how do i clear chat from the land to sort chat lag out?

[Diney McCallen]

want to clear historical chat logs from land, to avoid chat lag, how do I do this, or is it done with a sim rstart?

[Bobbie Faulds]

Chat lag has nothing to do with the land. The chat logs are maintained on the players' computers. You can, on your personal computer, clear chat cache and that can sometimes help. You can also look and see where your chat logs are kept if you have your preferences set to save local chat and empty that folder out.

Group chat has become a problem because it is used for something it wasn't originally designed for. Groups were originally designed to manage land, not serve as customer service/chat for stores. LL did help when they changed it so that any group with over 5K members no longer shows the members list but it can still be bad. It's been worse the last few days with the maintenance and rolling restarts.

[Rolig Loon]

The chat logs on your computer won't affect chat lag in world at all.  Not one tiny bit. Chat lag occurs because the servers are having to listen to too many people or objects at once.  Here's a technical note that LSL scripters have referred to for guidance:

 

• Avoid channel zero (PUBLIC_CHANNEL) and set name or id where possible to avoid lag. llListen(0, "", NULL_KEY,"") can be laggy as it listens to all chat from everyone in chat range and so should be avoided.

• In November 2007, Kelly Linden offered this explanation to help scripters plan listeners more efficiently:

1. Chat that is said gets added to a history.
2. A script that is running and has a listen event will ask the history for a chat message during its slice of run time.
3. When the script asks the history for a chat message the checks are done in this order:
   • channel
   • self chat (prims can't hear themselves)
   • distance/RegionSay
   • id
   • name
   • msg
4. If a msg is found then a listen event is added to the event queue.

The id/name/msg checks only happen at all if those are specified of course.

So, the most efficient communication method is llRegionSay on a rarely used channel.

Nowadays, llRegionSayTo is to be preferred, where appropriate.

The "history" that Kelly is talking about here is a temporary storage in the servers that holds information for a fraction of a second, evaluates it, and then passes it on and deletes it.  The more information there is to handle, the greater the potential for lag.  Hence, Kelly's advice about avoiding writing scripts that use the public channel that avatars speak on.  Once a script opens a communication channel, the servers must listen for anything that might be said to that scripted object at any time, so poorly-written scripts can add to the load that avatars already create by themselves.