Simulator Lag

Those Darn Campers

8 August, 2007

Simulator Lag

For the past several months, the Forsaken sim has been sick.

I suspected it when Kitto Flora’s little steam train started performing erratically.

And I confirmed it when I started figuring out what some of the sim stats meant (hit CTRL-SHIFT-1 to see toggle them on and off).

I bought a couple of sim stat testers (the more fancy is made by Mystical Cookie, who makes the wonderful Mystitool) and they agreed with me. Forsaken was performing poorly.

Before the slowdown, the sim was percolating nicely—and most of the prims and scripts now on the land were already in place.

I tested the sim repeatedly over a two-week period, with distressing results. Mystical Cookie’s sim tester, which ran a full test in less than four minutes on a clean-running sim (I actually ran the machine on two other sims) took more than 90 minutes and generated multiple low performance warnings on Forsaken.

I looked around my property to see what might be causing the lag.

I had about five rezzers making 20-prim plants. I turned them off.

No change.

I removed about 100 miscellaneous scripts.

No change.

I removed all of the giant prims on the land (about a half dozen) save one, which is set as nonphysical and hence is not likely to cause lag.

No change.

I asked my Dreamland representative for help. She restarted the sim.

Things got worse.

The Region tools, which are available only to sim owners, reveal the scripts that consume the most processor resources and generate the most particles (for a long time, I’ve suspected that one or more particle scripts on Pele are producing almost as many particles as can be viewed).

I asked my Dreamland representative to give me the names of the worst offending prims (all scripts and particles are prim-based). She refused.

She just told me it was Pele that is producing all the lag on Forsaken.

Today I looked for the Support Portal and didn’t find it. I suspect it’s because it does not yet (and may never) exist.

So no help from Linden Lab, and only a little from Dreamland.

Yesterday I posted in the Forums, and got some helpful replies. One avatar (I’m offline as I write this and so can’t list his name, but I did thank him in the forums and via IM) actually went to Pele. He said, on the basis of his use of beacons, that the problem has to do not with scripts, but with the physical objects on the land. He cited several possible offenders, including my balance, which I will turn non-physical as soon as I get home tonight, and a couple of sculpted prim fish which cycle sculptie textures. They will go into the cooking pot.

Yum! Sculpted fish for dinner!

I can’t think of anything in particular which I or Sweetie have placed on the land which might lag the sim so badly.

And it’s possible that the cumulative effect of the scripts on the land are lagging the sim—although that is, I think, despite what the Dreamland rep told me, not the most likely problem.

I have some theories about what is lagging the sim. I’ll talk about them in my next post.