How much is a lot of script time?

I've been trying to evaluate whether my multi-tool is using a lot of script time. The problem, is, I don't have much to compare it to. The only sim where I have estate manager privileges is pretty lightly populated. How much do people consider low, normal, high, and ban-worthy?

(If there's someplace else I should ask, please point me there...)

Well, when I tested this...

Flight Feather used < 0.07 ms at idle. That's "low".
A set of old-school scripted wings with scripts in every prim used >1.8ms at idle. That's "high".

When I ran my estate, I paid a lot of attention to script times. I ended up formulating my own rule of thumb based on my observations of items people used, and what was reasonable.

Did I mention this is my opinion? Want to make sure I do that.

I ended up with the rule that any item using more than 3.5 ms of script time for more than 10 seconds of time consecutively was 'excessive'.

Otherwise, I would have had to ban about 80% of the content people bought.

Of course the amount varies a lot depending on how complex items are. and for items I make myself, I would be mortified if any of them ever used more than 0.75ms of script time for any length of time.

Thanks. It looks like at about 0.2-0.25 I'm doing OK then.

Depends on how many objects like that you have. Remember, there's only 22ms total script time for the entire sim, so if you're making something that's going to have hundreds of instances in the sim... you probably want to make it a bit lower.

But for most circumstances, that seems reasonable.

Related question: what's the best way to measure utilized script time for an individual script?
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1)Access to the Estate Tools. The caveat with that is that you need to take multiple snapshots of the script because the time returned is a snapshot of just that particular slice of time. Probably poor choice of words. But if you try it you will see that it changes depending on just exactly what the script is processing at that particular moment.

2)The old school way. Go to a new, empty island with build enabled and a total time of .2 or .3ms, of which there are always a few on the grid. Now you can rez your object and get half decent readings.

Thanks, Jesse. I've never owned an estate -- do the mainland estate tools have this capability, as well as islands?

And, can an estate owner give estate renters access to this subset of the estate tools? (I doubt it!)

And, if an estate is group-owned, do group members have access to estate tools? I don't see a checkbox for that on the "abilities" list for groups ...

As for finding an island that is both build-enabled and empty, gah, that sounds like a lot of random TPing around!
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Island estate only. If you have a friend that owns an island you can ask them if they will make you an Estate Manager for a limited amount of time so that you can use the tools.


Yep! But I have done it in the past and it really does not take much time. Look for islands with no builds on them which you can spot when you zoom in. Alternatively you can log into Aditi and search for Bohol in the map. It is completely desolate and empty.

/me hugs the hint about Bohol, and Jesse too!

It would be great to have a whole blank sim to play with, on one's own. Y'know, if one could convince LL to waive the setup fee, running a sim-size sandbox is one service the Forum Cartel could provide to SL content developers. Use a Google calendar to allocate time slots for a single resident to have access to estate tools etc., so they could make script measurements or test whole-sim builds, then remove estate privileges for that resident, wipe all content, and on to the next timeslot. Some timeslots could be just regular sandbox access for all, simultaneously.
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With the resources here in the forums, I bet we could even develop a bot to help scripters make script time measurements. Y'know, lots of rapid measurements with data export (perhaps, at the worst, via screen capture) to a website like Slack's. Hopefully one could work out a way to extract the actual data for numeric reporting.
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Actually LL has already put the code into the server to read and get script time for mainland parcels. This will be put into the Viewers at the end of this year or beginning next year. We will also be able to finally see the memory footprints of our scripts.

Would that work for private estates too? If so, I think it's great news.

This one I do not know. I have been following it in regards to Mainland because it was something I had been requesting for over 3 years. You may want to ping Vector Linden for clarification. He is the one in charge of the server code and he should either know the answer or know who to direct you to.

Alternatively, his office hours are Thursdays at 3:00 p.m. PST in Morris on the Aditi beta grid. Unfortunately he has been swamped with work with the 1.27 server code and has canceled frequently lately. If you join the Second Life Beta group you will receive his emails stating if he has to cancel.

Aas it's a multitool HUD, if that becomes an issue I'll have ample motive to do further optimization -- sales would have to be really good Thanks! : )

That's great news! I'll definitely ping Vector on whether they'll be same measurements for mainland and islands.

Do you know if it will be measuring actual execution time (time spent actually running), or end-to-end execution (which would include time spent running other scripts as well)? If the latter, it would still be advantageous to do measurements on empty sims; if the former, the presence of other scripts with interleaved time slots would matter much less.
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If you get an answer could you post it on this thread by way of an update? Save us both bugging him with the same question.

There is no way to get end to end execution time for a script because it depends entirely on what the script is doing. For example; I have a single script that is a flight assist which can be turned off and on, a radar which can be turned off and on, it can rez objects and also bring me to a desired elevation.

Script memory usage is of course different because that particular script will still have just one footprint until the memory changes such as making a list longer. The reason they are going to allow seeing script memory usage is because at some point after it is in the viewer, LL is going to put into place memory limits per parcel and per avatar. No one including LL knows what the limits are going to be. But if for example you are allowed 256 kb of script memory for a 512 lot, then you would only be able to run four scripts that were actually using 64 kb of memory or a 60 kb script and seven scripts that used 28 kb etc. Do not get hung up on the numbers portrayed here because as I stated, no one knows what the numbers will be.

Yes, there will be estate, parcel, and attachment views made available from what's being called the 1.30 server (apparently there will be some version skipping in there). Parcel owners will also be getting the beacon and return thing that estate tools now have.

Yumpin yiminy, there's hope for the Lindens yet.

This raises another question for me, however: the 1.30 viewer seems an awful long way off and I'm still tapping my foot waiting for alpha masking in the 1.24 viewer. Where are folk getting the lowdown on these projected developments?

if you think the 1.3 VIEWER is a long way off, allow me to make you cringe and correct that to the 1.3 SERVER (since server version numbers climb slower that viewer numbers)

You're mixing server and viewer versions. Server version is already 1.27.

Uff. Every other thing I read or write these days seems to be off whack.

Yeah, I just didn't read Viktoria's post properly. I know the server versions and viewer versions are different. The current server can't download/upload textures consistently for a start. I've been getting error messages since the damn thing was rolled out last week.

I think I need to take a break from the forums.

Thanks very much, Viktoria, that's lovely news. Vector should send you a thank-you note too for saving him being bugged by me

Ephraim: I don't know where Viktoria gets her news, but if you are interested in discussions on coming features you can do two things: attend some office hours, and read the SLDev mailing list.
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Someone at LL seems to have developed an octal fetish or something, it seems we will be skipping 1.28 and 1.29 on the server side. 1.27 seems to have been a less bumpy ride than some other server updates, so maybe it won't that far off this time.

Maybe there needs to be a pool to guess what change in viewer 1.24 will cause the most frothing. Hidden meshes might get a little bit of "omfg teh GREEFERS can hied!", but I'm guessing most of the attention will be attracted by something like the "zomg all teh landmarks are full perm!!@@2!" change.