Stop being so laggy, people!

[Pussycat Catnap]

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Penny Patton wrote:

While I agree with the sentiments about scripts (avoid no-mod attachments with re-sizer scripts, they are a plague), it's also just a fact that if there are a lot of people in a sim, even wearing no attachments, scripted or otherwise, the sim will get laggy. The overuse of scripts just makes it worse.

 

Actually, my understanding of it is that scripts do not contribute to the particular type of lag where the whole sim seems to slow down.

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Modern furry avatars tend to be fairly low on scripts, and high on sculpties.

I've been to furry clubs with all 40 possible people, and on estate land been to one with over 60 - and not felt a drop of lag.

But its very rare for me to be able to enter any human club and not get hit with severe lag. Furries just tend to be forced to opt for mod hair so they can fit it on their heads.

 

 

[Innula Zenovka]

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Randall Ahren wrote:

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Penny Patton wrote:

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AO sets with high numbers of animations lead to latency issues, too, since every new animation needs to be streamed to every avatar around you. 

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What about dancing? Practically every club or hangout place has a dance ball. Doesn't streaming the dance animation to every surrounding avatar cause substantial lag? Couldn't clubs eliminate a lot of lag by getting rid of the dance balls?

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No, it doesn't.   All the sim does is send a small file to your PC, and your graphics card and cpu make all the people dance.   It actually puts a lot less strain on the sim resources to have people dancing (particuarly if they're using dance balls) because, as far as the sim is concerned, you're just standing or sitting there not doing anything.   You're using a lot more resources by walking round.

If you think about a normal club, you might have a lot of people dancing, but most of them are doing the same few dances.. if they''re all walking round, probably most of them have got different anims in their different AOs to be sent to your PC.

[Kasya Sciavo]

Yes, possibly so, Penny. But. Whilst no silly apologist, you do have a slight tendancy to let LL wriggle off the hook. The grid performance should be better. Far better.  

 

[Penny Patton]

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Randall Ahren wrote:

What about dancing? Practically every club or hangout place has a dance ball. Doesn't streaming the dance animation to every surrounding avatar cause substantial lag? Couldn't clubs eliminate a lot of lag by getting rid of the dance balls?

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 Not really. An animation is streamed to every avatar in rezzing range of the avatar being animated. If a dozen people are all using unique dance animations, each and every one of those animations must be streamed to every avatar in rez range. 

 If a dozen people are all dancing the same dance provided by a dance ball, only one animation is being streamed, because you don't need to download the same animation over and over again for each person being animated.

 

 At any rate, SL will always be a balance. An SL were we all wear system skin, plain clothes, no attachments and have no scripted toys would be a boring place indeed. The trick is to find really awesome fun stuff that is also very efficiently made.

 Like I said, my own avatar is fully animated, loaded up with scripted features, and decked out in the best clothes and attachments I've made...but only adds maybe 17 scripts using a total of 500-600kb to the sim's load.

 

And while I may be in the minority, I'm not unique. There is great, efficiently made content out there!

 

It should be easier to see when objects are so poorly made they add significantly to sim lag. LL only recently gave us the ability to script objects that can measure script memory use. We should have had that built in as a client side feature ages ago. LL should have been encouraging shop keepers to advertise the script counts and script memory useage of their creations since the beginning.

 It really is unfair to harass people who simply don't know any better in these circumstances, but at the same time people should be provided this information.

[Penny Patton]

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Kasya Sciavo wrote:

Yes, possibly so, Penny. But. Whilst no silly apologist, you do have a slight tendancy to let LL wriggle off the hook. The grid performance should be better. Far better.  

 

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:smileyvery-happy:

You should see some of my posts where I really take LL to task. Usually about the scale issues, the lack of content creation tools and/or features, their abysmal marketing and their poor handling of the new user experience.

I doubt any Lindens who read those comments think I let the company wriggle off the hook. 

[Cathbodva Clarity]

Hair that has scripts and is no mod normally had the option to the delete the sripts once you are done.

But yes lag from avatars ia huge and people dont realize,all of those huds and AOs.

That is why i like phoenix i can put my AO in the built in AO and reduce my lag to almost none!!

[Osprey Therian]

It isn't the scripts and textures needed to make things look and behave fabulously, rather it's the wasted resources (sloppy scripts, huge textures, etc.) that contribute to lag to absolutely no end that are the culprits. Wise use of shared resources benefits us all.

[Randall Ahren]

 

Cathbodva Clarity wrote: That is why i like phoenix i can put my AO in the built in AO and reduce my lag to almost none!!

Is that really true with the built in viewer AO? Doesn't the built in AO simply load the animations out of your inventory that a wearable AO normally has and stream those to other avatars in range as it cycles through the animations?

[Penny Patton]

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Randall Ahren wrote:

 

Cathbodva Clarity wrote: That is why i like phoenix i can put my AO in the built in AO and reduce my lag to almost none!!

Is that really true with the built in viewer AO? Doesn't the built in AO simply load the animations out of your inventory that a wearable AO normally has and stream those to other avatars in range as it cycles through the animations?

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Both need to stream the animations. You would not see any animations if they were not streamed to your computer. That adds to latency, the lag you experience due to SL contenet taking a long time to stream through your net connection to your computer.

However, a client side AO contributes absolutely no script burden to the sim. So it's slightly more efficient than a ZHAO-II (and way more efficient than some of the heavier scripted AOs out there). 

 

 

 Also, it's exactly like Osprey says, it's not that we need to get rid of ALL textures, scripts, animations, etcetera...it's just that we could use them better.

 Animations are small files, everyone can have unique walk animations, a few stand poses, and all those other animation slots available to scripted AO users without it causing problems. I only mentioned animations because there are people running around with like a dozen different spastic stand poses.

 It's like building. Do something that saves you only one prim and you have one more prim to devote to detail later on. Do a dozen little things that each save you a prim, and you have a dozen more prims to work with for adding flavour and detail. Efficiency comes from thinking this way.

 Single script re-sizers that can be deleted after use, as opposed to "script in every prim" re-sizers. Using 512x512 textures instead of 1024x1024 (and 256x256 instead of 512x512 textures, and creating efficient texture maps that combine textures for multiple pieces of an object rather than unique textures for every prim in an object).

 That space marine in colour/texture change scripts in every prim of their armour in addition to the re-size scripts probably never uses these features, but yet they still contribute heavily to the script load on any sim they're in because they are carrying around those unused scripts.

 

 And really, I do think this is a problem LL has created and could do so much more to help fix. They really do need to make it easier for people to make better judgements in scripting, texturing, purchasing, etcetera. It's horribly irresponsible to create an environment like SL and just expect your userbase will ALL approach it as if they were pro videogame developers.

[Paladin Pinion]

 

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Kasya Sciavo wrote:

Then I consider it most prudent for you to convince LL to ban all such prim heavy things at once.  They should not allow the sale of any such things if that is - which of course it is not - the sole cause of lag in SL.   

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They won't ban what you can buy, but I understand the plan is to limit script usage per avatar as soon as the proper tools are in place. Better go shopping for low-lag stuff.

[Paul Hexem]

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Paladin Pinion wrote:

 

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Kasya Sciavo wrote:

Then I consider it most prudent for you to convince LL to ban all such prim heavy things at once.  They should not allow the sale of any such things if that is - which of course it is not - the sole cause of lag in SL.   

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They won't ban what you can buy, but I understand the plan is to limit script usage per avatar as soon as the proper tools are in place. Better go shopping for low-lag stuff.

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Well, that was the plan, but they seemed to have scrapped it, unfortunately.

[Pussycat Catnap]

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Paladin Pinion wrote:

 

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Kasya Sciavo wrote:

Then I consider it most prudent for you to convince LL to ban all such prim heavy things at once.  They should not allow the sale of any such things if that is - which of course it is not - the sole cause of lag in SL.   

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They won't ban what you can buy, but I understand the plan is to limit script usage per avatar as soon as the proper tools are in place. Better go shopping for low-lag stuff.

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Object have been deleted from the grid and asset server before. But its rare outside of copybotting (itself I suspect much rarer than paranoia tends to claim).

But in this case it is much more likely than when script limits finally hit, if ever (sigh, was supposed to hit a YEAR AGO), a lot of those badly made scripts will just cease to work - leaving all the malicious or idiotic builders who've been peddling them facing a mass of support requests from very angry buyers... while the rest of the builders - who frankly often make better looking goods anyway - just laugh and announce discount sales for new converts.

 

And I'm not so much kidding that the responsible builders not causing this problem also tend to have better looking or better quality builds. People who take the time to learn how to do it right tend to do a better job.

Shop around more, and you can easily find good low lag product that is very often better looking and more feature rich than the crap that many have been sold a 'bill of goods' for.

 

 My neko kit - with animated ears and tail, AO, and flight feather all worn and moving about - and fully dressed, has me using less than 300kbs of script memory.

My furry though is a bit bigger than I'd expected. When fully decked out with all my getup in my furry setup, I'm just under 2mbs total. Half of that in my jaw to move it in sync with my typing. That surprised me - some other furries I have come under 1mb, but I do have one that shoots up to 5.

But before I landed on a good builder... lets just say that there are items in my inventory that can make me a walking 15mb sim-killer avatar, and that's still mild compared to what I've seen in some places...

 

 

[Marcus Hancroft]

 

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Penny Patton wrote:

While I agree with the sentiments about scripts (avoid no-mod attachments with re-sizer scripts, they are a plague), it's also just a fact that if there are a lot of people in a sim, even wearing no attachments, scripted or otherwise, the sim will get laggy. The overuse of scripts just makes it worse.

 

Actually, my understanding of it is that scripts do not contribute to the particular type of lag where the whole sim seems to slow down. Instead, when the script is bogged down scripts simply stop running until processing resources are available. Script heavy avatars instead prevent scripts from running correctly, contributing to a "script lag" which causes all scripted items in the sim to be affected and slow down or stop working altgoether.

 

 Is that correct?

 

And, of course, the framerate issues that people mistakenly label "lag" are caused by the number of particles, large texture maps, and polygons your computer has to render. If your framerate is suffering it's because of the number of prims and particles on screen, not any number of scripts.

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Howdy, Miss Penny!  The above post is absolutely correct!  YOU are absolutely correct.  There is a LOT of mis-information out there about what actually causes lag NOW compared to what caused it a couple of years ago.

[Melita Magic]

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Paladin Pinion wrote:

 

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Kasya Sciavo wrote:

Then I consider it most prudent for you to convince LL to ban all such prim heavy things at once.  They should not allow the sale of any such things if that is - which of course it is not - the sole cause of lag in SL.   

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They won't ban what you can buy, but I understand the plan is to limit script usage per avatar as soon as the proper tools are in place. Better go shopping for low-lag stuff.

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When buying roo stuff, I noticed they had an avatar script measuring device at the door. They said at some point, many sims might have those and deny entry to anyone exceeding a certain set limit. I was happy to see I was in the lower third among the avatars there. I still had an AO, the roo HUD and basic clothing and prims so I wonder what the people wore who wore ten times what I did in scripts?

[Kolby Nissondorf]

>_< LAGGGGGG

Did they ever take it off?

[Osprey Therian]

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Pussycat Catnap wrote:

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... when script limits finally hit, if ever (sigh, was supposed to hit a YEAR AGO), a lot of those badly made scripts will just cease to work... 

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And a year ago was the Linden apocalypse - Babbage, for one, was working on script limits. I have no clue what's happening now - anyone know? It seemed a good idea to me, since at the dawn of the grid LL had no idea we'd be (for one thing) attaching hundreds of scripted prims to ourselves and hadn't instigated script limits from the get-go. It's a tragedy of the commons.

[Void Singer]

here's another fun fact

high draw distance, low cache size, and high traffic with low residency (people actually staying) also contribute to lag, both actual (server) and percieved (client).

 

Physics is still the #1 simplest cause of server side lag, but the previous mentions also cause net time lag.

overuse of resources in all forms is probably #2, and unfortunately it's it extremely hard to impossible for LL to do anything about it, that requires education of creators... and applies to all content.

Scripts aren't supposed to cause server lag in and of themselves, but there are still a few chinks in that, especially if they affect physics viewable properties like color and texture... there are also a few cases where they can, but several of those have been eliminated, and the three remaining culprits not mentioned are being dealt with, with one almost eliminated, another getting close, and the third less common being worked on.

[Randall Ahren]

What do you recommend for draw distance? I keep mine at 40 meters. Anything less and it makes it look like there is fog inside my building. I don't know what my texture cache is set to, but I keep it cranked up. Everything appearing grey drives me half-mad. In addition, I have max particle count set to zero so that I cannot see particles. The only time I really enjoyed seeing particles is when I used to play Zyngo and I liked to see the dollar particles flying out of the machine when I won.

I suppose parcel owners could turn scripts off for visitors. That won't work though if you're giving out scripted objects for visitor use on the parcel.

What about group discussions? Is it really necessary for avatars to meet in one room for a discussion? Can't that be done through group chat? Too many avatars in one place equals lag.

[Pussycat Catnap]

v2 Won't even go below 64 on draw distance (unless something in the debug or advanced menus lets it go down more.

Default is 96 I think - and that's good enough for anyone unless you're doing still snapshots of a scenery.

I keep mine at 64 most of the time. Going up only when I want distance images.

 

[Void Singer]

what do I recommend for draw distance? that's tough, but I'd say as low as you are comfortable with when popping around the grid... and if you set it high make sure your cache is also set high, in fact I'd suggest setting your cach as high as you are comfortable with for all scenarios.

reasoning:
every time you view something it has to be sent to you, if you are popping around the grid with a high draw distance, you are getting an exponentially higher amount of content sent to you as you draw distance increases.

if your cache is low, it will only hold so much information, so things get kicked out, then when you view them again, they have to be sent again, and stored again.

Particles, I'd only concern myself with what the vid card can handle... I've got a nice GTX card,so mine is generally quite high.

as for parcel owners turning off scripts for visitors, I don't recommend it... it's just troublesome, and easy enough to get around that all you're really going to do is annoy people.

group chat would be great if it didn't suffer from lag problems, although there were some changes tested that seem to help that a great deal... hopefully there won't be any major bugs or drawback to it and we'll see that soon

[Randall Ahren]

Don't you get texture lag from particles? My neighbors have cherry trees, which shed blossoms. When I first login, the shedding blossoms look like transparent squares until everything fully rezzes. A similar prolem occurs at Achemon Station on the SLRR. A parcel owner next to the station has a snow maker. It is bascially a giant transparent rotating sprinkler that sprays snowflake particles from above the station. When teleporting in, the snowflakes initially look like squares. Achemon is pretty laggy. So is Obscure, which I think is because of a sandbox in the region. 

One of my other neighbors has a building that appears to constantly redraw itself with a rotating sign above the building. I tried to derender it, but derendering will not work with it. So I set my draw distance at 40 meters and that puts it outside the draw range of my viewer from where my parcel is so I don't have to see the building continually redraw itself.  

 

 

[Irene Muni]

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Void Singer wrote:

it's

a

reason for lag, but it's hardly the only one.... arguably the content creator that uses 50 different 1024^2 textures is just as bad if not worse.

there are also some horribly laggy dance huds and AO's that are actually worse than the 200 resize script hair that sits idle, or the physical scanner huds that not only spam the region with dozens of physical sensors, but also spawn trackers that try to update faster than the code can actually execute.

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this, this, this!

[Innula Zenovka]

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Randall Ahren wrote:

Don't you get texture lag from particles? 

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Particle textures, like the textures on buildings, your clothes and stuff, take time to load.   There's nothing special about textures in particles, except it's normally far more noticeable when a texture for a particle is loading than when it's a similar texture on one of the unscripted gems in my earrings.    And it's only one texture, normally; a particle emitter can only emit one type of particle at a time, so even if it's switching between different textures on a timer it's not usually going to be loading more than two or three.

Having said that, people do often use unnecessarily high resolution textures in particles.    But -- unless Void disagrees, in which case I'll defer to her because she knows considerably more about scripting than most of us, and certain more than do I -- I'd say that particles aren't a particular cause for concern.

 

[Void Singer]

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Randall Ahren wrote:

Don't you get texture lag from particles? [...]

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you can, it depends on your computer, but the information gets sent wehther you render it on your screen or not... so unless they're bugging you, you might as well set them to whatever your setup can handle.

[Mayalily]

Re:  Scripted items.  Do scripted items still 'cuz lag even when they are in your inventory not on your avatar?  Sorry if I sound like a computer dummie, but I am.