Extreme Lag on sim [help]

[Abram Violet]

I have been renting this region for a while (about a year) now & a few times every month, it gets hit by waves of lag. You kinda just freeze for a few seconds every minute or so. Things won't load, and also sometimes the inventory won't load. This is not just happening to my avatar, but everyone who is in the region at the time the "wave of lag" hit. We have had the owner of the parcel look around and he gave us a few suggestions as to what could be causing it so we returned the items. We even left the parcel bare. He told us that what was causing it was something like a scripted object hitting another scripted object & it's impossible for him to locate it. The region I'm talking about is 'Sharlies Angels'. I believe it has to be something that someone is using on one of the nearby sims in the region since it goes on even when no other avatars are in the region. Any tips on how to find who and what is causing the lag? Also, he has tried region restarts and everything we could think of. 

 

Thanks,

Abram Violet

[perfumed Odets]

hi,

 

Estate/sim owner is supposed to be able to find and locate the items that  are causing the sim performance slow down in estate setting of the sim. Or the cause of the lag of the sim  can be not by an object on the sim but the sim server issue itself also..in that case. estate/sim owner can get  a linden to check on the sim and move the sim to a different server to make the sim work more smoothe or a linden(a linden lab customer support dept staff) would be able to get a linden lab tech guy to check on tht sim server glitch issue and fix that.

[Qie Niangao]

I took a field trip the the sim. Unfortunately, while I was there, it behaved (almost) perfectly the whole time. The only glitch I saw was some fluctuation in Net time, but nothing I saw was relevant to the "lag wave" thing.

Nonetheless, there are a few things you might want to keep an eye on. Near the SW corner of the sim, there's a "Limbo Dance" installation with a constantly moving physical object. It's phantom, so it's not causing collision lag or anything, but constant physical motion is noteworthy, causing some network load when there are viewers nearby to watch--although, again, it wasn't causing any problems at all while I was there, and Physics time, like everything else, was very low.

Along the same lines of "lots of network updates" but not any sign of a problem: there are a pair of (non-physical) swings as part of a playground, swinging constantly until I touched them to stop. There are a bunch of Dwarfins, but they're actually less load than a single "Animated Gnome" nearby that's based on the old Puppeteer engine and flows quite a stream of updates to anybody viewing it. One of the clubs has a "stop all animations bubble lamp" that also does constant but relatively slow updates.

Again, none of these things were causing any problems while I was there, nor would I expect them to be the cause of the problem you're encountering. I'd certainly never raise these as issues to paying tenants, but if they ever complain about viewer lag, they might be able to give themselves some slight relief by changing how these objects work or are used.

Sorry I couldn't be more help. 

[Abram Violet]

What about meeroo nests? Each one is running at about .13 Mb & the person who owns them has well over 125+ nests rezzed. That alone would account for 16.25 Mb.  My landlord said that breedables were no longer an issue but I really think that is what is causing the problem. 

[Abram Violet]

Now that you mention it, I do seem to experience it whenever there seems to be a few people on the sim. (usually at the club) Could people being in the sim, around lets just say "the culprit"...would it be easier to find then while it's happening?

[Qie Niangao]

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... would it be easier to find then while it's happening?

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Always, but especially for an estate manager (or a Linden).

Without access to the Region/Estate tools, I was pretty much "looking for keys where the lighting is good," and didn't even notice the Meeroo nests. I'm not terribly concerned about them, to be honest. It's difficult to know how much memory they're actually using; from outside a script, only the maximum they could be using is knowable. Even if they're all using their limits, 16MB shouldn't be make-or-break for a full-primmed sim unless there's a lot more going on. (That said, 125 instances of anything on a sim is a potential concern. It's the vulnerability of a monoculture: any momentary glitch is increased by two orders of magnitude.)

[ETA: I meant to ask, is anybody using Pathfinding? If not, you might consider turning it off for the region and seeing if that helps. (Assuming it's not already off; I don't recall if I even checked.) In the past, that didn't prevent much processing overhead, but I read somewhere that this recently changed. Granted, that shouldn't be necessary, but sometimes ya gotta do what ya gotta do.]

[Abram Violet]

Thanks for the all the help! The landlord is kind of being a you know what about it, so I'm moving to a new region at the end of the month. It's going to be a class 8 sim where each parcel has it's own server so I doubt I'll be running into many issues with lag there. 

[Qie Niangao]

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Abram Violet wrote:

Thanks for the all the help! The landlord is kind of being a you know what about it, so I'm moving to a new region at the end of the month. It's going to be a class 8 sim where each parcel has it's own server so I doubt I'll be running into many issues with lag there. 

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Umm... I'm not sure what "each parcel has it's own server" can mean here. As far as I know, all full-primmed (i.e., non-Homestead) regions have the same architecture: one CPU core per sim. (I gather that the sim process is not pinned to a core, but just a 1:1 ratio.) I believe that Class 8 servers pack more cores per server host, but the CPUs themselves run somewhat faster than in earlier generations, so on balance you wouldn't lose any performance... but I don't think it will be a night-and-day improvement either.

[Perrie Juran]

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Qie Niangao wrote:

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Abram Violet wrote:

Thanks for the all the help! The landlord is kind of being a you know what about it, so I'm moving to a new region at the end of the month. It's going to be a class 8 sim where each parcel has it's own server so I doubt I'll be running into many issues with lag there. 

---

Umm... I'm not sure what "each parcel has it's own server" can mean here. As far as I know, all full-primmed (i.e., non-Homestead) regions have the same architecture: one CPU core per sim. (I gather that the sim process is not pinned to a core, but just a 1:1 ratio.) I believe that Class 8 servers pack more cores per server host, but the CPUs themselves run somewhat faster than in earlier generations, so on balance you wouldn't lose any performance... but I don't think it will be a night-and-day improvement either.

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Also, as I understand it LL uses an algo to determine what server to place a SIM on though I am very sketchy about the details.

I'm not aware of any place that LL guarantees to any REGION owner what server they will be on.  Because in the jargon you don't technically speaking purchase a SIM, you purchase a Region which is hosted ON a Simulater.

[pixysticks]

When a Second Life simulator is lagging out, things to check...

First turn on your Statistics. You can use the hotkey Control + Shift + 1 to access this window.

-Check the Object count to make sure the simulator isn't full or near to full (3750 homestead // 15,000 full prim).

-Check the active number of scripted objects, ensure the number is appropriate. An empty sim should have 0, and a full sim will have a varied amount depending on who owns it. But if you see thousands of active objects then there is a problem.

-Check your ping time. Ping is relative and will differ from individual to individual a little bit, but if everybody has a massive ping (such as 300ms+ which even that is bad. My average ping is 50-100ms or sometimes just a little over), then start snooping around the sim for the cause. If no cause can be found, it is likely a neighboring region is under heavy load. (especially in the event your sim is empty).

-Check your bandwidth. If you're pushing more then 15-50kbps something isn't right. Turn on Constantly Updating Objects from your Develop Menu (Hotkey Control + Alt +Q followed by Control + Alt + Shift + U). Your Advanced Menu (Hotkey Control + Alt + D) may be required to access your Develop Menu. If you see a lot of floating bubbles emanating from any one source then it is consuming large amounts of bandwidth for everybody within draw distance.

-Check and ensure "Region FPS" and "Physics FPS" are both the same number, and are both 45. Less is bad. Vehicles, physical objects, and any moving objects should be inspected and removed from the environment while you are trying to determine what is causing the lag.

-Check "Time Dilation" and make sure it is 1.0 or very near it. -Turning on Beacons from your world menu (Hotkey Control + Alt + Shift + N) can help you identify scripted objects, particles, and other nuisances that may be having a negative impact on your environment.

-Assuming you have Estate Manager (EM) rights, go into the Region Details (Hotkey Alt + R) and click on the Debug tab. Check Top Scripts to make sure nothing is consuming a large amount of CPU time. Anything "low lag" will be .001-.003. Items above that should be inspected/snooped/have a cause for consuming more resources.

-Check Top Colliders. If you have a lot of collisions taking place in the sim it can easily lag it out. If you and your friends all hang out in a building on are moving on a prim that overlaps with many other prims (you can see a shimmering texture effect where two textures overlapping flash quickly where they meet), then the structure/platform/whatever it is you're all standing on is causing an enormous amount of collisions. Find content creators who build using grid tools and use math.

-Obtain sim monitoring tools from the Marketplace, or the LSL Library and make them yourself to help monitor sim performance to see exactly when the region drops occur while having Beacons, Updating Objects, and Transparencies all turned on at once.

-Make sure nobody in your sim is doing any heavy appearance editing, or attaching/detaching large amounts of rigged mesh, sculpties, and scripted attachments. The act of cycling through some demos at a quick pace can easily destroy a sim's performance. These are a few ways to try to keep your sim running at optimal performance and low lag.

There are other factors that can cause a sim to misbehave but those are the typical most common ones. Good luck.

(edited to make spacing easier to read )