A very busy region: is it being mis-used?

[WolfBaginski Bearsfoot]

A particular merchant group operates it's own region, and has a very popular main store. Good look to them. It's very crowded, though I have some reason to doubt that there are that many avatars coming and going. The last time I was there, the median complexity looked pretty high, and they were not obviously display models (that could eventually be replaced by animesh).

Fortunately, they have a secondary store, in a sky-box, presented as the low-lag, please don't hang around, store.

Both are in the same region. OK, not much texture loading, but still the same horrible script-load and resulting bad frame rate from the server.

Or am I totally misunderstanding how laggy elements can affect a whole region?

I am not going to name the operation here. I have known them do whole-region bans of critics, and some of their key products are not sold on the Marketplace.

 

[Alyona Su]

The primary causes of lag are too many badly-optimized textures (including and especially those word on mesh avatars), too many avatars, your connection quality, your computer ability to draw the picture. In short: Yes it is a major benefit to have things in a skybox. Though it fails to reason why they would have a duplicate sky version when they may as well just whack the ground version.

Some of the best shopping experiences I've had were to private sims where there was no decoration at all - just a big box acting as the building and clearly-marked sections for each type of item. This is because people are there to shop, not role-play. These are the creators who get it.

[Fionalein]

@Alyona Su draw lag is client side, but @WolfBaginski Bearsfoot speaks of script lag or other server sided lag. You mentioned it is very busy, every avatar that enters with their collars and spankers and texture flipping animal companions, the vendours and scripted items all across the region (even outside your draw distance) they all add up to the server side lag factors... now make the region full and add some idiots still using TP hammers and no wonder the server is on it's knees. It can be the store is entirely innocent and it is just their clientele, but usually it is a combination of too much laggy stuff in region + laggy clientele that makes some shops really unusable...

Edited September 9, 2018 by Fionalein

[Alyona Su]

1 hour ago, Fionalein said:

collars and spankers and texture flipping animal companions, the vendours and scripted items all across the region (even outside your draw distance) they all add up to the server side lag factors

Script lag only lags scripts and scripts are a low-priority server process. Texture loading (and downloading) and managing all avatars in a sim are where the server loads are heaviest. I'm not a Linden, but I've been in SL long enough to know very well how the backends work and I've obtained that knowledge by owning private estates over the years. Lag is a mish-mash of many issues: textures cause latency and taxes your local computer, avatars cause server load because it has to take all that information about each avatar and pass it to every other avatar...

The best defense to lag is having a strong computer to run SL on, fewer avatars in a region, and, wherever possible, optimized textures. When there is script overload then scripts just stop working. They don't cause frame rates to drop or "rubber-band" movement. Scripts only affect interactivity with objects, etc. Nothing else. I'm not saying scripts do not cause lag, I am saying that as lag goes, they are the least of all issues in my experience as an estate owner.

The easiest, fastest, best way to combat lag is to get the newest, best graphics adapter you can likely not afford. 90% of the lag most people experience is with their graphic settings and network/Internet latency.

If you don't believe me: go to the laggiest, most crowded sim you can find - so bad that you can barely move or do anything. Turn your graphics setting to medium or even minimum, turn draw distance down to 96 meters. Wow, suddenly you can move around and skate along like like lag is non-existent. Seriously - try it. Most experienced SLers have a graphics preset that does exactly this when they go shopping or visit over-crowded event venues. Because it eliminates 95% of all lag.

Edited September 9, 2018 by Alyona Su

[JessieHoo]

On 9/9/2018 at 11:00 PM, Alyona Su said:

Script lag only lags scripts and scripts are a low-priority server process. Texture loading (and downloading) and managing all avatars in a sim are where the server loads are heaviest. I'm not a Linden, but I've been in SL long enough to know very well how the backends work and I've obtained that knowledge by owning private estates over the years. Lag is a mish-mash of many issues: textures cause latency and taxes your local computer, avatars cause server load because it has to take all that information about each avatar and pass it to every other avatar...

The best defense to lag is having a strong computer to run SL on, fewer avatars in a region, and, wherever possible, optimized textures. When there is script overload then scripts just stop working. They don't cause frame rates to drop or "rubber-band" movement. Scripts only affect interactivity with objects, etc. Nothing else. I'm not saying scripts do not cause lag, I am saying that as lag goes, they are the least of all issues in my experience as an estate owner.

The easiest, fastest, best way to combat lag is to get the newest, best graphics adapter you can likely not afford. 90% of the lag most people experience is with their graphic settings and network/Internet latency.

If you don't believe me: go to the laggiest, most crowded sim you can find - so bad that you can barely move or do anything. Turn your graphics setting to medium or even minimum, turn draw distance down to 96 meters. Wow, suddenly you can move around and skate along like like lag is non-existent. Seriously - try it. Most experienced SLers have a graphics preset that does exactly this when they go shopping or visit over-crowded event venues. Because it eliminates 95% of all lag.

But SL uses OpenGL. So th graphic card cannot work at its full potential.  I have never seen my graphic card has a over 50% usage when running SL, however the frame rate is often very low.(10-30fps). And I have heard that graphic card makers (Nvidia and AMD) do not focus much on OpenGL performance.  So even the most powerful card (like the recently released GTX 2080ti) can only have the similar performance as ancient graphic cards when running SL. It is CPU that matters more. 

[animats]

3 hours ago, JessieHoo said:

But SL uses OpenGL. So th graphic card cannot work at its full potential.  I have never seen my graphic card has a over 50% usage when running SL, however the frame rate is often very low.(10-30fps). And I have heard that graphic card makers (Nvidia and AMD) do not focus much on OpenGL performance.  So even the most powerful card (like the recently released GTX 2080ti) can only have the similar performance as ancient graphic cards when running SL. It is CPU that matters more. 

That  usually means you're out of CPU time in the viewer's main thread. The viewer has multiple threads, but the main one is doing all the graphics. Once it hits 100% of a CPU, frame rate starts to drop. See this article on culling. Probably the best article on SL performance. "The other major limiting factor for performance in SL is the small batch size. On average, SL draws about 70 triangles per drawing call. In theory, increasing that number to 200 triangles per drawing call could improve rendering performance by 200%. The primary reason the draw size is so small is because we have to break batches to switch textures and to sort transparent objects to be rendered in depth order." SL's big performance problem comes from the CPU making too many draw calls. This reflects SL's nature as a huge collection of small objects from different sources. That's the basic reason SL is slower than games.

In the last 10 years, GPUs have become far more powerful, but CPU cores are only a little faster. More GPU power lets you turn on more rendering passes for advanced lighting and shadows.

The main viewer-side resources that you can run out of are:

• CPU time in the viewer's main thread. Symptom - low frame rate, even text entry into viewer text boxes is slow. How to check: find the OS utility program that shows your CPU utilization. How to fix: Not much you can do. If you have a reasonably good PC, you're already near max CPU speed. Reducing graphics quality will improve the frame rate.
• GPU time. Symptom - low frame rate. Turning off advanced lighting and shadows will make a huge difference. How to check: find the OS utility program that tells you your GPU utilization. How to fix: buy a faster graphics card, reduce draw distance, turn off rendering features.
• GPU memory. Symptom - not all textures loaded at high resolution. How to check: see the viewer statistics window. How to fix: graphics card with more memory, reduce draw distance.
• CPU memory. Symptom - swapping. How to check: OS system performance utility. Disk light on solid. How to fix: more RAM, not running other stuff in background.

Note that main CPU time is the one thing you can't buy more of. Single CPU speeds hit a wall about 10 years ago, and everybody is between 3 and 4 GHz clock rates now. You can buy more cores, but it won't help much. The additional viewer threads are loading assets from the network, and those can run on other cores, but they're I/O bound anyway. SL's viewer can only use maybe 1.5 cores at peak.

(Technical note: Is there a debug option to disable alpha blending, so only alpha masking is used? That will make some translucent objects look wrong but might boost performance. Setting "Alpha blending", the default for textures, instead of "Alpha masking" incurs a performance penalty. Useful to find out how much of a problem that is.)

 

[animats]

On 9/9/2018 at 5:20 AM, WolfBaginski Bearsfoot said:

A particular merchant group operates it's own region, and has a very popular main store. Good look to them. It's very crowded, though I have some reason to doubt that there are that many avatars coming and going.

If the viewer is choking due to a large number of avatars, set "number of non-impostor avatars" to something like 2 or 3. That will fix it. Default is typically 16, which is too high. This makes background avatars in motion look jerky but cuts viewer load way down.

A lot more of this tuning needs to be automatic. SL offers all those graphics tuning parameters, and they're hard to tune. The viewer has enough info to do a better job than the user.

Edited September 11, 2018 by animats

[Fionalein]

@animats and @Alyona Su did you even read OPs question? if the lag persist while moving to another part of the sim, far away with the "lag inducing avatar" out of drawing dictance... can it be this time the avatars are not the cause of the lag? Besides, OP directly mentioned server not viewer FPS ...

 

Edited September 11, 2018 by Fionalein

[Hintswen Guardian]

18 hours ago, JessieHoo said:

But SL uses OpenGL. So th graphic card cannot work at its full potential.  I have never seen my graphic card has a over 50% usage when running SL, however the frame rate is often very low.(10-30fps). And I have heard that graphic card makers (Nvidia and AMD) do not focus much on OpenGL performance.  So even the most powerful card (like the recently released GTX 2080ti) can only have the similar performance as ancient graphic cards when running SL. It is CPU that matters more. 

I wouldn't trust your post as you don't even know the name of the card you are referring to. 

[Klytyna]

On 09 September 2018 at 1:20 PM, WolfBaginski Bearsfoot said:

Both are in the same region. OK, not much texture loading, but still the same horrible script-load and resulting bad frame rate from the server.

Or am I totally misunderstanding how laggy elements can affect a whole region?

Script load... That is simply too many damn scripts.

Partly this is scripts worn on the avatars visiting a region, but not as much as some clueless tech-support failures like to pretend.

Reality is it's often simply the landowners rezzing way to much scripted crap on their land, because they heard from some tech illiterate old fossil that "scripts don't cause lag".

So they beautify their place with scripted trees that drop particle blossom, and scripted flowers that sway in the "wind", and scripted windchimes, and ambient sound makers and all that jazz, and have owner only menus that never get used, you see store buildings that have a "click to use" hand mouse pointer because... They have scripts in them that are NEVER used, and so on. They carelessly jack their regions script count to 7000 or 8000, then scream blue murder when their "Fossil Tech 2007 Edition" Lag detector says you are wearing a whole 50 scripts on your avatar.

Script load in and of it's self won't cause a low server side Sim-fps/physics-fps/dilation. What CAN do that is physical objects in the region or badly optimised pathfinding.

Check the region in question by pressing crtl-shift-1 and scrolling down the display, pay attention to the pathfinding times about half way down, a SINGLE pathfinding scripted wandering prim creature (a pretty pony or a flock of birds or in months to come, those new animesh lag makers) can choke an entire region, add 5-10 ms to the physics time (bottom of the crtl-shift-1 display) and adding 5-10 ms to physics time WILL cause sim-fps/physics-fps/dilation issues.

In addition if there is some laggy PoS jacking the regions physics time through the roof, and lowering server fps, the server will attempt to compensate by... Decreasing available script time, thus severely reducing the % of scripts run and making menu performance seem like molasses in wintertime.

Click a vendor board, book a hotel room over night while you wait for the menu to open.

 

Edited September 13, 2018 by Klytyna