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Katherine Heartsong
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Is there a way to tell if a sim (or specifically a parcel on a sim) is actually a good deal in terms of lag before you buy it? I can see the number of avatars in the sim, and tend to make sure there are no AFK places or massive clubs on the sim (easy to do), but overall performance or scripts running? Any way to tell if you're getting a high performing sim versus and laggy one? 

I have a lag meter on my parcels but can't Rez anything on parcels I don't own, so no way to plant it and see.

Thinking about going up to a purchased 8192 and want to make sure I'm not getting stuck in lag-villa.

Thanks. :)

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3 hours ago, Katherine Heartsong said:

Is there a way to tell if a sim (or specifically a parcel on a sim) is actually a good deal in terms of lag before you buy it? I can see the number of avatars in the sim, and tend to make sure there are no AFK places or massive clubs on the sim (easy to do), but overall performance or scripts running? Any way to tell if you're getting a high performing sim versus and laggy one? 

I have a lag meter on my parcels but can't Rez anything on parcels I don't own, so no way to plant it and see.

Thinking about going up to a purchased 8192 and want to make sure I'm not getting stuck in lag-villa.

Thanks. :)

I'm sure someone will give you information on checking exactly how to see sim performance.  If it's a well established area that people have stayed in for awhile, it might be alright.  The problem arises when you've found that perfect spot, everything is running fine and then someone moves into the region with a club or something.  I had a lovely spot once only to have someone move in and build a space station.  At certain times of the day, they would have 30+ people/bots? on their parcel and I could barely change clothes let alone use a HUD.  

Mainland is always a gamble.  One bad neighbor can ruin the whole place.

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Disclaimer: I don't know how valid (as in indicating true state of lag or not log) this is, but this is what I do. Perhaps it will be helpful (or pershaps someone else will come along and correct what I wrote, or offer better explanations or things to check). 

I bring up the Statistics window (Ctrl-shift-1) and check the following:

  • FPS
  • Scripts Run   (currently, where I have my mainland parcel this is 100% - when I'm looking for a parcel to buy I try to find a location where this is at least in the 80's, or preferably in the 90's percentage wise).
  • Physics Time (I glance at this because usually it's less than 0.999 ms, but a few times I have seen it significantly higher, so I've generally not considered those parcels any further.  I don't actually know what this represents, but when it's a value a lot different than what I normally see, I get wary). 
  • Script Time
  • Spare Time 

If the script time is really high and the spare time is extremely small, than I'm wary, because that is before I've put out anything that might have scripts.  I do try to remove unneeded scripts from things I put out, but there will be some percentage of items that need to keep their scripts and may have scripts being used on a regular basis, so I like to see some spare time available for my things. 

I try to read and follow the discussions here in the forums about what these different statistics numbers mean, and how they indicate good or bad performance, but a lot of those explanations don't stick around in my brain.  

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FWIW there are quite a few places in the middle of nowhere that have very low lag if you don't mind not having much interesting around you. Abandoned land on the tops of mountains (almost nobody wants mountain land for some reason) can be bought from ll if you file a ticket, and there are a few plains sims here and there. one parcel I own right now has several large roadside parcels right next to it for sale and it's extremely low-lag (until some neighbor comes and ruins it. . .).

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There is a lot of  this and that about lag and there is many factors involved.

A sim people come and leave all the time can have  good numbers but just the fact they come and go make lag.

That is because every one  has to update that avatar with all scripts,hud's and textures.

Using max texture size on all fancy stuff also slow down. Linden recommend max 1024 pixels but Idle is 512.

I have checked a few  things to look at:

Time Dilation: when that go down the simFPS also go down to compensate so sim can run smooth. Idle is 45

Active Scripts: There is no Idle , but  lets say under 10000 for a sim total. Higher makes lag . Seen 25000 and i had to leave, could not move.

Script run: Idle is 100% but there is no problem down to 50% . At 20-30% you get trouble with hud's, rez things  and so on.

Total Frame time: 22 is idle and under. You will se at most have 22,200 or like that.  Problem starts if it get higher and stay so.

Spare Time: As it says, the time over to run scripts. Constant on zero is a problem. Idle is any number over zero.

 

Hope this can help you :)

Statistic bar on Firestorm is  CTRL+SHIFT+1

 

Statistic2.jpg

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13 minutes ago, TalentBoy said:

Time Dilation: when that go down the simFPS also go down to compensate so sim can run smooth. Idle is 45

This might need some clarification... SimFPS should be 45. Time Dilation would be though.

And I think you meant to write "ideal" a couple of times. 😉

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On 7/18/2021 at 5:18 AM, Katherine Heartsong said:

Is there a way to tell if a sim (or specifically a parcel on a sim) is actually a good deal in terms of lag before you buy it? I can see the number of avatars in the sim, and tend to make sure there are no AFK places or massive clubs on the sim (easy to do), but overall performance or scripts running? Any way to tell if you're getting a high performing sim versus and laggy one? 

I have a lag meter on my parcels but can't Rez anything on parcels I don't own, so no way to plant it and see.

Thinking about going up to a purchased 8192 and want to make sure I'm not getting stuck in lag-villa.

Thanks. :)

Another thought - if you have the patience, visit the parcel at different times of day and on different days of the week. (Advice based on experience - once pitched a tent without noticing the Midnight Express Train's track was a few feet away.....)

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Oh no ... people have the stats floater out and are using to make meaningful decisions.

Working out if a plot of land or region is a nice place to set up and wont lag is easy, much easier than trying to devine meaning from numbers that only tell half the story on a good day! 

There are many regions on a sim host. The performance of one region can be affected by what the other regions are doing. This alone makes all the numbers junk. ALL OF THEM. Great numbers today can be a bonfire tomorrow with no cause. A different region with a club or event you can't even see or ever identify could happen and bam.. It's lag central.

You need to pay attention to :

  • Number of avatars on the region. Lots is bad.
  • Number of avatars on the adjoining regions, again lots is bad.
  • The other parcels on the same region. What are they .. homes, shops.. clubs, breedables ..  
  • The parcels on adjoining regions. Again, look out for clubs and social places.
  • Fly up to 4000m in the middle of the region you're looking at living on, set your draw distance to the max and slowly turn in a circle and descend.
  • Check out the traffic scores in about land to see if your neighbors are busy. Do this on adjoining regions too.
  • Check the land out more than once. On different days of the week. At different times of day.
  • Tuesday after roiling restarts is the best a region will ever run, Mondays are the worst.
  • Are region crossings acceptable, or terrible (a fairly good indicator of health)
  • Run about, jump, make rapid turns. Do you rubber band, at all ?
  • Are there any old builds from 15 years ago? If so, they might be running stuff scripted using LSO, LSO is bad!
  • Fly up to 4000m in the center again, draw distance to 130, show transparent, slowly descend and rotate - do you see anything weird.
  • How many neighboring parcels are for sale .. lots might give you good performance right up till someone else moves in .. with a club.
  • View the pathfinding navmesh - does it look like just the terrain? Or has someone marked collision volumes (they will show in red). Avoid !
  • Look at your neighbours builds with transparency highlighted - Red is bad! Blue is good!
  • Take your time.
  • If you see people on the region who appear to live there, IM them and ask!

If a region seems fine, you're happy with it on face value, there aren't any clubs nearby .. and suddenly for no reason it all tanks after you've moved in ... file a support ticket with LL and ask for a reboot! If the problem persists or comes back, ask to be moved to a new sim host.

The stats floater only gives meaningful numbers from one moment to the next, if you must have it open, look for spikes or sudden drops.

Don't waste your life looking at script time or scripts run .. again, regions on the same simhost can and do affect this. if your stuff does the thing when you poke it, then it's fine.

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Well sorry Pancake if i made you irritated with my note.  😥

All i say and all you say can change on next day, so all it do is saying what

the status is  that day and in that moment.

And seriously, looking for 15 years old buildings? Mesh buildings can make lag to if they not 

made right.

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3 minutes ago, TalentBoy said:

Well sorry Pancake if i made you irritated with my note.  😥

All i say and all you say can change on next day, so all it do is saying what

the status is  that day and in that moment.

And seriously, looking for 15 years old buildings? Mesh buildings can make lag to if they not 

made right.

To address a few of your specific points, they aren't bad, so please don't take this that way.

SL is a complex system with many moving parts and sometimes those systems can align in ways that make everything else worse.

When looking for a healthy region, the last thing to look at is the local builds, client side lag and server side lag are different things with different causes. If you have client side lag, that's just you, the person next to you could be doing just fine. Drop your draw distance and relog on the region you're looking at, use a wired connection and being patient can help to mitigate the effects of local lag when looking for region lag.

There is no ideal region, the best you can hope for is an entire full private region all to yourself surrounded by water. but that's a lot of money (and still not immune to other busy regions on the same simhost). Mainland OTOH can be a total s-show, so it pays to be picky.

10 hours ago, TalentBoy said:

A sim people come and leave all the time can have  good numbers but just the fact they come and go make lag.

People entering and leaving a region is one of the biggest jobs a region has to do.

So yes, looking out for busy places is important. Places that have a constant influx of people coming and going will cause problems for the entire region. This can even affect neighboring regions, so living on the region next door to one with a busy store of club isn't ideal.

10 hours ago, TalentBoy said:

Using max texture size on all fancy stuff also slow down. Linden recommend max 1024 pixels but Idle is 512.

Textures are client side and come from different servers than the ones hosting the actual regions, processing textures is a big job for the client but has no impact on the region.

Just be patient, and don't worry too much about texture size. It's not the be all and end all of viewer performance by a long shot.

10 hours ago, TalentBoy said:

ITime Dilation: when that go down the simFPS also go down to compensate so sim can run smooth. Idle is 45

Time dilation is a big one, if that's below 1, the region is unable to do the all the mandatory core activities in the time it has each frame. The cause of time dilation can be complex and non obvious though, certainly not something the stats floater will help you unpick - if there is time dilation, all the other numbers are meaningless .. it's like driving car with a flat tire and worrying about fuel efficiency.

Simply put, a region has a loop that runs each frame. There are some essential things that have to happen, a chunk of time for scripts, and all being well , some spare time.

Spare time is the first to go and anything can cause that, then scripts get their time cut short, and finally time dilation kicks in and all bets are off. The building is on fire.

10 hours ago, TalentBoy said:

Active Scripts: There is no Idle , but  lets say under 10000 for a sim total. Higher makes lag . Seen 25000 and i had to leave, could not move.

Script run: Idle is 100% but there is no problem down to 50% . At 20-30% you get trouble with hud's, rez things  and so on.

Total Frame time: 22 is idle and under. You will se at most have 22,200 or like that.  Problem starts if it get higher and stay so.

Scripts can't cause lag like they used to years ago, if the region is struggling, they just get less time and there are lots of things that can eat into this and make it seem worse than it really is. Script scheduling also isn't perfectly linear.

It's best to worry about fundamentals and so long as scripts operate when you poke them, consider them fine.

Perceptual performance and numerical performance aren't the same, if it feels acceptable and you can live with your neighbors, then it probably is fine.

Shopping by the numbers alone can lead to unpleasant surprises & the best numbers in the world wont make up for a  jerk living next door!

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Yes its all complex and one thing does not exclude the other.

It was meant as a quick check. All above can't  make any sure its not the same week after.

Yes regions affect each other, parcels do, skyboxes do.

But i can agree with your notes to for a closer look at the  parcels they interested in.

And with that i'm out of this discussion.

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 7/18/2021 at 8:18 AM, Katherine Heartsong said:

Is there a way to tell if a sim (or specifically a parcel on a sim) is actually a good deal in terms of lag before you buy it? I can see the number of avatars in the sim, and tend to make sure there are no AFK places or massive clubs on the sim (easy to do), but overall performance or scripts running? Any way to tell if you're getting a high performing sim versus and laggy one? 

I have a lag meter on my parcels but can't Rez anything on parcels I don't own, so no way to plant it and see.

Thinking about going up to a purchased 8192 and want to make sure I'm not getting stuck in lag-villa.

Thanks. :)

Well, many people will give you many answers on this, some highly technical, but these are my rules of thumb:

o if the FPS/TD consistently dips below 99/45 it's a deal breaker. 90/40, you really feel it even.

o If there are more than 5000 active scripts on the sim, it's a deal breaker. 

o Get a free XOPH script radar and fly around and see if anybody has really high script time items that will continually pose a problem. Don't assume that a note to them to ask them to put it back in inventory when they are not here will work

o Look at the claim dates. Are they all from 10 years ago? 5 years ago? Or yesterday. 

o Look at the abandoned land and dates. What caused the abandoning?

o Make a few repeat visits, you may have missed something

No malls or clubs or Tiny Empires is all to the good, but it only takes a few people to add up huge time consuming scripts, possibly in the sky where you can't see them.

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36 minutes ago, Prokofy Neva said:

Well, many people will give you many answers on this, some highly technical, but these are my rules of thumb:

o if the FPS/TD consistently dips below 99/45 it's a deal breaker. 90/40, you really feel it even.

FPS as shown in SL is misleading (both client and server side)

Average or peak FPS doesn't matter, the 1% lows do.

 

 

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59 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

FPS as shown in SL is misleading (both client and server side)

Average or peak FPS doesn't matter, the 1% lows do.

 

 

Technical exactitude, technical details, technical perspectives don't matter in the use of SL. What matters is the rule of thumb, as I said. If you are buying land, there is no point in buying land at 98/44. If your own land is at that, wait an hour, it may change, if it is still like that, try removing scripts, but even removing 500 won't help sometimes. And again, *it does not matter one whit* that it is "misleading" to cite these numbers; that they mean different things in different contexts, etc.

Common sense tells you that if it is not 99/45, you don't buy it. This is about buying land. It's about common sense. It's not about technical exactitude.

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Here is something Wendi Linden gave me when I filed a ticket recently. It has everything you need to know in one place:

 

Hello Prokofy Neva,
 
Thank you for contacting Second Life Support, and for your patience. We have restarted this region and, just to be on the safe side, I have moved the region to a new host. Everything now appears to be working well, and the region stats no longer appear to be fluctuating. 

While I visited Hite, I kept a close eye on the statistics for the region. You, of course, can do this too by selecting control-shift-1, or choosing "Statistics Bar" from under your "Advanced" menu, in "Performance Tools." Much of the below I'm sure you know.

The Basic FPS at the top represents the FPS you are getting at your end, and is a combination of several factors, including the region itself, the connection from the region, through the Internet, and your own local network, and, of course, your computer and your Second Life viewer.

If you scroll down a bit, you'll see time dilation and sim fps. The closer to 1.0 and 45 the better, but you will almost never see that, given that one's own avatar and the scripts running on it will take a small amount of the time and fps. At current, these both look pretty good in Hite, sitting close to 100 and 45, without the dipping you saw earlier.

Then take a quick look at time. On a struggling region, I will almost always see low spare time (spare time is "what time is left over after all the other things that take time grab their chunk"). Seeing something like 0.001 ms means there's practically no spare time for the region to do things, and you'll see a performance hit. USUALLY that spare time is being eaten by scripts, which is the number right above spare. Seeing 18, 19, 20 means scripts alone are taking much of what's there for a region, and everything is may suffer. Currently, Hite does has a fairly high script time, and it is impacting the spare time. With that in mind, I am led to assume that script load on the region could be to blame: it may tip into overuse with the addition of a number of avatars, a vehicle hitting the region, or other things that temporarily increase the load even further.

I would, of course, recommend cutting back on scripts when possible, to allow for more spare time in the region. I did not see any specific item or items that I could point to and suggest removing or altering, unfortunately. It simply looks like too much of a good thing all around, I fear. On regions where there is a lot of shared real estate, such as this one, and each area has several scrips running it can compound resulting in the degraded performance you have experiencing.
 
If you continue to see any further performance issues in Hite, or if you have any additional questions please reply to this ticket and we will be happy to assist you further!
 
Best Wishes,
 
Wendi Linden
Second Life Support
Linden Lab

 

***

This sim is often sick, and I'm puzzled, as I own a lot of it, and I try to police the scripts. I go around with Xoph and remove heavy ones; I used to take all the scripts out of trees but it got to be such a chore changing seasons putting out new ones I stopped, because trees are not the culprit. I do notice quite a chance when the Lindens move it off the server it was, where it may have been shared with a club (the servers do not hold contiguous sims so you can't know). They often do that when you contact them repeatedly with sick sims. 

Hite has 6671 scripts -- that alone is a red flag. The sheer number of them as Wendi notes is a problem even if you don't spot any particularly heavy ones.

Spare time is only .002 even with 99/45 now. Doesn't feel laggy to me, but it might be to someone.

Not sure what ideal spare time should be but 1 would be nice I suppose.

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On 7/20/2021 at 1:21 AM, Coffee Pancake said:

Spare time is the first to go and anything can cause that, then scripts get their time cut short, and finally time dilation kicks in and all bets are off.

Yes. There should be a graphic of this.

I'm also envisioning a tree of Ways Sims Go Bad.

We need a bootleg of Linden sim Support training.

6 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

o Look at the abandoned land and dates. What caused the abandoning?

Another yes, along with the rest of the list.

On abandoned land, an "instinct": if a real chunk of the region is abandoned, that means the reported script metrics reflect usage from just the current un-abandoned parcels. If that abandoned land gets back in use those numbers will get worse.

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1 hour ago, Prokofy Neva said:

We have restarted this region and, just to be on the safe side, I have moved the region to a new host. Everything now appears to be working well, and the region stats no longer appear to be fluctuating. 

..................

This sim is often sick, and I'm puzzled, as I own a lot of it, and I try to police the scripts.

Policing scripts is pointless, you will never find the one bad script, and all the idle scripts you can remove are barely scratching the surface.

Keep in mind that any scripted tools you may be using to assist will be having an impact, and can be some of the heaviest items on a region all by themselves .. don't get into the habit of leaving monitoring tools and lag meters out.

Look for object updates, anything that's triggering updates is imparting an effect on multiple systems at once, therefore it's overall impact is far higher than just the script itself. Anything that moves often being the worst of it .. although I have seen some truly horrendous particle and camp fire effects that are changing settings every few frames to try and appear more dynamic.

But .. at the end of the day, Wendi kind of made the problem clear with "I have moved the region to a new host" - A region can be affected by other regions on the same simhost. There is no way to know what you're sharing simhost resources with. Maybe the last simhost was overloaded, maybe it had a huge club or event, maybe the new one does too .. maybe the time you go looking for problems is about the same time another region starts up a big daily event.

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1 hour ago, Coffee Pancake said:

Policing scripts is pointless, you will never find the one bad script, and all the idle scripts you can remove are barely scratching the surface.

On one's own land, though, one kinda can (and should) keep an eye on what scripts are accumulating, and Prok undoubtedly knows what's possible. In the viewer itself, one can get a list of scripted objects on a parcel:

173541328_Screenshot2021-08-01072317.thumb.png.d27157a91117615077aa7dfcc18aa1e1.png

Sorting by Size can be useful here, mostly as an indicator of script count. The real point of this is to uncover surprises: objects that have more scripts than anyone would expect. Those may be worth investigating.

And part of investigating is getting a handle on script times as well as counts, and that's not so easy. Prok already mentioned wearing "a free XOPH script radar and fly around" which I now want to investigate. (I've used my own "fly around hunting for script hogs" HUD hack for years.) The silly-seeming "flying around" part is because there's no LSL facility for getting a list of all objects on a parcel, even one's own parcel, so sensors and cam-gaze-raytracing can grab object UUIDs for OBJECT_SCRIPT_TIME queries. It's labor intensive, but given some tenacity, questions can be answered. (E.g., what's the most script-intensive pose engine? It's not the one you're thinking of!)

You're very correct that one shouldn't wear these except while actively investigating; they're busy little scripts.

 

 

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4 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

On one's own land, though, one kinda can (and should) keep an eye on what scripts are accumulating, and Prok undoubtedly knows what's possible. In the viewer itself, one can get a list of scripted objects on a parcel:

In my experience, with a full private region split between rentals and a busy community build .. it's a waste of time.

It feels like doing something.

There are rare insane objects that seem to be some kind of disguised manic hamster Tardis, but watching for object updates rats them out far faster than scrolling thought a huge list of things in estate tools (a far more informative list than about land has).

The very worst offender over many years was a little pot with some joss sticks that created the most convincing smoke effect I have ever seen in SL. Beautiful work .. picking it up .. made me feel better, did nothing for the region.

In the end, the estate tools list of active objects had one purpose - finding hidden breedables (that we explicitly limited in the covenant).

We had times where the script count was low and the region struggled, other times when it was packed to the gills and it ran just fine.

 

What always helped - rebooting the region and occasionally requesting a new simhost.

 

A rebooted region always runs better, with the exact same number of scripts doing the exact same things.

If I had to blame something on a region for the regions performance, it would be total visiting avatars over time. We could go without rebooting on quiet weeks, on busy ones we would be rebooting daily. but there were other times when the region would just suck and those times had no correlation to anything on the region.

 

 

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1 hour ago, Coffee Pancake said:

In the end, the estate tools list of active objects had one purpose - finding hidden breedables (that we explicitly limited in the covenant).

For sure. On Mainland, though, you make do with what's available, and finding a factory farm of breedables over somebody else's parcel can explain a low Scripts Run percentage. Also, as I mentioned, some things are surprise enough that, for example, I'll never let certain pose engines on my own land. Individual items rarely make much difference, it's true, but if one makes it an ongoing practice to reduce script time over a big enough chunk of a Mainland region, it can increase Scripts Run, especially if (as you mentioned) there's a bunch of legacy content. (Minor quibble though: LSO isn't always "bad". Most LSO scripts still in use probably do nothing or nearly nothing; what gets really bad is when they do a lot of in-script string or list manipulation, or otherwise loop a lot. Where LSO is a definite win is crossing region borders because handoff is simply block copying their 16KB between sims, rather than needing to serialize up to 64K of Mono stuff.)

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