From: Dillon Speculaas
Re: Desmond and lag... Provincetown was specifically designed to be as low lag as possible. Limiting the effects of lag is possible, but it does take planning BEFORE the sim is built. It's a failure of many great sims that lag effect was not taken into consideration during the planning stage. The Provincetown dance club Babylon was tested over a period of a couple weeks to be sure the lighting would provide a pleasant experience while limiting the lag usually associated with such clubs. We limit scripts and scripted objects in our residences and commercial properties as well.
Our first party in July... the introduction of the completed sim... maxed the avie limit and we did in fact crash... IIRC we hit 41 or 42 before the sim went down. However, since then, we keep tight control over what's scripting in the sim during events, and we have now had the avie limit boosted to 50, and have had nearly that many avies on several occasions without tech problems... Linden issues notwithstanding.
This is interesting, because nowadays script lag slows down scripts and impacts very little else. This intentional priority change was made during an update a loooong time ago, at least prior to v 1.7.
As far as crashing a sim at 40 or so people as recently as July - this too is odd. I've had 60+ in individual Caledon sims back then with time dilation *still* .95 and more.
Though, there is always the visitor wearing 1/5 of a sim's worth of twisted, cut polygons on their avatar, using a laptop, and then complaining to *me* about "lag in my sim". Heh.
Three things commonly lag a sim "server side" nowadays:
1) Momentary sim lag spikes - all servers do this, going off to process housekeeping tasks or some such periodically.
2) Image cache issues. When you get a lot of visitors, sometimes the cache gets overloaded. This is a grid-wide bug and 99% of the server side "lag" in Caledon (and everywhere else, if people aren't doing blatantly stupid stuff). Image cache issues are easily cured with a restart. The gridmonkeys are working hard on this one, and seem to be making progress.
3) Stupid stuff. Yep, someone intentionally rezzing a physics-enabled chain of torii. Nothing much anyone can do about that except shut off building or physics.
* * * * *
The number one way to reduce lag is education. Many people struggle valiantly against stuff that has little or no effect anymore.
Incidentally, I've been running benchmarks on class 5 sims, with the help of some script-wizards over the last few days. Bottom line: these servers perform very nicely. Got 28 primmy avatars in an object-maxed, effectively texture-maxed class 5
openspace sim and *still* had better than .95 time dilation. Nobody could crash the sim, even when I asked all 28 to try.
