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How to broach script use with neighbors.


k9loverjasmine
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39 minutes ago, Abnor Mole said:

This part of the image is very telling. The simulator is having to spend a vast majority of available resources running the 5000 scripts in the region, leaving nothing left for anything else (Spare Time is 0.001). That may also be why the Scripts Run % is hurting as it tries to keep up with demand. It may not be one or even a handful of scripts causing the problem, but simply far too many scripts overall.

Scripts are actually the last thing to run on the sim, after everything else has already been handled. Usually, unless physics are to blame, most of the frame-time will be spent on scripts and "spare time" will be near-zero unless 100% of the scripts are being run every frame. Realistically, you can't expect any sim to be running 100% scripts and occasional script lag is the norm. I wouldn't say 40-55% like in this case is normal though, but 70-90% is very common.

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5 hours ago, Abnor Mole said:

This part of the image is very telling. The simulator is having to spend a vast majority of available resources running the 5000 scripts in the region, leaving nothing left for anything else (Spare Time is 0.001). That may also be why the Scripts Run % is hurting as it tries to keep up with demand. It may not be one or even a handful of scripts causing the problem, but simply far too many scripts overall.
 

Time.png.195878d0c88a51fc9f2e76f0491d4b06.png

It's also a problem I notice in many places across the grid where someone will create a detailed venue but use nearly all the simulator resources in the process. It runs beautifully when it is empty, but performance degrades quickly as soon as more than a handful of people (agents) show up. It is like building a truck with a max vehicle gross weight of 16,000 pounds and a dry vehicle weight of 15,500 pounds. By the time you add a driver and fuel, it has no capacity remaining for any passengers or cargo. That is why a good rule of thumb when building out an entire region is to reserve at least half the simulator time for agents. 

This is of course only in reference to simulator or server side lag, not client side or viewer lag which is more dependent on your computer and internet connection. 

3

While that does show the scripts are using all the frame time in the region, check 100 regions at random that have at least 50% of the prims used (I used to say no more than 50% abandoned land but even a lot of owned land doesn't have anything on it). I haven't done this test in quite some time (and I previously checked for 50% abandoned not total prims used) but I did find that in most cases the scripts are using almost all of the frame time.

Here are 10 regions I just checked at random (please note the values entered were all manual checks, I have not used anything to average values over a period of time and I just watched for 15-30 seconds and entered an approximation for script time/spare time and scripts run based on the values I saw. Any region I saw with less than 5000 prims I skipped.

Region Name Objects Active Scripts Script Time Spare Time Scripts Run
Kama Center 9330 4173 19ms 1ms 95%
Klancaster 16179 8889 13ms 0ms 30%
Nautilus - Hanno 10989 7382 20ms 0ms 60%
Machhapuchhre 12101 7600 15.6ms 0ms 40%
Akhsharumova 9774 5016 18.3ms 0ms 65%
Rannveig 7290 4001 18ms 0ms 65%
Cedar 6317 3199 16.4ms 3.2ms 98%
Dinah 5887 4136 17ms 2ms 97%
Bay City - Edgartown 10187 3725 18ms 0ms 45%
Shimmer 7731 3270 15.5ms 5ms 99%

Of the 10 regions checked, all except one has a script time above 15ms and the one that was below seemed to have other issues (agent time was 3ms with just me there, simulation and net time combined were another 3ms). Extrapolating the data to a full sim's usage clearly shows a trend of bad performance, so increasing prim counts as previously done was not beneficial to region performance and it won't be until scripts can be run faster allowing more scripts to run in the same time. Sure you can say it's the resident's fault for using so many scripts or badly made scripts but at the end of the day, most users don't understand what causes the lag and how to fix it which is caused by both bad information and lack of education.

In one of the regions where I own land I watched the spare time go from ~12ms to 0ms and scripts run plumeted to 50% when a casino moved into a 4096m. We as residents don't get the proper tools to be able to track down and remove scripts which are using up the script time.

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On 12/27/2018 at 5:58 PM, k9loverjasmine said:

Hello this is my first time posting in the forums and while I have done some searches and haven't found a lot of help dealing with a situation.  I recently bought a small parcel on the mainland for a very good price, and the reason why became apparent the first time I had a guest over that was not using  a 100 Mbps connection, lag was to be honest game breaking.  Upon closer inspection my neighbors have a host of little robots and breed able pets.  The two offending lots are owned by a group of friends and my preliminary inspection of scripts on their lots were 55 Mbps and 97 Mbps which seems high to me but then again I am new so not really certain if it is or not.  I would like to talk with them about it first but not really sure how to broach the subject with out being rude.  What would be a good etiquette to talk with them about this.    So I guess what I am asking is could some one please give this newbie some tips before she makes a fool of her self.

Put out all the scripts you can and be ready for attrition warfare

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The memory of the scripts is not all that important, but the script time is.

You need your own script to measure that, using http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/LlGetObjectDetails

The important variable is OBJECT_SCRIPT_TIME

I've got a blog on this, from my plans to put out a meter for it that I never completed because of the LOD of the prim I was using to display the results...

https://catnapkitty.wordpress.com/2017/12/21/almost-done-wip-script-lag-monitor/

- But my script measured avatars. You'd need to use that function differently to measure rezzed objects.

Your viewer should be able to report overall sim script time, I think (I actually haven't checked in a very long time), but that won't tell you what to blame. It can be surprising... a single very low memory script can be the cause of most of it if it just has a few bad looping functions, and a massive high memory script can be a non-issue if it's written well.

 

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On 12/27/2018 at 2:58 AM, k9loverjasmine said:

Hello this is my first time posting in the forums and while I have done some searches and haven't found a lot of help dealing with a situation.  I recently bought a small parcel on the mainland for a very good price, and the reason why became apparent the first time I had a guest over that was not using  a 100 Mbps connection, lag was to be honest game breaking.  Upon closer inspection my neighbors have a host of little robots and breed able pets.  The two offending lots are owned by a group of friends and my preliminary inspection of scripts on their lots were 55 Mbps and 97 Mbps which seems high to me but then again I am new so not really certain if it is or not.  I would like to talk with them about it first but not really sure how to broach the subject with out being rude.  What would be a good etiquette to talk with them about this.    So I guess what I am asking is could some one please give this newbie some tips before she makes a fool of her self.

You're always welcome to try polite and even timid at first, but given that a person who paralyzes an entire sim on his one plot with all these breedables has already been by definition extremely rude, you may do better by being really blunt. And then you can contemplate doing things like banning him so he sees yellow lines, or engaging in the sort of typical -- and legal ---- SL warfare, putting out a zillion breedables yourself to lag him. But then, you've made your own land useless. This is why it's good to do ctr-shift-1 on a sim before buying land to see the stats, and to check them on different days and times.

I realize there are more highly technical things to look at discussed here like "Update Objects". But there are simpler things in my view, although they still come under "Advanced" and may be confusing.

o Use the built-in lag-meter. Why not? It will tell you green, red, or yellow. It's essentially bundling together and simplifying the other things. And you can see if it is on your side or on the sim's side.

This is under Advanced/Performance Tools/Lag Meter. It shows Client (the browser, and your system), network, and server (on the Lindens' side). It might be yellow and saying "too many complex objects" so on your wide, you reduce the draw distance, perhaps the shaders and whatnot in preferences/graphics.

o Use ctr-shift-1 but just look at "Time Dilation" (which should be at 99 and when it gets really low like 40, you are at a standstill) and "FPS" (which should be ideally at 45 but when it gets below 40 you can really feel it. These numbers, if low, can get you a sim re-set when you call Support.

Yes, "Script Time" is important, like "total frame time" needing to be at 22, for example. But I think TD and FPS really tell you what is happening on a sim that may be outside of "my computer".

If you see "number of scripts" is about, say, 3000 or 4000, and certainly above 5000-6000, you will feel lag. It's just a lot of scripted items. But as techies always say, what KIND of scripted items. From island menus we can see the items with the highest script time -- some breedable or sex bed could be hogging all the script time -- so even a few of those is going to be a worse problem than 500 doors with scripts to hinge them.

 

 

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On 12/31/2018 at 9:42 PM, Hintswen Guardian said:


Of the 10 regions checked, all except one has a script time above 15ms and the one that was below seemed to have other issues (agent time was 3ms with just me there, simulation and net time combined were another 3ms). Extrapolating the data to a full sim's usage clearly shows a trend of bad performance, so increasing prim counts as previously done was not beneficial to region performance and it won't be until scripts can be run faster allowing more scripts to run in the same time. Sure you can say it's the resident's fault for using so many scripts or badly made scripts but at the end of the day, most users don't understand what causes the lag and how to fix it which is caused by both bad information and lack of education.

In one of the regions where I own land I watched the spare time go from ~12ms to 0ms and scripts run plumeted to 50% when a casino moved into a 4096m. We as residents don't get the proper tools to be able to track down and remove scripts which are using up the script time.

Why is "education" about *another person's over-usage of script time* going to help ME? It doesn't. I can educate myself out the wazoo. It's that neighbour who has no sense of "the commons" and needs to turn it into "the tragedy of the commons". 

What isn't needed is "education" so much as LINDEN POLICY. Overuse of resources should be an abuse you can abuse-report. It was, in a way, in the past. The Lindens also provided ways to see individual parcel script usage. But let them decide without people having to look at all kinds of complex menus. If you are lagged on your land and believe it isn't you, AR your neighbour for resource hogging.

Sure, it's good to sweep around your own door. I remember in the old days before the servers were forced to their current socialist 99/45 by force, i.e. making some scripts work slower if they have to in order to keep the overall sim better working, I would get a ticket that someone was experiencing lag that they believed was caused by their neighbours' chickens. But when I flew out there, Ma and Pa would be sitting on their rocking porch swing with shotguns, in all their bling and prim hair (of those days). Who was lagging the sim? They were. 

I don't think there's a way to check script usage on one single parcel on the Mainland, in the viewer. You can with resident-made HUDs.

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9 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

Why is "education" about *another person's over-usage of script time* going to help ME? It doesn't. I can educate myself out the wazoo. It's that neighbour who has no sense of "the commons" and needs to turn it into "the tragedy of the commons". 

What isn't needed is "education" so much as LINDEN POLICY. Overuse of resources should be an abuse you can abuse-report. It was, in a way, in the past. The Lindens also provided ways to see individual parcel script usage. But let them decide without people having to look at all kinds of complex menus. If you are lagged on your land and believe it isn't you, AR your neighbour for resource hogging.

Sure, it's good to sweep around your own door. I remember in the old days before the servers were forced to their current socialist 99/45 by force, i.e. making some scripts work slower if they have to in order to keep the overall sim better working, I would get a ticket that someone was experiencing lag that they believed was caused by their neighbours' chickens. But when I flew out there, Ma and Pa would be sitting on their rocking porch swing with shotguns, in all their bling and prim hair (of those days). Who was lagging the sim? They were. 

I don't think there's a way to check script usage on one single parcel on the Mainland, in the viewer. You can with resident-made HUDs.

What is the point in policy? There's already a policy regarding excessive region resources and it's useless so more policy is likely to be the same, very few of LL's policies actually seem to be enforced. Besides what good is a policy to enforce something users can't measure? You wouldn't tell your tenants to stay under a certain prim count if you had no way to see how many prims they use, would you?

Currently, there is no reliable way to see script usage on mainland. Without estate tools you have nothing. Any resident made HUD that claims to tell you script usage is basically useless.

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15 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

I don't think there's a way to check script usage on one single parcel on the Mainland, in the viewer. You can with resident-made HUDs.

There's a "Script Info" button in the "About Land" window that provides some read-out of script memory use on land one owns; it seems to work on group land, too, but I'm not quite sure what Abilities it requires of the agent and/or parcel settings. On other people's land, it does something inscrutable, and there are related bug reports in the jira going back to 2010. (That makes it one of those features that never got fixed because nobody uses it because it never got fixed.)

Another problem with that is that memory use isn't all that important anymore, although it was make-or-break back in 2010 when that window was new. (Another problem is that it can't measure actual memory use, but rather maximum possible memory use, which is a very different thing for Mono scripts.)

On a smaller scale, a script can measure the script time used by another scripted item, or by an avatar. That measurement function can be in a HUD, but to measure every object on a parcel it would need to rez sensor probes to go out and find all those objects, which could only work within sensing distance of land on which one can rez. Or, what I do sometimes is to wear the HUD and fly around, looking for script heavy hitters. This is at best a kludgy substitute for the "Top Scripts" functionality available to Estates.

Even further afield from the thread topic: Scripts became a huge problem for a while years ago, back when some idiot creators decided to make no-mod attachments  with scripted resizing, but without proper LSL functions they had to put a separate script in every single linked prim of the resizable object. It was recognized as a serious enough situation that the Lab started a whole initiative to offer streamlined script functions for operating on any linked child prims from within a single script. This and a few other "efficient scripts" language features made a real difference to sim performance as they were adopted and old script-laggy content gradually aged out of use.

There may be a pale reflection of that happening again, in the form of Bakes On Mesh. The feature's real intent is to rein-in the "onion skin" complexity of Mesh avatars and thus restore some sanity to rendering lag, but it may have an additional benefit of reducing dependency on the HUDs that control Mesh avatar alpha cuts, etc. The spread of those HUDs and similar ones for Mesh heads, etc., have been increasing script load faster than it's being released by the slow decline of breedables.

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19 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

There's a "Script Info" button in the "About Land" window that provides some read-out of script memory use on land one owns; it seems to work on group land, too, but I'm not quite sure what Abilities it requires of the agent and/or parcel settings. On other people's land, it does something inscrutable, and there are related bug reports in the jira going back to 2010. (That makes it one of those features that never got fixed because nobody uses it because it never got fixed.)

Another problem with that is that memory use isn't all that important anymore, although it was make-or-break back in 2010 when that window was new. (Another problem is that it can't measure actual memory use, but rather maximum possible memory use, which is a very different thing for Mono scripts.)

On a smaller scale, a script can measure the script time used by another scripted item, or by an avatar. That measurement function can be in a HUD, but to measure every object on a parcel it would need to rez sensor probes to go out and find all those objects, which could only work within sensing distance of land on which one can rez. Or, what I do sometimes is to wear the HUD and fly around, looking for script heavy hitters. This is at best a kludgy substitute for the "Top Scripts" functionality available to Estates.

Even further afield from the thread topic: Scripts became a huge problem for a while years ago, back when some idiot creators decided to make no-mod attachments  with scripted resizing, but without proper LSL functions they had to put a separate script in every single linked prim of the resizable object. It was recognized as a serious enough situation that the Lab started a whole initiative to offer streamlined script functions for operating on any linked child prims from within a single script. This and a few other "efficient scripts" language features made a real difference to sim performance as they were adopted and old script-laggy content gradually aged out of use.

There may be a pale reflection of that happening again, in the form of Bakes On Mesh. The feature's real intent is to rein-in the "onion skin" complexity of Mesh avatars and thus restore some sanity to rendering lag, but it may have an additional benefit of reducing dependency on the HUDs that control Mesh avatar alpha cuts, etc. The spread of those HUDs and similar ones for Mesh heads, etc., have been increasing script load faster than it's being released by the slow decline of breedables.

On what browser? There's nothing like that on the regular SL browser for the mainland.

What are you looking at? I see nothing resembling this at all on the "About Land" menu on any page.

Those HUDs with the script readers don't seem so kludgy to me, I use them fairly often and they do sometimes find the culprits at least within a range. Of course, if it's not on your land, go to the OP...

I don't recall about the child prims. What I recall is that a lot of people used listen scripts on things like devices that would show whether an avatar was online, and even for doors, and that scripters then began to get rid of or adjust that listening. But I still find things that chat on and on about their listening, or that they've stopped listening, so I don't know if that is really improved.

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20 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

There may be a pale reflection of that happening again, in the form of Bakes On Mesh. The feature's real intent is to rein-in the "onion skin" complexity of Mesh avatars and thus restore some sanity to rendering lag, but it may have an additional benefit of reducing dependency on the HUDs that control Mesh avatar alpha cuts, etc. The spread of those HUDs and similar ones for Mesh heads, etc., have been increasing script load faster than it's being released by the slow decline of breedables.

It might actually increase scripts. You only need one central contol script to alpha/texture all those linked layers. Onions will most likely be supplied as independently wearble legacy support so the onions will double scripts needed... Then again I doubt the bodies are all scripted as responsible... 

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27 minutes ago, Fionalein said:

It might actually increase scripts.

Maybe. And I admit I haven't worked up the interest to try the Bakes-On-Mesh project viewer and the Omega gadgetry to test it out (or however it works -- like I said, haven't mustered the enthusiasm yet). But I thought from early project descriptions that the whole alpha cuts thing would be obsolete, replaced by baked alpha mask textures to hide precisely all that needs hiding, and that would seem to obviate 99% of Mesh avatar HUD's use. I guess I was assuming most folks wouldn't long bother with adding legacy onion-skin layers... but that may all be super optimistic (and anyway I can't seem to grasp how any of it works without Materials support, so maybe BOM adoption will be slow overall).

39 minutes ago, Fionalein said:

I doubt the bodies are all scripted as responsible... 

Somewhere I recently posted an analysis of script times in my own attachments. A tremendous lot of it was related to Mesh avatar and head, both HUDs and avatar-worn attachments. (I also re-experienced the agony of table creation in these forums; hence Hintswen's above post gets respect.) So yeah... that's also why I occasionally rant about the virtues of pushing those scripts to avatar attachments only as-needed.

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2 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

What are you looking at? I see nothing resembling this at all on the "About Land" menu on any page.

This is what I mean, from the Linden viewer:1856701005_Screenshot(15).thumb.png.7211a1e708a1991160eab62262b61d0c.png

As I said, though, it only measures memory use, so of limited utility and difficult to interpret at best. Still, it gives some hint of where one's scripted stuff is scattered around a parcel.

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1 minute ago, Qie Niangao said:

This is what I mean, from the Linden viewer:1856701005_Screenshot(15).thumb.png.7211a1e708a1991160eab62262b61d0c.png

As I said, though, it only measures memory use, so of limited utility and difficult to interpret at best. Still, it gives some hint of where one's scripted stuff is scattered around a parcel.

I'm surprised Prokofy doesn't know about this. It's one of the things I expect anyone in the rentals business to know about, especially someone that does mainland rentals.

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