"Gray Goo Fence" - what is it - please define

HELP! (I hope some lindens will read this!) I have a product that does prim surface detection by shooting a tiny tiny prim out in specific direction. When it collides with a surface of a prim, it shouts a message back to the parent giving it specific information about the distance of the prims surface. Suddenly the product stopped working and I get a non functioning product AND messages that indicate that this is a new thing implement in the last downgrade. Someting about the gray goo fence.

I mess with the timing and discover that if I fire the prims separated by more than 3 seconds, then I don't have a problem (i was using a 1 second probe)

I am about to release this product and need to know that I can reliably set this timing and not get hammered because the lindens decide to change somehing else.

Three Questions: 1) Does anyone know the reality of what this thing is.

2) Is 3 seconds a reliable number?

3) Why does this have to be levied against TEMP_ON_REZ prims which are going to go away anyway and don't burden the sim?

Please help me out - My product depends on this.

The "grey goo fence" was a safety feature put in place after some griefers were able to take down the grid using object replication.

Check out the wiki definition of grey goo. Basically, it's caused by an object that self-replicates, then each new replication self-replicates, then each new replication self-replicates, then each new replication self-replicates, then each new replication self-replicates, then each new replication self-replicates... The end result is that these objects eventually overrun the world. Even temporary objects can self-replicate, spawing who knows how many clones before it eventually dies.

The "fence" is a precaution to prevent a massive outbreak of objects. I'm not sure if Lindens ever went into details about what parameters it uses to trigger the fence. Usually, I think, you can get around it by slowing down the replication rate as you've already figured out.

to my knowledge there has been no publicised parameters as to what the grey-goo fence looks for. Slowing down replication (llRezObject(), llRezObjectAtRoot(), etc.) is best way to get around this.

That being said, the fence isn't that good at stopping population explosions. In working with my A-life I've found that it's very easy to create grey-goo that completely bypasses the replication aspect of the fence and can fill up (and crash) a sim within minutes of a run-away duplication bug.

I believe there is also a physics checking aspect of the fence, as I had recieved the fence error when working on a single object that was processing a large amount of collision events and llApplyImpulse commands.