Are Free Accounts Throttled

[Damian Glendullen]

Hello, I have had two paid accounts with SL for ten years and spent thousands of dollars in SL. I recently decided to sell my land holdings and downgrade to a free account. Since I did that, SL is laggy and landscapes take forever to load. Are free accounts throttled by Linden labs?

[Wulfie Reanimator]

Sounds like coincidence/placebo.

Any changes in your internet bandwidth/quality, viewer settings, places you've been visiting, or computer usage habits?

There are so many factors to consider. Especially if you're having low framerate (which seems to be the case since you mentioned loading separately), there's no way LL can affect that directly. 

Edited June 15, 2018 by Wulfie Reanimator

[Solar Legion]

No, they are not throttled. 

[Alwin Alcott]

50 minutes ago, Damian Glendullen said:

Hello, I have had two paid accounts with SL for ten years and spent thousands of dollars in SL. I recently decided to sell my land holdings and downgrade to a free account. Since I did that, SL is laggy and landscapes take forever to load. Are free accounts throttled by Linden labs?

i have 3 premiums, and a little herd of basics, i never noticed a difference in performance, if my main lags, the others enjoy the same sticky gummy effects and loading. So i guess it's "no" to your question.

[Bitsy Buccaneer]

Objects and textures on your land holdings would have been in your cache and therefore quicker to rez. That could explain the difference, not a change in your premium status but a change in how you use SL and where you go since you've gone to basic.

[Phorumities]

now that you no longer have a home you are forced to wander the grid looking for some place to lay your weary head and rest your tired aching feet, day after day. As others have said, having to load different textures every night might lag you a bit since they can't be pulled out of your cache

[Chic Aeon]

Even though the possibility of downgrading the lowest Premium level when the new (one or more) Premium level(s) come into play in the future, I have never heard any mention of throttling. Find a spot you like and use that as your home base OR rent a small place (some are almost free) and that should solve most of your issues. Unless there were also some computer changes, I agree that it is most likely a texture (and possibly mesh) loading issue. Try logging into SMITH or another empty region and see what happens. 

I am not premium and I sometimes have two alts on and we are all fine. We mostly hang out at LEA6 though and that is designed to be easy on computer systems. I went to a crowded venue yesterday and had issues with textures loading simply because there were SO MANY :D. So it DOES depend where you are.

 

[Fionalein]

Don't give them ideas...

[Lewis Luminos]

No. I have a premium account, I also have some free alts, and there's absolutely no difference in performance between them.

[Claireschen Hesten]

It's just coincidence the problem is no doubt your end. i've been premium and never noticed any difference

[Prokofy Neva]

No, it's not that free accounts are throttled, but I see a number of sims just not functioning since the last Linden update.

There's lag, scripts not executing, you can't even walk. I'd had to ask the Lindens to re-set sims several times in the last few days, which sometimes fixes them, sometimes not.

That includes the sim that you are on, which has been reset at least once by my request in the last few days. Bots pile up on the infohub there because when other sims crash or are reset, for some odd reason, instead of going to their home, they go sometimes to the nearest infohub and end up lagging the sim if there are more than say 10-15 of them especially. Resetting the sim often shakes them loose, but then they are back. 

 

Edited June 16, 2018 by Prokofy Neva

[Rolig Loon]

I've never been premium.  I have perfectly acceptable FPS.  I can't imagine that an increase in FPS would be enough to convince me to upgrade to Premium, even if it were true (which it isn't).

[Damian Glendullen]

Aha! Who knew?

[Ansiri]

Oh... that's why i'm lagging also and have the slow loading issue...

[Solar Legion]

Accounts only "go home" on logging in if they are set to do so. 

If they are set to Last Location and the location is not available, the system often picks the closest Hub and drops the avatar there. 

This has been the norm since at least 2006.

[Rhonda Huntress]

1 hour ago, Solar Legion said:

Accounts only "go home" on logging in if they are set to do so. 

If they are set to Last Location and the location is not available, the system often picks the closest Hub and drops the avatar there. 

This has been the norm since at least 2006.

If you have never set a home point, the home hot key will send you to a random info hub.  Once you set a home point you loose this feature forever and will go to the closest hub if home is not available.

[Fionalein]

2 minutes ago, Rhonda Huntress said:

If you have never set a home point, the home hot key will send you to a random info hub.  Once you set a home point you loose this feature forever and will go to the closest hub if home is not available.

And if you set your home point on a closing sim?

[ellestones]

1 hour ago, Fionalein said:

And if you set your home point on a closing sim?

when our home sim cannot be found then we get sent to a Linden Welcome Area

[Damian Glendullen]

Thank you all for your answers about whether Linden Labs throttles free accounts. As Prokofy Neva kindly pointed out, the issue is the last Linden update, which is resulting in lag on several sims, including Iris, my current Home sim. I am familiar with how  Home and Infohubs work however (I am ten years old!).  

Edited June 17, 2018 by Damian Glendullen

[Prokofy Neva]

15 hours ago, Rhonda Huntress said:

If you have never set a home point, the home hot key will send you to a random info hub.  Once you set a home point you loose this feature forever and will go to the closest hub if home is not available.

Then people who own and deploy bots are irresponsible, because they aren't setting them home points on the sim where they are deployed as "hostesses" or whatever, and then they bounce on to random infohub sims. If the Lindens are responsible for setting this up so that they go to Welcome Areas without home points they should just LOG THEM OFF and eventually the owners will get the idea that they need to set their home point on their own sims. To be sure, they could in theory set home points on Linden infohub/welcome area sims, but why do that? They should be interested in having their bots come home to the sims where they deploy them.

Edited June 17, 2018 by Prokofy Neva

[Fionalein]

6 minutes ago, Prokofy Neva said:

Then people who own and deploy bots are irresponsible, because they aren't setting them home points on the sim where they are deployed as "hostesses" or whatever, and then they bounce on to random infohub sims.

LOL comrade Prokofy do you really think those bots have no "check position and teleport to deployment area" routine...? Come on, even underpayed freelance programmers will include that one if Mr. Capitalist pays the fair - they might however leave it out when they feel cheated =^.^=

[Rolig Loon]

6 minutes ago, Prokofy Neva said:

Then people who own and deploy bots are irresponsible

I suspect that "ignorant" would be a better adjective than "irresponsible," since I suspect that most SL residents (maybe even you, until now?) don't know that's how it works.  It's not one of the things that would spring to most people's minds when setting up a bot.  

[Theresa Tennyson]

33 minutes ago, Prokofy Neva said:

Then people who own and deploy bots are irresponsible, because they aren't setting them home points on the sim where they are deployed as "hostesses" or whatever, and then they bounce on to random infohub sims. If the Lindens are responsible for setting this up so that they go to Welcome Areas without home points they should just LOG THEM OFF and eventually the owners will get the idea that they need to set their home point on their own sims. To be sure, they could in theory set home points on Linden infohub/welcome area sims, but why do that? They should be interested in having their bots come home to the sims where they deploy them.

When their home regions are restarted, roughly every week, as all regions are, they'll be sent to an infohub, just as all avatars in the same situation are.

[Prokofy Neva]

1 hour ago, Theresa Tennyson said:

When their home regions are restarted, roughly every week, as all regions are, they'll be sent to an infohub, just as all avatars in the same situation are.

Let me break down the difference to you, dear, and flag once again the problem with literalist techie thinking of the sort that gives us "buy milk" in that joke.

When conscious humans with avatars are sent to an infohub when a sim is restarted, they DO NOT STAY THERE. THEY GO HOME. Or they go shopping on another sim. Or they go exploring on another sim. THEY DO NOT STAY AT THAT INFOHUB. THEY MOVE ON.

They do not remain to lag up and obstruct a sim.

Bots, being not conscious, and being mismanaged by humans who don't wrangle them carefully, stay slumped over on the infohub where they land. Sometimes for DAYS AT A TIME. Even weeks. That's how you know certain clubs, furniture stores, RP sims etc must be failing. They can't be bothered to pick up their bots and bring them home.

IMing the bot itself, or trying to figure out the club owner and IMing him almost never works. Only re-setting the sim which at least shakes them off THAT sim and sometimes keeps them offline will work. There shouldn't be a "right" to keep a bot online 24/7 when it is not home, but on an infohub. The Lindens themselves should send them home or offline.

 

Edited June 17, 2018 by Prokofy Neva

[Rolig Loon]

13 minutes ago, Prokofy Neva said:

When conscious humans with avatars are sent to an infohub when a sim is restarted, they DO NOT STAY THERE. THEY GO HOME. Or they go shopping on another sim. Or they go exploring on another sim. THEY DO NOT STAY AT THAT INFOHUB. THEY MOVE ON.

They do not remain to lag up and obstruct a sim.

Bots, being not conscious, and being mismanaged by humans who don't wrangle them carefully, stay slumped over on the infohub where they land.

That's quite true.  There's a difference between the sort of "homing" scripting that ought to be built into any bot, as Fionalein says, and the automatic system that you are talking about.  The bot's own system will keep trying to send it to the "home" location that is set in its own script, but if the SL servers have no record of the bot account having set a Home that the system recognizes, the bot will keep being sent to a random (or maybe closest) infohub.  That's your point, as I take it.  My only difference with you in this discussion is about your conclusion that the bot's owner is "irresponsible" and that bots are intentionally "mismanaged." I think it's much more likely that the bot owner (like most of us) has no idea whatever that failing to set a Home that's recognized by the servers will make a difference.  It's simple ignorance, excusable because there are way too many obscure processes in SL for most people to be aware of. 

I have no hard data to support my conclusion, but I doubt that you do either.  I am just guessing on the basis of long SL experience and faith in the power of ignorance.