Sim Memory, Scripts, Collisions and how it works!

[ReneMoreau]

I would REALLY like to know how this all affects eachother, how it works in world, what as sim owners we should look out for when trying to keep a lag free region, and to know what it all is broken down.

 

Mempory- What is a healthy number for a sim? What number should be aimed for when keeping a sim lag free?

Script memory- How much is too much?  How is should each avatar aim for?  When living in a community, having residential properties, what is a good amount for each parcel?

Collisions- What the heck is it?

Debugging and finding lag problems- Ho does mesh affect lag? How much does what each avatar wears and what they do (i.e building, dancing, rezzing, etc) affects lag?

 

Sorry to sound like a noob, but I get so many different answers on all of this, and I would really like to get to the point.  I would love a clear guide so any links to blogs, websites or other threads and information is greatly appreciated! 

Thank you!
~Rene

[Drew Bhalti]

imo most lag is client side.  the server's themselves very very rarely anymore have any amount of lag.  

 

Most of the time it's people who are running VERY old hardware and have bad connections are the very vocal voice that complain about lag. 

 

But there is quite a bit to teach SL users in reguards to what makes lag and what does not make lag. 

[Ohjiro Watanabe]

This won't answer all your questions but maybe some tips for you:

 

http://www.atob.ws/CTLSimLag.aspx

 

[Qie Niangao]

Some difficult questions here. You ask about memory and particularly script memory, and this can be a significant problem -- but it's much less common than before, so it may be that LL has added physical memory to the sim hosts. (I've heard that they did, but I've not seen that confirmed.) The reason this was such a big deal, back when memory would routinely exhaust, was that it affected all the sims sharing host hardware (so your sim could suffer without being responsible for its own fate) and the effect was extraordinarily non-linear: performance didn't just degrade, it fell off a cliff.

Anyway, for whatever reason, memory just isn't the problem it used to be, so I wouldn't spend much time trying to optimize it for your sim, nor hassling visiting avatars about the memory consumption of their attached scripts (the measurement of which is insanely inaccurate anyway).

Collisions are just events in the sim's physics processing, occasioned by something bumping into something else. For example, an avatar falling from the sky and landing on the ground creates a (particular kind of) collision. This is almost never anything to worry about except in extraordinarily crowded sims (e.g., SL Birthday regions) or those with complex physical scripts (usually vehicles) -- or when attacked by a physics griefer. In fact, the SL physics engine is so robust these days that it takes serious trickery to trigger physics-based lag (which raises the challenge for the griefers, but not insurmountably). Historically, though, collisions were a major problem on even moderately busy sims.

Once an avatar has arrived in a sim, there's very little it can do to affect lag one way or another until it leaves the sim. It's very slightly better if they sit down on something non-physical (regular furniture, poseballs, etc.) because then they won't cause any collisions at all. And they might interact with some script that does something laggy to the sim (rez a ton of physics-enabled prims or something evil), but generally, once they've arrived, they've already done more lag damage than anything they'll do until they leave -- which event also incurs a lot of sim processing.

(So if you think about that, you'll see that the very worst thing you can do is to teleport out an avatar for exceeding some lag measurement threshold without also banning them for a few minutes and telling them in detail what they need to fix before trying to teleport in again. Otherwise you're both annoying the visitor and setting up your region for repeat rounds of expensive rezzing-in and rezzing-out.)

One reason that the rezzing-in and rezzing-out process is so apt to lag a sim is that during those intervals, scripts are being loaded into memory and slotted into the scheduler to run, so this is one time that having a lot of scripts actually matters. (This is also why temp-rezzing scripted objects is a Very Bad Idea.) Otherwise, scripts mostly just split up the scraps of idle time after all other processing is complete, so steady-state they typically have no affect on sim lag at all.

[tabletopfreak Toocool]

"Memory- What is a healthy number for a sim? What number should be aimed for when keeping a sim lag free?"

also wondering

[Klytyna]

17 minutes ago, tabletopfreak Toocool said:

"Memory- What is a healthy number for a sim? What number should be aimed for when keeping a sim lag free?"

also wondering

A four year old thread resurrected by a necropost...

Forget Sim memory, it's nowhere near the problem it used to be 6-8 years ago.

Forget "Script Memory" as ditto...

Certainly forget the SL-Fossil gibberish "How much does mesh lag", as that was based on an assumption in days of yore by Viewer 1 using idiots, that "mesh is of the devil".

Forget also the "IMO lag is poor people" BS also.

You want a low lag sim...

1. Keep total script count as low as you can

2. NEVER use pathfinding

3. Keep physical set objects on the sim as few as possible

4. Avoid media on a prim and external web databases for your objects where you can to reduce html requests

5. Eliminate as much alpha blend from the build as you can

6. Try and avoid the "too many small overtextured useless items" thing caused by the foolish search for "imersiveness" in RP sims, kitchens in houses do not NEED 20 non functional "Le Cretinset" cooking pans on a rack, each one with it's own slightly different 1024 x 1024 baked texture

7. Never use scripted persistant temp-re-rezzers

8. Don't try to get 50+ avatars on your parcel at once, it's not big and it's not clever.
 

[ChinRey]

2 hours ago, tabletopfreak Toocool said:

"Memory- What is a healthy number for a sim? What number should be aimed for when keeping a sim lag free?"

As Klytyna pointed out, we shouldn't really resurrect threads as old as this since much of the info may be outdated. Better to start a new one on the topic. This thread was short enough to start with it shouldn't do much harm though.

Right now, the by far two biggest causes of lag in SL as a whole are textures and mesh avatars. But some places and some users may be lagged down for other reasons.

And it changes all the time. Some factors ay become less important as LL fixes issues (they are working on both the texture and mesh avatar problems right now), other factors may become more important as people come up with new ways to abuse them. Now that we have animesh, it's likely that pathfinding will become more common. That's certainly something to look out for in the near future.

There are two things that never change though. One is that there will never ever be a computer strong enough to handle all the details and features we all really want in an online virtual world. The other is that the less we waste, the more we have to get the useful stuff done.

 

Oh, and since Klytyna mentioned this:

1 hour ago, Klytyna said:

Certainly forget the SL-Fossil gibberish "How much does mesh lag"

The same applies to "sculpts are laggy" and - I've heard "prims are laggy" too. Poorly made content (I'm talking technically, not design here) is laggy. Well made, optimized content isn't.

Edited October 13, 2018 by ChinRey

[tabletopfreak Toocool]

1 hour ago, Klytyna said:

A four year old thread resurrected by a necropost...

Forget Sim memory, it's nowhere near the problem it used to be 6-8 years ago.

Forget "Script Memory" as ditto...

Certainly forget the SL-Fossil gibberish "How much does mesh lag", as that was based on an assumption in days of yore by Viewer 1 using idiots, that "mesh is of the devil".

Forget also the "IMO lag is poor people" BS also.

You want a low lag sim...

1. Keep total script count as low as you can

2. NEVER use pathfinding

3. Keep physical set objects on the sim as few as possible

4. Avoid media on a prim and external web databases for your objects where you can to reduce html requests

5. Eliminate as much alpha blend from the build as you can

6. Try and avoid the "too many small overtextured useless items" thing caused by the foolish search for "imersiveness" in RP sims, kitchens in houses do not NEED 20 non functional "Le Cretinset" cooking pans on a rack, each one with it's own slightly different 1024 x 1024 baked texture

7. Never use scripted persistant temp-re-rezzers

8. Don't try to get 50+ avatars on your parcel at once, it's not big and it's not clever.
 

 

1 hour ago, Klytyna said:

 

You want a low lag sim...

 

respectfully .. i want to know how much memory a full privet region is alloted .... im well aware of all the other information  that you shared , but im sure someone who didn't know will see it and that's great ..  so to anyone els.. the question still stands

[tabletopfreak Toocool]

12 minutes ago, ChinRey said:

the less we waste, the more we have to get the useful stuff done.

case in point.. this is why NO MATTER how minor it may be.. having optimized my sim well as is, id like to make sure all areas i can control are optimized.. which is why id like to know how much KB of memory does a full private region get 

[Klytyna]

4 minutes ago, tabletopfreak Toocool said:

respectfully .. i want to know how much memory a full privet region is alloted .... im well aware of all the other information  that you shared , but im sure someone who didn't know will see it and that's great ..  so to anyone els.. the question still stands

 

1 minute ago, tabletopfreak Toocool said:

case in point.. this is why NO MATTER how minor it may be.. having optimized my sim well as is, id like to make sure all areas i can control are optimized.. which is why id like to know how much KB of memory does a full private region get

Once, apparently it was 300 mb, but that was back in the days of the old class 5 servers, it was certainly rasied since then, what it may be now, I have no idea...

Not that it matters, as the ONLY way you can affect the memory usage is to...

Pay attention to ther points I made , and which you calmly dismissed...

As analogy, it's like ypou asking how to make sure your car goes when you turn the ignition key, put it in gear and stamp on the 'loud' pedal, and when people tell you to make sure the fuel tank isn't empty, the battery isn't flat, all four tyres are suitably inflated, etc., you sneer and claim you knew all that but still want to know how to make sure your car goes...

 

[ChinRey]

16 minutes ago, tabletopfreak Toocool said:

case in point.. this is why NO MATTER how minor it may be.. having optimized my sim well as is, id like to make sure all areas i can control are optimized.. which is why id like to know how much KB of memory does a full private region get 

Seems somebody else got in an answer before I had the chance

/me glares at Klytyna, trying to look very serious and angry, doing her best to suppress the giggling

I can add two things.

First, the memory data you see in the Statistics window is all client side. There's nothng about server side memory there.

Second, no matter how much memory the server has, it will eventually fill up with old garbage data and that can cause serious performance issues. One of the reasons why sims are routinely restarted once a week, is to clear the memory but according to a Linden I talked to, that is not always enough if a sim is heavily loaded,

Edited October 13, 2018 by ChinRey

[LittleMe Jewell]

57 minutes ago, tabletopfreak Toocool said:

respectfully .. i want to know how much memory a full privet region is alloted

But that is not what you actually requested in your first post - thus why you got the answers that you got.

You asked?

2 hours ago, tabletopfreak Toocool said:

"Memory- What is a healthy number for a sim? What number should be aimed for when keeping a sim lag free?"

also wondering

 

[tabletopfreak Toocool]

50 minutes ago, Klytyna said:

 

Once, apparently it was 300 mb, but that was back in the days of the old class 5 servers, it was certainly rasied since then, what it may be now, I have no idea...

Not that it matters, as the ONLY way you can affect the memory usage is to...

Pay attention to ther points I made , and which you calmly dismissed...

As analogy, it's like ypou asking how to make sure your car goes when you turn the ignition key, put it in gear and stamp on the 'loud' pedal, and when people tell you to make sure the fuel tank isn't empty, the battery isn't flat, all four tyres are suitably inflated, etc., you sneer and claim you knew all that but still want to know how to make sure your car goes...

 

that would be a great analogy if i had asked you how to make my sim run smooth.. i was clear and concise in my question , one the OP had asked himself and was dismissed  then as well in a very simula fashion  .. not that you didn't seem well meaning.. but after a VERY long snarky back and forth with LL staff.. IT SEEMS  that while yes.. its not a big deal compared to other factors , there is in fact a high end to memory usage , as it pertains to the memory your scripts on the sim use.. and its 500k.. its not a hard limit .. but a guideline of when memory usage is getting high ... much how you have 22ms or cpu time.. and you COULD use no scripts and just overload on physics.. if you wanted to... BUT there still is a point at which you say.. oh ge.. thats alot of resources just going to physics .. most sims will be around 1ms or less.. that's not a hard limit but its just a guide to say.. if yours is 4ms and your not sure why.. then its high and something is wrong.... in the same way, your total script memory usage should be close to 500k or less .. unless your doing something very specific (not sure what that would be tho).. to be clear .. if yours says .. say 600k+ you MIGHT wanna look into what you could do differently as it pertains to memory usage  

[tabletopfreak Toocool]

15 minutes ago, LittleMe Jewell said:

But that is not what you actually requested in your first post - thus why you got the answers that you got.

You asked?

 

 your right.. i did assume you know sim means full region  and a homestead is a homestead.. even then .. there is an answer for homesteads(i didnt ask the live support about that tho im guessing it would be about half or maybe like 60% of a full region) and a higher "limit: for a full region which is 500k.. if yours is 600k plus you might wanna look into it.. that's all .. and as for digging up an old thread.. its good.. cuzz now after years of being ignored , its been solved ! woot woot 

[LittleMe Jewell]

4 minutes ago, tabletopfreak Toocool said:

i was clear and concise in my question

Respectfully........ see my post above.  Your original question was not the same as your later questions.

 

[tabletopfreak Toocool]

59 minutes ago, ChinRey said:

Seems somebody else got in an answer before I had the chance

/me glares at Klytyna, trying to look very serious and angry, doing her best to suppress the giggling

I can add two things.

First, the memory data you see in the Statistics window is all client side. There's nothng about server side memory there.

Second, no matter how much memory the server has, it will eventually fill up with old garbage data and that can cause serious performance issues. One of the reasons why sims are routinely restarted once a week, is to clear the memory but according to a Linden I talked to, that is not always enough if a sim is heavily loaded,

im talking about the memory number you see in KB listed at parcel details >general>script info 

and even so to the point of it will eventually fill up with garbage, it would still be good to know this threshold  

as for my question about kb of memory used by scripts on the sim hitting the server , its 500k as a guideline.. basically if your at 600k.. it might not come to a halt.. but its way above average .. not that 500k is average ..i was told they don't see meny sims go over that .. so 500k is already the high end for a full region , and i would assume a homestead would want to keep that even lower .. since the latter gets less cpu.. id assume it gets less memory as well before it gets overloaded

[tabletopfreak Toocool]

6 minutes ago, LittleMe Jewell said:

Respectfully........ see my post above.  Your original question was not the same as your later questions.

 

"Memory- What is a healthy number for a sim? What number should be aimed for when keeping a sim lag free?"

vs

respectfully .. i want to know how much memory a full privet region is alloted

i see how that might confuse some people, im sorry for that

in any case the answer wasn't "here's 10 other well know things you can do to help sim lag"

the answer would seem to be about 500k

some of us like to be ahead of the curv , prevent issues before they become issues  

while it certainly true textures alone are the biggest "issue" (only an issue if your pc isnt up to it)

EVERY little thing adds up.. so i do my best to get evey little thing in check so that i can have more most detail in my build, while being as efficient as possible .. well "reasonably possible" 

[tabletopfreak Toocool]

lets not get in our feelings ,k? this was a good day.. this question that's years old.. no matter how insifiat to you it may seem has been answered.. and if thats know what this thread was started for.. what am i saying.. of course that's what this thread was started for.. to get answers 

[Klytyna]

9 minutes ago, tabletopfreak Toocool said:

i was clear and concise in my question , one the OP had asked himself and was dismissed  then as well in a very simula fashion

People who ask pointless and irrelevant questions often get dismissed, it's the way of the world...

Asking what the limit is when you a) have NO direct control over usage, and b) when your sim will crash and burn from other causes long before you reach that limit, makes the question largly irrelevant, this was pointed out to the OP 4 years ago, and again to you now.

4 minutes ago, tabletopfreak Toocool said:

im talking about the memory number you see in KB listed at parcel details >general>script info

A largely pointless number... It doesn't have that much effect on sim performance, and as mentioned, a sim will crash and burn from other causes of lag LONG before that number becomes significant.

16 minutes ago, tabletopfreak Toocool said:

but after a VERY long snarky back and forth with LL staff

Let me guess, you asked the tch-illiterate call center buffoons on the Livechat desk... Who basically read old obsolete rubbish off the knowlegebase app they use...

The same buffoons who in 2013 told a questioner there were no such things as different server classes, despite the fact that class 8 servers made up 27% of the grid, with the majority being class 7's, and a few old class 5's...

The same buffoons who told a premium member that using an RLV enabled  TPV altered your PC so you could NEVER install or use the official viewer ever again...

The same buffoons who regularly tell people that 'lag' can be cured by simply performing a sim reset (which will have absolutely NO effect on lag caused by bad building practice or the nature and number of objects rezzed)...

...

So, basically, you asked a pointless question, didn't like the answer, and went and asked the very LAST people you should bother with...

And now you think you are a lag-destroying tech-god and a general forum hero for getting a  questionable answer to a worthless question, 4 years late...

 

 

[ChinRey]

18 minutes ago, tabletopfreak Toocool said:

im talking about the memory number you see in KB listed at parcel details >general>script info

That's script memory and it's only a small fraction of the total memory used.

 

16 minutes ago, tabletopfreak Toocool said:

the answer would seem to be about 500k

It's far more than that.

Totally empty sandbox, not a single object rezzed anywhere so no scripts running:

Sandbox where somebody forgot to clean up before they left. Two boxes with unpacker scripts and one pose stand:

Busy sim that is a bit on the heavy side but still running reasonably well:

[Klytyna]

20 minutes ago, tabletopfreak Toocool said:

the answer would seem to be about 500k

Also, if you think script memory usage for an entire sim should be 500 kilobytes, either the Livechat Buffoons told you rubbish, or you simply didn't LISTEN...

A single avatar's scripts, can run anywhere from 500 KB to several MB, I've seen people rocking 48 MB of script memory on a single fugly tech SL-Fossil avatar (old old hair and shoes).

 

[tabletopfreak Toocool]

3 hours ago, Klytyna said:

People who ask pointless and irrelevant questions often get dismissed, it's the way of the world...

Asking what the limit is when you a) have NO direct control over usage, and b) when your sim will crash and burn from other causes long before you reach that limit, makes the question largly irrelevant, this was pointed out to the OP 4 years ago, and again to you now.

A largely pointless number... It doesn't have that much effect on sim performance, and as mentioned, a sim will crash and burn from other causes of lag LONG before that number becomes significant.

Let me guess, you asked the tch-illiterate call center buffoons on the Livechat desk... Who basically read old obsolete rubbish off the knowlegebase app they use...

The same buffoons who in 2013 told a questioner there were no such things as different server classes, despite the fact that class 8 servers made up 27% of the grid, with the majority being class 7's, and a few old class 5's...

The same buffoons who told a premium member that using an RLV enabled  TPV altered your PC so you could NEVER install or use the official viewer ever again...

The same buffoons who regularly tell people that 'lag' can be cured by simply performing a sim reset (which will have absolutely NO effect on lag caused by bad building practice or the nature and number of objects rezzed)...

...

So, basically, you asked a pointless question, didn't like the answer, and went and asked the very LAST people you should bother with...

And now you think you are a lag-destroying tech-god and a general forum hero for getting a  questionable answer to a worthless question, 4 years late...

 

 

NOPE he arugded with me for a while ,l sounded as ignorant as you lot here, then finally gave in ans said "i don't normally see sims with moire the 500k in memory usage" meaning most of them are under that.. and thats all i wanted to know.. why you so mad??? XD 500k as in 500,000, ok? god.. you think you know everything hu?

[tabletopfreak Toocool]

2 hours ago, Klytyna said:

Also, if you think script memory usage for an entire sim should be 500 kilobytes, either the Livechat Buffoons told you rubbish, or you simply didn't LISTEN...

A single avatar's scripts, can run anywhere from 500 KB to several MB, I've seen people rocking 48 MB of script memory on a single fugly tech SL-Fossil avatar (old old hair and shoes).

 

nope wrong yet again.. your on a roll today.. i didn't say 500kb... duh that would be way low... i said 500k.. as in 500,000.. kb is just implied since.. you know.. that's the metric they measure SCRIPT memory usages in.. of which you have control over IF your the on dropping your items.. and if you are smart enough to check script usages BEFORE you by things.. basically its just about being responsible 

[tabletopfreak Toocool]

2 hours ago, ChinRey said:

That's script memory and it's only a small fraction of the total memory used.

 

It's far more than that.

Totally empty sandbox, not a single object rezzed anywhere so no scripts running:

Sandbox where somebody forgot to clean up before they left. Two boxes with unpacker scripts and one pose stand:

Busy sim that is a bit on the heavy side but still running reasonably well:

https://gyazo.com/ff986f4338483066d331685b4d405f83

[tabletopfreak Toocool]

keep ASSuming things.. it really suits you well XD