SL Performance...or lack thereof.

[Laneybug Macbain]

I have been in SL for almost 2 1/2 years now.  Within the first month or so, I landed in the residential sims that I still reside in to this day.  The high prim sim for this sim series is little changed from when I first came here but I am telling you that performance gets worse every day!  We have scrubbed for bad scripts and eliminated them.  We have eliminated scripts that just don't need to be there.  We have looked for every kind of issue that could cause lag and eliminated it.  The script use on the sim is minimal considering it is a high prim sim.  We just don't know what else to do. 

I have talked to Linden and they keep telling me the same thing over and over and over.  It's us, of course.  My position is this, if things have changed so little, then how can it possibly be us?  We need answers as people complain about the lag sooooo much we are actually losing visitors.  We have long time residents who refuse to come to the community center, which is the high prim sim because lag is so bad.  How do you prove, to Linden, that it is not us and to please look at what is possibly on the server side other than a few statistics?  It is the same old thing...never Linden, always us.  

From where I sit, when the sims are no longer attracting people, the owner of 26 sims no longer has a need to keep them.  Revenue lost for Linden.  While there may be larger land barons in SL, I don't think ignoring this issue is the best strategy.  What can you do?  

[Rolig Loon]

I was just on the sim I think you're talking about -- a beautiful place that I've visted many times before -- but I didn't notice any lag.  The sim stats are showing time dilation = 0.994 and 44.7 sim FPS.  It's essentially lag free, by the numbers, and I'm having no trouble moving around.  Maybe it's just the time of day. When are you experiencing the lag issue?

[Laneybug Macbain]

No, it's pretty much all the time and we can hardly even have events there anymore.  There are occasionally people who say they don't lag but cannot figure out what makes them so different.  Their computers are not super machines.  In fact, more often than not, my machine is much better than most.  It's not limited to any time of day.  I am the estate manager for these sims and I never have an issue until I go to the high prim sim.  This sim is divided into two parts with half being residential and half commercial.  Nothing extraordinary nor are things around there unusually scripted.  I have been told a couple of times by Linden that it's textures.  But these same textures have been on this sim since it came about almost 4 years ago.  So totally stumped.

[Rolig Loon]

Yes, there are a lot of lovely textures on that sim, but that's only going to affect how rapidly they all load.  It won't have any significant effect on your ability to move around, chat, and do other normal things.  You'll just see some gray areas instead of non-cached tetures for a while.  I can't get back in world right now to double check, but as I recall your "high prim" sim isn;t really all that high prim.  You have something just shy of 11,000 prims on it, so there's about 1/5 of your prim allotment left.   That's a comfortable margin.  The script time on the sim was close to 20 ms this morning, which is on the high side of normal but not bad.  I don't remember noticing anything out of the ordinary with Physics time either.  All in all, the numbers on your sim do look good.

I don't want to add fuel to the hysteria about the number of scripts that people are carrying these days, but that is one obvious factor to consider.  As a general rule, if people are carrying more than 50 scripts (equivalent to about 2MB of script memory), they may be adding measureably to sim lag.  That's all the more true if many of those scripts are Mono-compiled -- at least until LL finally beats the Mono bug.  Even on the fairly quiet sims where I spend a lot of my time, I have recorded times when a sim's servers have stalled for up to 30 seconds when a lot of people are TPing in for an event.  I would never suggest installing a script meter as a punitive device, but you might want to try using one just to see how much script load people are bringing in, and maybe setting one up as an educational tool.

Off the top of my head, I don't know what else to suggest right now.

[Laneybug Macbain]

While I understand what you are saying, what you don't catch in what I am saying (maybe I am not being effective, my apologies).  We have educated folks about their scripts, etc.  We have made mono every single script we can and eliminated or purchased updated versions that had scripts not compiled in mono.  I, myself, carry very minimal scripting if any at all most of the time.  Resize scripts I get rid of once I have modified whatever it is to fit me.  We have few things that are just abnormal to account for the lag most feel.  I have literally welcomed a new visitor to the sim and before I can even blink my eyes, they'll remark that it's too laggy there and leave.

I have been to other sims with lots and lots of people there and the lag is worse, yes, but not significantly.  So I don't understand why you don't lag at our place and don't understand why the other places are not significantly more laggy.  There are only a couple others that say they "usually" don't lag.  But they, too, lag sometimes or crash the rest of the time.  I have heard that if you are sharing a server with other sims that are laggy, they can leech their lag over to your sim.  Don't know if that's true but am surely to goodness fed up with banging my head on the wall.

We are talking about, for the most part, a consistent group of people who have been going to this sim on a regular basis for over two years.  So is it really us changing or is the technology not up to date or what?  Hard on this end to guess without knowing how this system is set up.  And hard to make an argument, even here, without more concrete evidence to throw around.  So I guess we're just going to have to keep going until no one comes anymore then the sims go away.  There is nothing more for us to do.  We didn't build this system but we sure have gone out of our way to eliminate all the culprits that have been suggested by Linden and now here.  So nothing left to do I guess.  Thanks for the input.    

[Rolig Loon]

 

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Laneybug Macbain wrote:

I have been to other sims with lots and lots of people there and the lag is worse, yes, but not significantly.  So I don't understand why you don't lag at our place and don't understand why the other places are not significantly more laggy.  There are only a couple others that say they "usually" don't lag.  But they, too, lag sometimes or crash the rest of the time.  I have heard that if you are sharing a server with other sims that are laggy, they can leech their lag over to your sim.  Don't know if that's true but am surely to goodness fed up with banging my head on the wall.   

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Yeah, I don't understand it either, and I agree.... it stinks.  Your sims truly are beautiful.  I've enjoyed visiting occasionally over the past couple of years, but if had to deal with a lot of lag every time I came, I probably wouldn't visit as often either.  Other than what I've already suggested, though, I don't have a clue how to beat your problem.  Sorry. :smileysad:

 

[Shockwave Yareach]

Another idea I'd like to venture -- perhaps your sim is the victim of a griefer attack?

 

There are griefer things like Prism which troublemakers like to rez in places like sandboxes.  They normally place them up around 75m, and they are transparent so nobody sees them.  They rotate like mad though, and anyone with a LL viewer that's in range of it will be spending time computing all the angles and fetching graphics (which change 20 times a second or something like that.  )  If this junk is in drawing range, your viewer lags like you won't believe.  Dial the draw distance down to where you no longer render it, the lag vanishes.

Use your estate tools and see if you have junk littering the sim by people you don't know.  The only reason I know about this trick is that it was used on my home sim about 2 years ago.  I would lag like heck because my draw distance was 196; everyone else around me had no problems.

[Laneybug Macbain]

The land is deeded to a land group and auto return is on for those not in that group.  That is something we keep a constant watch on and anything that manages to slip through is done away with.  Gotta love those griefers.  Thanks for the info, I'll double check to make sure nothing has been missed.

[Dilbert Dilweg]

What Region are we talking about?

[Laneybug Macbain]

Scotland Balloch

[Dilbert Dilweg]

I honestly  do Not see any Lag. But that doesn't mean there isn't at the times you experience it. I was there and only 4 residents total on the region.

I did Notice Standing in my mall as apposed to standing at your place I had a lower FPS on my end. Compared to my mall and with 50 residents. I got 35 FPS in my mall and 27 FPS standing at your place. (hard to determine)

I would imagine when you get about 30 resident in one spot. Everyones FPS is going to drag way down and make it feel like sim lag.

Use ctrl-shift-1 to pull up The statistics window. Then click on BASIC and that will show you Your Viewer FPS, and you can compare it to the SIm FPS, under "advanced". If your Viewer FPS is dropping way down when you run an event, but the sim Stats stay up in the 40's (give or take a little) for FPS, with the occasional drop, then the lag is on your end (viewer side) and everyone else's due to having to render a lot of images/avatars And Build

More avatars = more images and prims to render. Combine it with high resolution images on the sim and you will surely get a lot of lag. It will be viewer lag..

A Lot has changed in how residents wear items. There are more attachment spots and more complex avatars = more to render. New tattoo Layers etc

Use the Statistics window to determine exactly where the lag is during your events.

I would like to be there during an event and see what happens.

Also, Users wearing a ungodly amount of scripts can kill sim memory and make it one laggy monster.

 

If you have a regular low FPS under basic in the statistics window then you should look into upgrading your Video card or PC. They dont run forever

Good Luck

 

[arton Rotaru]

To check if it's viewer or server lag, I would recommend to fly up into the sky, when you discover the bad lag, at 500 meters or so. And see how you are doing there.

[Blaze Nielsen]

Hi Laneybug, lag can be a real bitch. Heres my take on it. Our Bartlett & Nielsen store is made up of 6 sims. We monitor script time every day on each sim. It changes dramatically and tends to build up over time. Each sim has an average number of MS script time between 5ms and 10ms depending on the number of scripts etc. in them. If a sim starts exceeding that number or fluctuates wildly, we restart it (assuming we are not hosting a bunch of high scripted avatars). Sometimes several restarts are required to tame the lag. We can see lag dramatically jump when an avatar tps in loaded up with scripts. Sometimes that continues even after they leave (why this happens, I don't know). someone mentioned your sim was running at 20ms script time. thats way high and you will have noticeable lag at that level.  Sometimes your sim may be paired with others in a server that are a club or overextended in some way and start to sap your sims resources. when that happens, restart until you can get it on another server. (I'm assuming you have tools available to do all this and not on mainland).  Good luck.

- Blaze Nielsen, bitching about lag in SL since 2005

 

 

[Void Singer]

just there myself, and the framerate is choppy.... too many unique textures, but I can move around fine.

script time is fairly high, running ~19ms+, but dilation is almost non-existant. physics time is great.

texture update console says there's a ton of particles, some of them are probably fighting with each other to get screen time, and their spawn rate should be lowered.

I do get a massive increase in net time when entering but it subsides after about 20sec...

 

honestly the only thing I see is a high texture count driving frame rates down.