Script usage on mainland

[Blue Voix]

I have managed to piss someone off and I need to know how to count how many scripts I am using on my parcel, then what the total is for the mainland sim I am on then how to tell how much of that is my parcels load. Thank you all in advance.

[ObviousAltIsObvious]

for your parcel, World>About Land, General tab, press the Script info button at the bottom. the list can take some time to populate. sometimes Refresh List is needed to make the list display. a total isn't printed, just scroll thru the script list with the arrows and count them off.

for the region, Advanced>Performance Tools>Statistics bar or Shift-Ctrl-1. scroll down and find Active Scripts for the total count in the region.

there must have been a typo there!

[Jenni Darkwatch]

World->About Land->General(tab)->Script Info(button)

[Perrie Juran]

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ObviousAltIsObvious wrote:

for your parcel, World>About Land, General tab, press the Script info button at the bottom. the list can take some time to populate. sometimes Refresh List is needed to make the list display. a total isn't printed, just scroll thru the script list with the arrows and count them off.

for the region, Advanced>Performance Tools>Statistics bar or

**bleep**-Ctrl-1

. scroll down and find Active Scripts for the total count in the region.

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Would you like to buy an "F?"  

[Amethyst Jetaime]

Here are the Official Mainland Policies.  As long as you don't violate those you are free to do as you please there.  However to be a good neighbor and for your own enjoyment, you of course don't want to lag out your sim either. 

You can use your land tools to see what scripts are running on your parcel and how much script memory they are using, which counts more than the number of scripts.  If you see any that seem high compared to the other scripts then eliminate those.  Just go the General tab and click the script info button.

 

 

[Perrie Juran]

My guess here is your neighbor is lagging and is trying to discover the culprit.

Which may or may not be the scripts.

This topic gets chewed to death.

Is there something your neighbor is targetting in particular?

[Blue Voix]

So if I was playing a rather script heavy game does it matter where on my parcel I set up? I live next to a linden road with a sim crossing, is having my game near there lagging it? I can move things up on the platform even though I love the sim and standing on the ground where I meet people the most, I just love all the cool people that use the area, its mainland btw.

[Blue Voix]

yes he seems to think my over all script usage was high, I bought a gadget that said it was .1 ms high so I have already pulled down some extra deco and made sure everything was set no movement. I play Ozimals brand and krafties brand and I probably was using more scripts than I should have for my 800prims parcel with 500 prims out but it was not hugely over. I dunno the whole things is rather confusing for me. I just want to play a game or two and enjoy mah sl and not make people mad, I am will to work to figure out whats fair.

[Jenni Darkwatch]

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Amethyst Jetaime wrote:

Here are the

Official Mainland Policies

.  As long as you don't violate those you are free to do as you please there.  However to be a good neighbor and for your own enjoyment, you of course don't want to lag out your sim either. 

You can use your land tools to see what scripts are running on your parcel and how much script memory they are using, which counts more than the number of scripts.  If you see any that seem high compared to the other scripts then eliminate those.  Just go the General tab and click the script info button.

 

 

---

There is no way to determine script memory use. Not even estate tools provide an accurate number for that.

Old LSL scripts will always count at 16kB per script. That's correct, they DO always use 16kB.

New Mono scripts will always count as 64kB per script. That's bogus, they only use however much they need. And they're better for a sim than LSL scripts.

Therefore script mem count is not a good or even useful indicator for anything at all.

 

Jenni

[Perrie Juran]

 

Sometimes I think the issue of Scripts is going to be the death of SL. 

People have lag problems and every day there is a new poster child to target.

And sadly there are some people who think that Scripts are the root of all Evil in SL.

This is the Statistics bar from Blue's SIM.

I'll let the experts weigh in but I sure don't see anything abnormal here.

 

 

[Blue Voix]

Aww thanks, that is what I thought, the sim had been lagging last week but I thought it was something more than just me, like it just needed a restart....guy came over and declared I was on the verge crashing the sim single handedly and was super upset. I appeased him and bought a do hicky that counted for me, I decided to pull up .2 ms worth of server time off my total and be done with it. Thanks everyone I have learned a good bit about how scripts work.

[Dillon Levenque]

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Perrie Juran wrote:

 

Sometimes I think the issue of Scripts is going to be the death of SL. 

People have lag problems and every day there is a new poster child to target.

And sadly there are some people who think that Scripts are the root of all Evil in SL.

This is the Statistics bar from Blue's SIM.

I'll let the experts weigh in but I sure don't see anything abnormal here.

 

 

---

 

I see this question all the time even here in the General forum; I imagine it must be constantly coming up in the more technical forums and in technical discussions.

What I can NOT understand is why doesn't anyone know the answer? I mean, come on. SL has passed its first decade. This stuff should be known. There should have been enough data logs analyzed and enough measurements taken and enough calculations calculated to know the effect of scripts on sim lag.

Obviously I have not done anything in LSL. I am not a codey. I've done way more programming than most people I know and almost infinitely less than people who actualy write code for a living or for real projects. But why is this so hard? What is it about the way SL works or about the way LSL works that makes it impossible for anyone to understand what's good or what's bad?

If anyone knows, feel free to get as technical as you wish in your answer. I have no problem with looking stuff up. It just seems odd to me that something so important should be so poorly understood. In RL technical circles that just wouldn't be allowed to happen.

edited to replace a word that actually reversed what I meant to say; I forgot what other words I was putting in that sentence. And once more to add the quote.

[ObviousAltIsObvious]

there is not a nice answer because it is YMMV.

5000 giant scripts all idling, waiting for a touch, won't do much at all.

5000 tiny scripts pushing physical objects around a sim will hurt a lot.

a few hundred scripts rapidly swapping textures can devastate a sim.

 

[Theresa Tennyson]

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Dillon Levenque wrote:

---

Perrie Juran wrote:

 

Sometimes I think the issue of Scripts is going to be the death of SL. 

People have lag problems and every day there is a new poster child to target.

And sadly there are some people who think that Scripts are the root of all Evil in SL.

This is the Statistics bar from Blue's SIM.

I'll let the experts weigh in but I sure don't see anything abnormal here.

 

 

---

 

I see this question all the time even here in the General forum; I imagine it must be constantly coming up in the more technical forums and in technical discussions.

What I can NOT understand is why doesn't anyone know the answer? I mean, come on. SL has passed its first decade. This stuff should be known. There should have been enough data logs analyzed and enough measurements taken and enough calculations calculated to know the effect of scripts on sim lag.

Obviously I have not done anything in LSL. I am not a codey. I've done way more programming than most people I know and almost infinitely less than people who actualy write code for a living or for real projects. But why is this so hard? What is it about the way SL works or about the way LSL works that makes it impossible for anyone to understand what's good or what's bad?

If anyone knows, feel free to get as technical as you wish in your answer. I have no problem with looking stuff up. It just seems odd to me that something so important should be so poorly understood. In RL technical circles that just wouldn't be allowed to happen.

edited to replace a word that actually reversed what I meant to say; I forgot what other words I was putting in that sentence. And once more to add the quote.

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Here's what I know about this - I'm not an expert, especially with how things were in the past, but I'm pretty familiar with how things are right now.

The server attempts to calculate a simulation of everthing that's going on in a region 45 times in every second - these 45 simulations are called "frames." If the various things that the server is simulating will take less than 1/45 of a second to calculate then a certain amount of "sleep" is injected into the process so that the servers won't run more than 45 frames in a second. If the things being simulated take MORE than 1/45 of a second per pass, the servers will run fewer than 45 frames a second and you get what is known as "server lag" where everything feels like it's going in slow motion. Note that this is unrelated to the graphical frame rate you see in your viewer - it's entirely possible to have an area where the sever is running at 45 frames per second but the graphical complexity of the scene (which the server doesn't really care about) will cause your viewer to run at fewer than 10 frames per second, and it's also possible for a fast viewer in an unhealthy sim to run at 100 frames per second when the server simulation is only running 22 frames per second.

One of the things that makes up the time a server frame takes is the time dedicated to running scripts. CURRENTLY, the servers "wall off" a certain amount of time to run scripts in each frame - if the amount of script time needed to run every script is greater than this walled-off amount of time, not every script will be run in every frame - they take turns. This means that the scripts themselves will perform less well but the overall server frame rate will stay close to the optimum rate. The "Percentage of scripts run" is showing whether or not the server needs to skip scripts to maintain its frame rate. It's rare that scripts alone will cause a region to lag now unless they're specifically written as griefing scripts.

This is how things work NOW - however, I believe that it USED to be that all scripts would be run in every frame, meaning that a script-heavy region would start to lag because of the time the scripts took to run. This was why script-counters came into being in the first place. I assume most of the current confusion comes from people who were familiar with how things used to run and aren't aware of how the script-running procedure has changed.

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I also visited Blue's sim and the server frame-rate and percentage of scripts run were fine. My VIEWER frame rate wasn't good near Blue's lot, and the amount of overall memory the region was using seemed pretty high considering restarts had been done so recently so there may be some sort of issue in the sim that causes it to use excess memory but I don't see a smoking gun pointing to/from Blue's lot.

[Qie Niangao]

Maybe some of the mystery of "script lag" will be apparent when we look at what's really going on in the OP's sim. (It's Oberstdorf, by the way, but at least at this point, there's nothing much going on in that sim itself.)

Scripts can affect "lag" in a whole bunch of ways, but only rarely anything visible in "Script Time" of the sim's statistics. That's because, as already pointed out, the sim strictly limits the amount of time it spends actually running scripts. But those scripts may still have side-effects that lag the sim itself (rarely) or (more often) viewers of the sim.

On the OP's parcel, you may note that viewer framerates are significantly lower when facing south than in any other direction. This is especially true if monitoring object updates (Develop / Show Info / Show Updates to Objects), and the reason becomes apparent: a landowner on the neighboring sim is using a venerable weather-making system that emits temporary snowcover prims that gradually fade to transparent and go away. It's not that these are particularly intensive scripts for the sim to process, but the updates to viewers are a constant heavy stream, even in a neighboring sim, if one is looking in that direction. (This particular example is a little worse because that temp-rezzing of scripted prims is fairly unfriendly to that sim, too.)

Incidentally, while monitoring Object Updates, one may also notice some horses, penguins, and reindeer, on Oberstdorf itself. These objects have scripts of varying impact (by far the worst is the "Puppeteer" scripts in the reindeer) but you'll notice that the sim is not lagged even a bit by these scripts, and if you swing your cam around to watch just those critters and not the snowcover prims, you'll see the framerate, too, isn't much hurt by those few animated animals. (That's assuming a reasonable graphics card, etc.)

So, if one is willing to invest a bit of time to investigate a case of lag, one may find scripts that contribute to it, but the way they contribute may have nothing to do with "Script TIme."

[Dillon Levenque]

Thank you very much. I have a much better understanding now thanks to your explanation and Qie's after. It would appear that the script counters (including the one on my bedroom floor that makes me so proud when I see I'm under the limit) are almost totally meaningless.

As it so disappointingly often happens, something that 'everyone knows' turns out to be almost total hogwash.

 

[Perrie Juran]

Thank you Qie!

Blue's SIM was pretty typical for a Snow Lands SIM.  Not many people want to live in an Artic environment.  Sometimes it seems like a lost continent in SL.  I do spend time there cause I enjoy some of the winter acrivities. 

I posted up the Stats for Blue's benefit because overall it was just another SIM as far as performance went for me.  And actually the Stats looked better on average than my home SIM.  Fewer objects, a third less active scripts and double the spare time. 

So thank you for weighing in here on this.

[Blue Voix]

Thanks for all the insightful input and information I have learned a lot about how this stuff works. I love my sim, I have this love of being on the ground in the snow there and I enjoy meeting the most interesting people with excellent avatars that are wandering about exploring,  so I was in no hurry to play my game anywhere else. I did make some changes in how the scripts I own run and all but was happy to hear the reports the sim is running in a average way.