Full Estate Avatar Support 100 ??? AWS Servers

[Wallace Wirefly]

LL sells Private regions. One pays $349 US and $229 a month. LL states : Max. avatars 100. One rarely sees this happening in-world. In fact in most cases lucky to get to 50 - 60 before severe issues arise. I think it's about time LL admits that this statement be corrected. People need to know that the servers LL uses will not handle what the state. How LL allocates FULL sims maybe the issue. It is hard to find any information about this. Is a FULL estate given a dedicated server? Or is it just give a thread or core? Is there a LIMIT on what a "sim" can do?  Now LL has moved SL to AWS servers what are they paying for this? They say they did this so SL will run more smoothly. Or did they do this because how they assign "sims" to each serve keeps cost down?. If one was to look at other open sim worlds the amount of prims and avatars are quite large. Search around and see. And their cost is much lower. For the price paid for a FULL in SL for a sim one would think that a FULL sim here in SL would run like a dream. So does one think that going to AWS was to help SL "run" better? Cutting cost is OK and we did see LL reduce cost of purchase and tier all I am wondering is tell the truth when it comes to what one gets for ones money. Maybe offer a range of costs depending on the service one requires. It's what AWS does. Lets see what becomes of this virtual world and what incentives LL ( which by the way was purchased by investors) can offer people. This last year has brought a lot more people into the virtual and competition is growing. So LL can we really get 100 avatars into a FULL sim? Will one be able to get additional prims IF one desires it no matter what "sim" they have? If NOT why not? What exactly was moving to AWS for? Better? or more money? The floor is open.

[Chic Aeon]

I was at the Fancy Décor sim reopening not too long ago and there were indeed 100 people and I could still fly and chat and move around fairly easily. No rubber-banding, no walking through the quicksand and while I still had jellydolls turned on I did not have "friends only" on so I could see avatars.  

Linden Lab (just like the OS grid owners) only account for part of the equation. It is also what is ON THE SIM that lags it down. Heavy mesh, lots of complex scripts, too many 1024 textures where they are not needed.  

 

So you DO know from this photo of maybe a month ago (article on my blog just search for Fancy Décor to prove the point) that it IS possible.  The rest is up to the sim owner. So it is not false advertising.   

 

We certainly saw more folks per sim before the Mesh Era, agreed. The servers didn't have to work so hard then. Textures were smaller and there was no creator mesh to download and view.  It all fits into the puzzle. 

[Coffee Pancake]

1 hour ago, Chic Aeon said:

It is also what is ON THE SIM that lags it down. Heavy mesh, lots of complex scripts, too many 1024 textures where they are not needed.  

We certainly saw more folks per sim before the Mesh Era

Animated avatars wearing rigged mesh attachments kills the viewer client side. Each avatar is processed sequentially and tends to incur a similar performance hit per avatar (because similarly constructed avatars tend to gather together for social reasons). Each avatar in SL has many animations acting upon it at any moment & there are often many rigged attachments. 

Jellydolls and imposters help somewhat, not rending avatars makes the bulk of the problem go away.

High resolution textures are somewhat immaterial, they are hosted separate from the regions, and while they do contribute significantly to the viewers CPU load, it will resolve itself with a little patience and user discipline (like not immediately caming about on arrival). Animating avatars laughs in the face of texture decoding.

NOTE  : If you haven't already, add SL's cache folder as an exception to your Antivirus / Windows defender. This is safe and will massively improve rez times. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/add-an-exclusion-to-windows-security-811816c0-4dfd-af4a-47e4-c301afe13b26

Static mesh can be moderately bad, generally speaking the worst offender is small decorative clutter. It tends to be dense and cheap to place.

50% extra performance hit, enable shadows.

For added clientside hell, water. Try disabling water rendering when in need of a few many extra FPS (or for region owners, try not building at ground level).

 

Avatar entry and exit cause the biggest script problem, but it's not down to the contents of the scripts, just that they exist at all. Guess what all those rigged attachments have in them. PS - Kicking people out because of scripts is double-plus bad - Checking the scripts is expensive, kicking the avatar out is as expensive as it was to let them in.

People hammering a full region trying to get in is also bad and does impact server performance, bumping on the border especially so.

 

tl;dr - If we all shopped wearing linden avatars with no attachments, didn't all try to enter at the exact same time with dozens more nipping our heals; 100 avatars .. no problem. 

[Wallace Wirefly]

16 hours ago, Chic Aeon said:

So you DO know from this photo of maybe a month ago (article on my blog just search for Fancy Décor to prove the point) that it IS possible.  The rest is up to the sim owner. So it is not false advertising. 

Is it possible? (by the way glad you got picture since the world map has not worked properly since "uplift") A picture does not reflect an issue. Who introduced mesh? Rigged items? Bento bodies? BOM? etc. All skewed toward creators. IF you are going to introduce such things be prepared for the effects they cause is all I am saying. I still do not know how many "sims" are allocated to a server. Has moving to AWS helped the people of SL? Who benefits? When LL first started there was good transparency about metrics. Over time it has become more of a black box. Why? SO yes is it possible ...for a select few it maybe but what about all the others? One wonders IF SL did not have $L transferable what would this world look like.

[Solar Legion]

Oh for ....

A region can support up to 100 avatars. That does not mean that they can do so consistently or reliably.

How many you can have on a given region will be determined by a number of factors, some already mentioned in this very thread.

There is no reason whatsoever to claim it is not possible or a falsehood.

[Rachel1206]

Friends of mine own a popular club full region sized, some weeks ago there were 87 people in the club. People visiting have complex mesh avatars and club script limit for an avatar is 180 scripts. As you can imagine  lag does though get notitable. On arrivial a little patience required, but once the avatars rezzed, I have good 14-20 FPS with high graphics and ALM enabled and can socialize, dance, chat without problems.

Number of high complex mesh avatars have significant impact, I observed if less than 26 avtars I have good high FPS, if more than 26 server FPS start to drop dratic and loading of new arriving avatars takes longer.

Shopping event often results in the message region full, when you try to TP to the event. This hence must mean, there are 100 avatars in a full region. Same with Linden Lab birthday celebration, where live performances often are so popular the region is full. I assume Linden lab dynamic can set number of max avatar allowed lower than 100. Typical you can TP into an adjacent regions and participate.

 

Edited March 26, 2021 by Rachel1206

[Miller Thor]

7 minutes ago, Rachel1206 said:

This hence must mean, there are 100 avatars in a full region.

Just because a region is reported as fully, it does not mean that the entire potential of the region is actually being exploited. Often, the region owners or managers reduce the number of visitors allowed to prevent people with excessive script load from pulling down the region. We had a wedding last year with a total of 96 guests. Thanks to a good information policy, and we all know that weddings are usually attended by dozens of scripted overloaded guests, the region nevertheless ran with a very pleasant performance and there were no complaints about excessive delays.

[Rachel1206]

6 minutes ago, Miller Thor said:

Just because a region is reported as fully, it does not mean that the entire potential of the region is actually being exploited. Often, the region owners or managers reduce the number of visitors allowed to prevent people with excessive script load from pulling down the region. We had a wedding last year with a total of 96 guests. Thanks to a good information policy, and we all know that weddings are usually attended by dozens of scripted overloaded guests, the region nevertheless ran with a very pleasant performance and there were no complaints about excessive delays.

Thanks for clarifying, impressive wedding event and besides server side, good performance highly depending on good region design. Good work you did.

[Ardy Lay]

Nobody mentioned agent collisions with other agents and with ground, objects and LARGE objects.  How about investigating these and reporting on their effects?

[bigmoe Whitfield]

as oz linden mentioned in a recent lab gab stream,  costs for aws are more than the data center floor they were paying for, do not expect sim prices to be dropping at any point because of it.