Statistics Script time VS Debug top Scripts time

[Loki Eliot]

So im looking into performance issues on my private region and have been looking at Script time. In the statistics bar it says my Region Has a script time of 11ms. Ive read that over 5ms is bad so i went to the top scripts debug window and that tells me the total script on the island is 4ms, so which one is telling the truth or why are they different?

 

[Cerise Sorbet]

Top Scripts shows a rolling average over time, the statistics window is closer to real time so that you can see the spikes and valleys in the graph.

[Loki Eliot]

This shows what happens to the statistic bar in the middle of a spike/hiccup

 

[Cerise Sorbet]

Yeah, if the whole sim goes gronk, you won't get much useful out of the rest of the stats. But, if the sim isn't dying from rez/physics stuff, you can expand the script time, one of the graphs shows the plot points.

[Qie Niangao]

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Ive read that over 5ms is bad 

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That's an odd thing for that writer to say. It would be a strange sort of sim that needed script times to be lower than 5ms... maybe a very specialized showcase for physics and pathfinding that couldn't afford a reasonable amount of time for scripts, but certainly not the typical sim.

Also, in case it's not clear, a larger script time is not the sign of a busier sim. In fact, very often the opposite: when the sim is busy with other stuff, it will end up reducing script time (because, beyond a bare minimum timeslice, scripts have the lowest priority of any sim activity).

And certainly the statistic bars in these screengrabs don't suggest that scripts are a problem on this sim. The first one shows more than 5ms Spare Time, which is pretty comfortable. The second, during the spike, shows that suppressed script time due to a big increase in Simulation Time.

At first glance, it's not obvious to me why that simulation time is so inflated. There are a few more agents in the sim, but nothing that seems extraordinary.

Just for reference, what goes into the "simulation time" bucket seems to be quite a grab-bag of stuff, including "doing some work dealing with the land/wind/cloud layers, running some scripts, and a bunch of small bookkeeping jobs like returning objects, checking for dead connections and such" (per Simon Linden at a user group) and "running other [non-physics] simulations (agent movement, weather simulation, etc.)" (per the knowledge base). Whatever that means.

[Loki Eliot]

The '5ms' thing i got from the 'manageing Private Regions' page, sorry if it was an odd thign to say but im only going by what info im managing to gather. If in your experienced opinion you think my regions script time is actually typical of private regions then im relieved. 

Since i started this thread i actually had someone from the Lab come check over the island. They said they had 'undertaken steps to improve stability' and also added 'The region now exists on different hardware which should help performance in your situation.'

The region is noticibly better and not suffering the hiccups/spikes so i guess there was something wrong that was not in my control. Thanx for the extra info though.

[Qie Niangao]

Wow. Thanks for that information. Hard to guess the origin of that "official" 5ms threshold for script time. I suppose, below 5ms, there will not be much to see in Top Scripts (certainly nothing to account for sim lag), and it never hurts to look in Top Scripts to see if anything is busier than expected. 

In any event, glad your sim is running better.