Issues with Mainland

[Summer Logan]

So I know at this point the lindens do not really regulate mainland as for script limits, built limits etc. it’s basically free will. They will tell you if you have issues with lag due to scripts or issues with your neighbor due to building that it’s best to ignore them or move to a more private sim (like a land rental sort of situation) as these owners do regulate script/build limits. However, I believe that mainland should be more regulated. If someone has a lot of breedables and or obnoxious building they should be the ones who get asked and pushed towards getting their own sim that way they can do whatever they like without bothering other people (because honestly we can block the person derender the build but you can’t block the script so it causes less lag). Why should I suffer? I pay my membership, I purchased my land and I feel like I have the right to enjoy it lag free. I barely use heavy scripts myself so if someone wants a breedable farm why should they be able to use 10 times more scripts than me? Maybe if there was a way to implement how many scripts each parcel are allowed to use just as prims are calculated that would be helpful. So the lindens had told me 4,000 script processes per sim is ideal so divide it up between the land owners on that sim. 
I’ve contacted support a couple times (before I had to eventually move) and the only thing they did was restart the sim and move it to a different server. What is that going to do when the problem is on the same exact sim? Moving to a didn’t server did not take the lag away when the problem was right next door. 
 

just my thoughts. I feel like the lindens need to do better. 

[Qie Niangao]

It certainly doesn't get to the root of the problem, but in case it's any consolation: In the past week (or a bit longer for Release Channel sims), script performance has been very noticeably improved. If you haven't checked statistics recently, you may be quite pleasantly surprised on that front.

It's still certainly possible for scripts to add to a laggy time in SL, mostly by doing physics- or graphics-intensive stuff that doesn't matter to script time, but most modern breedables don't really do much of that anymore. Until this update, however, many breedables were notorious for generating pure script lag (scripts delaying other scripts running in the same region), which should be greatly alleviated now. Doesn't mean it's fair of breedable "factory farms" to use such a disproportionate share of a region's script resources, but it may not be as painful as it used to be.

(And of course there are plenty of other Mainland issues, some of which you identified in your post, altogether unrelated to scripts.)

[Alwin Alcott]

1 hour ago, Summer Logan said:

I pay my membership, I purchased my land and I feel like I have the right to enjoy it lag free. I

feelings are rarely rules or laws.
The ones with things you don't like pay too.... and they perhaps dislike your creation...
i don't say your rant is not right, but sometimes i think people don't mind "ugly"builds and breedables as long it's not on their lawn.

[Yukiko Yeshto]

While scripts can cause "lag", a lot of those issues also come from too many high resolution textures on even the tiniest objects, and/or high poly items, and a few more things. If you experience "lag", it could as well be that you have been considerate enough to remove scripts where they aren't needed, but maybe are not aware that you rezzed out items that create issues. It is complex. If LL started to regulate that, we would probably end up with no more user-created content being allowed to be uploaded. Or, maybe only by approved professionals. Which would also take away from what makes SL so attractive. I fear, we have to accept "lag".

[Feorie Frimon]

2 hours ago, Yukiko Yeshto said:

While scripts can cause "lag", a lot of those issues also come from too many high resolution textures on even the tiniest objects, and/or high poly items, and a few more things. If you experience "lag", it could as well be that you have been considerate enough to remove scripts where they aren't needed, but maybe are not aware that you rezzed out items that create issues. It is complex. If LL started to regulate that, we would probably end up with no more user-created content being allowed to be uploaded. Or, maybe only by approved professionals. Which would also take away from what makes SL so attractive. I fear, we have to accept "lag".

Texture lag is SUCH a hidden contributor to lag - just changing textures to 512 over 1024 has a huge effect. Unfortunately it has a huge effect on appearance too.

And thanks for translating ‘Developer Speak’ on the scripts update - that was very helpful for me! @Qie Niangao
 

 

[Summer Logan]

Yes I understand all that about mesh and textures and I've honestly never had a problem with either. I have a high end computer/components and high speed internet. It's always been the scripts that have been my issue.

[Sayumi Tsunenaga]

On 1/28/2022 at 12:49 AM, Qie Niangao said:

In the past week (or a bit longer for Release Channel sims), script performance has been very noticeably improved.

Thank you for this information @Qie Niangao - do you know a reference to where this was explained to members, please?  I'd just like to learn a little bit more.

One thing that I often notice is that some of the really attractive lands with lots of detailed vegetation seem quite laggy.  I have long suspected that this is a combination of the scripts and the high res textures in many of the modern trees and plants...  is this the likely cause?   I love to explore such lands, but sometimes it becomes a real waiting game for everything to load and settle, and even then, movement is quite tiresome.

[Qie Niangao]

3 hours ago, Sayumi Tsunenaga said:

Thank you for this information @Qie Niangao - do you know a reference to where this was explained to members, please?  I'd just like to learn a little bit more.

One thing that I often notice is that some of the really attractive lands with lots of detailed vegetation seem quite laggy.  I have long suspected that this is a combination of the scripts and the high res textures in many of the modern trees and plants...  is this the likely cause?   I love to explore such lands, but sometimes it becomes a real waiting game for everything to load and settle, and even then, movement is quite tiresome.

There's really not much information the Lab has released about the script improvements beyond a very broad-brush blog post referring to "tooling improvements" in some unspecified AWS magic. I'd love to know more myself.

Laggy vegetation is almost always due to rendering, which is to say it's viewer-side rather than scripts. High texture resolution doesn't help, but I think it's more a problem of so many densely overlaid alpha textures which compounds the complexity of rendering whatever resolutions they have.

One way scripts could add to the problem might be to set those to animated textures (perhaps to move in the "breeze") which further complicates rendering each frame in the viewer. (Note that this would not add to script lag, as observed in the sim Statistics window (ctrl-shift-1), and indeed texture animation can continue even with the scripts removed.)

One thing that can help is to change as many as possible of those surfaces to Masked alpha mode instead of Blended, but that's also a different look and best if the texture is created with that in mind.

[Sayumi Tsunenaga]

7 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

Laggy vegetation is almost always due to rendering, which is to say it's viewer-side rather than scripts.

Aha!  So the problem is possibly more in my viewer settings?  I generally keep my draw distance below 200, but I really should learn more about some of the other settings in the quick prefs...  for example, I see that I have LOD on 4.0 (maximum)...  hmmmm...

7 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

script lag, as observed in the sim Statistics window (ctrl-shift-1)

Wow!  Now there is a window I have never seen before, I have tried to find region statistics under World > Region details, and of course there's not much there!   I think this is what I was hoping to find.  Now I just have to work out what the important figures are and what they mean...  I think this 

is different though.

Thank you for such a comprehensive outline of this issue!

[Prokofy Neva]

On 1/27/2022 at 11:23 AM, Summer Logan said:

So I know at this point the lindens do not really regulate mainland as for script limits, built limits etc. it’s basically free will. They will tell you if you have issues with lag due to scripts or issues with your neighbor due to building that it’s best to ignore them or move to a more private sim (like a land rental sort of situation) as these owners do regulate script/build limits. However, I believe that mainland should be more regulated. If someone has a lot of breedables and or obnoxious building they should be the ones who get asked and pushed towards getting their own sim that way they can do whatever they like without bothering other people (because honestly we can block the person derender the build but you can’t block the script so it causes less lag). Why should I suffer? I pay my membership, I purchased my land and I feel like I have the right to enjoy it lag free. I barely use heavy scripts myself so if someone wants a breedable farm why should they be able to use 10 times more scripts than me? Maybe if there was a way to implement how many scripts each parcel are allowed to use just as prims are calculated that would be helpful. So the lindens had told me 4,000 script processes per sim is ideal so divide it up between the land owners on that sim. 
I’ve contacted support a couple times (before I had to eventually move) and the only thing they did was restart the sim and move it to a different server. What is that going to do when the problem is on the same exact sim? Moving to a didn’t server did not take the lag away when the problem was right next door. 
 

just my thoughts. I feel like the lindens need to do better. 

This is an age-old problem. The Lindens never met a script they didn't like. I don't really understand why script time cannot be limited by avatar or parcel owner. In fact I believe this was tried for a time. No doubt it is complex, but this situation doesn't occur that often that it shouldn't be a TOS regulation -- excessive script usage. So if you are seriously lagging the entire sim for other people, you will be asked to bring down your time. It's not always stationery breedables, I find, but colliding items like pets and babies, adult furniture, and more. Get a Xoph sensor for free on the Marketplace and fly around and see what the lagging scripts are with high times. You might be surprised to find some of them are your own. I do this often.

I find 5000 scripts is the point beyond which it gets laggy, but it can be at different levels for different people, and it's about the accumulation of scripts and not always about certain high ones.

The Lindens just revised the script performance which is supposed to create more headway for script time. Not sure this is making all that much a difference.  When the Lindens move your region to another server, in fact that should get you away from sharing your sim with others who might have a club or some laggy thing. These are randomly assembled and you can't see which ones they are (as we used to) and they aren't adjacent. So when they offer to move your sim, that can fix things -- until it gets a new neighbour randomly creating the same problem. It can be that secret sharer that lags you more than the neighbour on your existing sim.

You can put draw distance to 160 or less to reduce lag, and get rid of some of those options like advanced lighting and that will reduce lag as well.

[Prokofy Neva]

On 1/27/2022 at 11:49 AM, Qie Niangao said:

It certainly doesn't get to the root of the problem, but in case it's any consolation: In the past week (or a bit longer for Release Channel sims), script performance has been very noticeably improved. If you haven't checked statistics recently, you may be quite pleasantly surprised on that front.

It's still certainly possible for scripts to add to a laggy time in SL, mostly by doing physics- or graphics-intensive stuff that doesn't matter to script time, but most modern breedables don't really do much of that anymore. Until this update, however, many breedables were notorious for generating pure script lag (scripts delaying other scripts running in the same region), which should be greatly alleviated now. Doesn't mean it's fair of breedable "factory farms" to use such a disproportionate share of a region's script resources, but it may not be as painful as it used to be.

(And of course there are plenty of other Mainland issues, some of which you identified in your post, altogether unrelated to scripts.)

Is it "scripts delaying other scripts" or a curb on all scripts making them execute more slowly which the Lindens introduced years ago? I find that breedables usually are NOT the culprit unless they are moving around and colliding. And yes, the 1024 textures is an issue in terms of the scene loading.

[Qie Niangao]

12 minutes ago, Prokofy Neva said:

Is it "scripts delaying other scripts" or a curb on all scripts making them execute more slowly which the Lindens introduced years ago?

All scripts in a region are the last priority of stuff the sim does within a simulation frame of 1/45 second. There's some minimum time set aside to scripts so even if the region is overloaded with physics stuff, for example, still some scripts will get a chance to run, but in general the running of scripts won't cause the simulation to lag. Scripts do, however, compete for whatever time is available within that simulation frame, and when that competition starts to get tight the region's "Scripts Run" percentage falls below 100%, meaning some scripts are not getting a chance to run as soon as they should. That's what my "scripts delaying other scripts" was supposed to represent.

Now, this is based on how the simulation scheduler worked before this recent "tooling improvements" release. I'd guess that the scheduler still works the same way, at least to this level of detail, but the Lab is holding these cards pretty close to the vest.

[Summer Logan]

Here is my script information. As I stated I no longer live on the sim with the HUGE script issues (they had over 800 breedable cats and active scripts were over 10,000). So just for my personal knowledge how is my script count vs the sims on my new land? Am I sitting in a good place or should I try to reduce?

[Qie Niangao]

It's pretty difficult to squeeze meaning from the "Memory used" data about a parcel. The whole topic of script memory measurement is another level of complicated, but to a first order approximation, divide the kb number by 64 for the (minimum) number of scripts currently on the parcel, which at least has the potential to be meaningful, unlike the measured memory used.

Just comparing with my own use, that 33.7 mb parcel-level count is kinda many scripts for a 1024, not so much for a 4096 or larger, but of course the big question is about script lag, and if there's no script "competition" among all the parcels on the region, there's just no benefit in reducing scripts. Hence, we look at the numbers in the Statistics bar to get an idea of there's any reason to look further at scripts.

Here we see "Scripts Run" at 98.424%—practically 100%. If that's a representative number, there just is no script lag happening. Having any fewer scripts won't make any of them run any faster.

Now, one may also wonder how much "headroom" there is for scripts to be added to the region before trouble happens. The judgment is subjective, but there's a relevant measure: "Spare Time", which appears here, taken from one of my sleepier Mainland locations:

The lines I highlighted in green are the first place to look for a region's script performance: when "Scripts Run" is about 100%, the amount of headroom available to add more scripts before they can have any impact on each other is the "Spare Time" per simulation frame (and in this example, fully 80% of the frame is idle). "Sleep Time" in pink usually closely tracks "Spare Time" and when that's not the case, the sim is usually in pretty dire straits and it may be worth trying a restart. (Note: Homesteads are different and weird. They still operate on a 22ms frame clock but only get to use a quarter of that.)

When there actually is script lag (Spare Time near zero and appreciably less than 100% Scripts Run), the yellow highlighted numbers can give some hint of whether there are simply too many scripts or if they're too busy. It's possible for relatively small numbers of scripts to need to process vast numbers of events but that's rarely the case even for breedables.

Note that all those other categories of "Time" (besides Spare and Script) take precedence. If the whole region is actually lagged (Time Dilation appreciably below 1.0) it's bound to be because something else (often Physics) is demanding more time than fits in a normal frame, so the simulator must extend the length of each frame, and everything gets slow. This is how some old-timey breedables used to really lag a regioin: they used physical motion, colliding with each other and getting trapped between walls, etc., burning Physics Time like mad. Nowadays, most stay non-physical all or most of the time.

Sorry for the long response; just one last thing: In that Statistics window there's a whole hidden wonderland of mystery under "Advanced" which details all the work the viewer is doing. This is really where most lag is experienced and where texture resolution—or an expensive video card—makes a difference. I'm a scripter, though, so I try to never look behind that curtain.