Lag and Club Behavior

Okay, this is kind of a rant, but I see this so often, it makes me a bit upset.

How often have you gone into a club, and seen all these scripts running, to change the color, texture, and movement of the dance floor, moving spotlights, particle generators up the wazoo everywhere...

Of course the lag is going to be bad. What do these club owners do? They request all of their patrons to remove *their* scripts, particles, etc. etc. etc. while removing none of their own.

Why do club owners do this? It's annoying as heck to their patrons.

=) lol good observation.

an Empty club should be reasonably just as smooth FPS-wise as any other build.

If its not then it needs torn down and rebuilt.

A lot are built by very tacky, unskilled builders though.

it's their property, and therefore their rules, they could enforce a no-hair-whatsoever policy if they really wanted

but you are right that overuse of poor scripts in a small space will cause extra strain on a server.

No hair would reduce lag a lot.

I dont think anyone would go to a no hair club tho.

cept maybe the star trek people

depends on which kind of lag your talking about

NO HAIR ! would speed up your computers performance becuase your video card isnt rendering 1.9 million polygons as hair

bad scripts hog down the back end of things, the sim

Rotating a spotlight and changing the colour of the floor are hardly intensive though.
Calculating the movement of thousands of flexiprim hair strands is. No Hair Club here I come!

Changing the colour of a prim requires the sim to resend all of the prim's data, which I think was somewhere about 1Kb.

100 prim colour changing dance floor = 100Kb * 30 avies = 3Mb per second for the sim if that's the rate of change, just for one dancefloor

Static stationary prims or attachments on the other hand don't really induce any significant server lag. Attachments move when you move, but that's done client-side.

Meanwhile there's a local light ever other meter and dozens of 1024x1024 textures all over the place. The effect of any attachments is going to be negliable at best.

Heh! No hair? But I'm already a bald walking corpse!!

Really though, I think its a combination of all these things: Bling, Hair, scripts, animated stuff.

once your AV has "seen" each texture from a dance floor, it wont be sent again though, surely? I would have thought they'd be called back from your cache rather than sending all the data to you again.

Scripts objects are DYNAMIC means they render on your pc not sent over and over.


so no

a club full of ppl wearing scripted objects does not lag a sim, but it might lag your home pc if its not good enuf for the best of the best


but if you are not IN the club LOOKing at the scripted objects, they dont exist.

It won't send the texture when you have it cached, but it will send the prim's parameters over again on every change.

(Edited to add that rotation through llTargetOmega() and texture animations are fully client side on the other hand)

Are you sure flexiprims are done entirely client side? I would have thought it would be done by the physics engine on the server, taking a hit on the physics FPS that is listed under sim details. I haven't looked at the viewer source though, so I don't know.

Local lights are surely client side though? You can switch them off in the viewer for a speed boost (unlike flexi prims).

@poopmaster: scripts themselves run on the server. They don't run on the viewer, which is why script performance and IPS are listed as sim stats. Sometimes IPS can drop to pratically 0, and that will affect every script as seen by every person in the sim.
IIRC, particle effects like bling will be rendered on the client side, but the actual timing script that runs it is run on the server.

This isn't accurate. Scripted objects absolutely affect sim performance. Whether you're 1m away from one or 90m away from one. LSL is entirely server side, and consumes server CPU time.

A club FULL of people wearing scripted objects can, and often does, lag a sim to death.

Perhaps we should make all nightclubs grey inside too or better yet remove all the walls because prims cause lag.

Perhaps LL should just get their act together and make servers that can handle a decent amount of prims and scripts for a nightclub simulation and it's customers, because when the opposition pulls it off with 4-10 times more prim/script capability they will be in it deep.

Flexiprims don't affect physics at all - I believe they are essentially phantom. If they DID, club sim FPS would probably drop below 0.1....

yes flexi is all dynamic, runs client side.

didnt you goto Prim105 class

I have kept away from prim hair because I don't want to spend half the evening at clubs with grey plasticene hair! Luclkily I have long straight silky hair which is standard SL when loose. Sometimes I have it in a flexi tail that is only 3 prims or a bun that is 2.

Actually checking:

Hair: 48 prims
Necklace: 230 prims
Earrings: 38 prims each
Skirt: 64 prims

Not sure why people make such a fuss about hair when pretty much every other prim attachment is close to the same amount or a multiple of it (and no, my jewelry isn't bling ).

I have a 195 prim hair =) (dont usually wear tho)

thing is, take that 400 prims you are wearing and multiply x everyone = thats a lot of prims for the land to support.

I recently "saw the light" and sought out a low prim wig that I could live with. It's got 29 prims, but it's also flexi. I suspect that I haven't reduced much lag versus a wig with more prims that are all static.

I don't see much significance in the distinction between server lag and client lag. One would like to avoid having SL be a slideshow for themselves and the people around them regardless. On the other hand, I usually enjoy the prim hair of the folks around me and can suffer the lag for it.

There are a lot of beautiful, smooth-running and completely deserted places in SL, so if a particular place is always laggy, it's licit to just gang up and go somewhere else, or, e.g., go during off peak times. On the other hand, I do think it's OK to ask that folks cull their attachments during classes, certain events, etc, and for folks to expect owners to do their part too.