Agent Time, Scripts & Draw Distance

[Wulfie Reanimator]

According to Wiki: "Agent Time - The amount of time spent updating and transmitting object data to the agents."

According to some sim-owner: "Agent time is the time the sim spends sending data among avatars, like certain HUDs that talk to each other. LL live chat told me this. Draw distance has nothing to do with agent time either."

Me: [video of the statistics window]

Besides the obvious "more draw distance = more objects = more updates = more data = more agent time", are there other things that actually influence agent time in the stats window? Do scripts -- attached or not -- ever increase agent time without causing object updates (such as with chat messages, as supposed)? I tried using several objects with this script in them, on myself while I was alone:

default
{
    state_entry()
    {
        while(TRUE) llSay(0, "hello world");
    }
}

This causes no object updates, but I guess technically causes the sim to send "data" to the agent.
But this isn't object data, and agent time doesn't increase.

I also believe that "agent" in this context means specifically the viewer itself, not the avatar.

Edited September 9, 2019 by Wulfie Reanimator

[Lucia Nightfire]

In regions that have a lot of overlapping prims, objects inside other objects or agents inside objects, agent time will be higher the more agents that have these in their interest list.

I suspect it has something to with viewers constantly checking bounding boxes of every agent or object in the interest list and verifying if they are fully in line of sight and should trigger updates if they haven't yet.