Does Size Matter or is it what you do with it that's important?

Does size make any difference (I guess I'm saying SIM loading/speed etc)

IF you pop a door script, a texture animation script or a rotation script (or many others) into a prim that's 1x1x1 or 256x256x256 ?

Is it all the same task/job as far as the SL world is concerned and the fact that it's a physically bigger object has to relevance on the task in hand?

Or, perhaps, does it matter WHAT script it is you are giving the object?

Perhaps size matters for some tasks but not others?

Anyone done any tests to prove this out?

Thanks.

I'd guess that moving the prim is slightly more impacting for larger prims because of collision plane changes, but I wouldn't guess it's much.

Well, size can make a difference in terms of the physics engine on the server and rendering on clients.

On the server end, a naive approach would have to consider every single pair of objects (if there are 100 objects that would be approximately 100x100=10000 pairs) to calculate whether they've collided and what the result is if they have. A more sophisticated approach (and Havok 4 must do this, but I'm not sure to what extent--if it simply checks bounding boxes, or tries to separate things into oct-trees, or what) does some quick filtering based on the rough bounding box and position of the objects to rule out as many pairs as possible before the complicated and expensive computation is done. It isn't inherently harder to deal with large objects, but they are going to cause a lot more (potential) collisions because they are bigger and their bounding boxes will intersect those of more objects than a smaller object would. This is the biggest danger with mega-prims. Havok 4 deals with them better than Havok 1 did, but it is still an issue; there's no avoiding that.

On the client side, the viewer culls objects that are behind or too far away to be of interest (influenced by your viewer's draw distance in custom graphics preferences--not actually a hard cut-off, much as it sounds like it). Again larger prims aren't ruled out as often, and mega-prims may wind up being drawn by the viewer of every user connected to the region (and maybe even surrounding regions). Get enough of those and your viewer may slow down to a crawl because of all the extra crap it has to render no matter where you are and which way you are facing. Of course, in some cases that might be better than 500 small prims stacked together to make the same effect, so it's not as big an issue for the viewer as for the server.