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Efficiency, lag and sitter systems


Bitsy Buccaneer
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Are the various sitter systems more or less the same in terms of lag and resource use or are there any which are particularly good in that regard? One of them advertises itself as having only one script (and thus very low lag), but does that matter for pieces which aren't in use? If everything is in one script (positions and animation names etc), does that one script not become a bit weighty?

I know enough to get myself confused and have done a thorough job of it. :matte-motes-smile: Any guidance?

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That's nothing to worry about, since scripts do not produce lag.  If you had almost no free time left at all (because your region was already about to lag out anyway) and you then had a bunch of scripts all start up at once, some of them would slow the others.  A sitter script is hardly likely to do that, though. Most of the time it's idle, just waiting for someone to click a button.

In simpler words, there are loads of more important things to worry about than whether a sitter script is going to lag anything.

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If everything is in one script (positions and animation names etc), does that one script not become a bit weighty?

That's pretty unlikely, if by "weighty" you mean the one script would use more resources than two or more smaller scripts.

Positions and animations are stored a variety of ways by these sitter scripts; some don't even keep all that in script memory, making it possible to scale to many poses without adding more scripts (at least not for poses).

It's certainly true, as Rolig says, that sit-script lag is not going to be significant, so it's really not worth worrying about. That said, there are some really ancient sitter systems that use ridiculously large numbers of scripts, and back when they were common, sim performance was affected by memory use, and they'd often be the worst offenders of any objects on the sim. They really were bad news, but I think they're largely replaced, and anyway sims seem to have much more memory headroom than in the past.

Finally, there's one good reason for a one-script sitter solution: for an object that scores 1 Land Impact, it's really annoying to have to add another Server weight LI because of multiple scripts. I use my own simple multi-pose script for those situations, but otherwise I just use a common commercial sitter system -- one that now needs at least two scripts even for just one sitter.

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Thanks Rollig and Qie. I think I'm clearer on the changes and how that contributed to my confusion (obsolete information + current situation + the usual telephone whispers game = many conflicting assertions).

So touch scripts don't add to lag at all? I have an idea to switch textures in some of my art pieces so they can be a 512 for general viewing and a 1024 for close up inspection. If it works, it could be best of both worlds. But not if inactive scripts add up.

Qie, I am confused by what you're saying about LI and script total. Could you please explain to me how that works? I know that adding a script makes every .5 bit count as 1. (So two individual throw pillows on a chair each contribute 1, even if they are .5 each, but only 1 if they are uploaded as 1 bit.) I don't know anything past that.

What you wrote suggests that it is more complicated. Or maybe I have just misunderstood.

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Could you please explain to me how that works? I know that adding a script makes every .5 bit count as 1. (So two individual throw pillows on a chair each contribute 1, even if they are .5 each, but only 1 if they are uploaded as 1 bit.)

Yeah, it's a little trickier than that, and it's changed over time so keeping track is a challenge. Check the revised Server Weight formula in the yellow box on this wiki page for details, which saith:

MIN{ (0.5*num_prims) + (0.25 * num_scripts), num_prims }

Now, what that means is you can have a linkset with two Convex Hull prims (for example), add one script and still get a Land Impact score of 1 for the linkset. (Its Server weight is actually 1.25, which shows as 1.3 in the Linden viewer, but that rounds down to 1.) If you add another script, however, that score goes to 1.5, which *should* round to 2 . (This "*should*" is weird. I've seen it stick at 1 at first, but then flip to 2 in copies, so this part seems flakey, but the point is really that a single script need not raise the LI.)

[ETA: Perhaps obvious, but just to extend the example: Imagine a 4-prim linkset that scores a Land Impact of 2. Now you add some of the highly modular commercial sitter scripts, maybe a texture changer, whatever, to a total of 6 or more scripts: now your land impact is 4, but if it all were squeezed into just one script the LI would be back down at 2.]

 

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Thank you thank you thank you Qie. That makes sense now. I hadn't thought about it in terms of the rounding up factor.

I especially appreciate that you've given me enough information to evaluate beforehand whether or not a project will benefit from a single script sitter. The one I'm working on just now probably won't, but a chair with pillows probably will.

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