scripted) =/

How do you tell how many scripts an object is running? I'd love to be able to keep my hair, but I can stash it in the inventory if it's a lag nightmare. There's no newbies guide to making sure you don't lag up a sim. (and despite my join date 6 months ago I haven't played enough to be anything but a newb)

Out of curiosity I requested LL take a look at my land to see what the cause might be and this is what I recieved back from them:

"Items that effect framerate are usually visual ones, scripts won't cause anything.

Having a look around, the most prominant features that would effect framerate are the complexed bulidings that your rendering. The reason that things are better at a higher level would just be that your not rendering them at 250m.

Apart from changing the structure of the building to something more simple, there isn't really that much that can be done to improve your framerate.

Full bright textures and spinning objects effect framerate also."

Being that my land is waterfront and the rendering also includes the water I can see this being the cause.

There is no way to respond to them so Thanks LL for taking a look.

Just an update (I'm the OP):

I opened a support ticket yesterday morning. As of this morning, about 20 hours later, everything is back to normal. According to the Linden tech, there was an item in the region that was causing the bad script perf. The item was removed and the owner notified.

Now there are 3,700 active scripts with a Script Perf of about 40,000 ips. Total frame time is down to 16ms, scripts taking 12ms of that. My scripts are running great again.

Pretty cool! Thanks Spike Linden!

Congrats Ultralite, and it's great to hear you got speedy resolution despite my gloom-and-doom story up above

Congrats on your victory! But one item bringing down the whole sim? Yikes.

It would be useful if someone, Linden Labs or private party, would put up a website where people could go to see a list of known sim-lagging items with bad scripts in them. I suspect that there are a number of old inefficient items out there that are probably passed around as freebies that are unhealthy to run.

Of course someone would probably see this as a violation of privacy - but most people don't know enough about scripting to know if an item they found somewhere and decide to rez is going to lag the whole sim down.

I suppose we should all be happy that you got a response that was sensible, helpful, clear, and presumably prompt. And I don't like to pick on spelling errors in casual forum postings, because typos happen.

But, assuming that's a direct cut-and-paste, I really wish that LL staff would have enough pride in their work that they'd be embarrassed to send out something with so many spelling errors. It's not that the spelling is critical, it's having a corporate culture that promotes quailty everywhere that's critical.

My dream is to be able to "weight" an avatar upon entering a sim. I manage an open-space sim. As you may know, it has about 1/4 power of a standard sim, and i had up to 100 agents. I can limit the number of agents, but that's unfair that ppl coming here to get help cannot enter because 40 ppl are just chatting around.

If we can't get the number of scripts attached to an av, we should AT LESAT be able to get (via LSL) the number of attached scripts on our own parcel. Thus, it would be possible to educate visitors (and maybe deny access to some) at the telehub before they enter the rest of the sim.

You need to contact the Lindens about that. My home sim went from about 15,000 IPS to 700,000 IPS in a single day, nearly shutting everything down with it. I got in contact with someone, and they came out and located a single object that was responsible. When she was done cleaning things up, the IPS went down to 9,000 or so and the sim is running better than it has in months.

Our normal numbers now show around 4,000 to 6,000 scripts with an IPS of around 8,000 to 15,000.

the real problem is LL is cheap


4 sims (that can handle what 100 users max spread over the 4) all run on 1 'server' computer



it's not the fault of the 'users' of the sim its all the fault of LL not giving enuf resources to the paying users.

One pc should run one sim, and each sim would run great, could handle alot more users, more prims, and one newb with "color changing hair and shoes' would not bog down 4 entire regions!

You forgot to add "and land prices would go thru the roof because LL would have to quadruple their colo space to hold that many boxes."