By Phil F. Kearny
People come into Ambrosia Dance Club not thinking of the effects that they have on the simulator. They just want to have a good time wearing whatever scripts and attachments they want without thinking about the effect they are having on some mysterious thing called a server. They want it to be just like real life.
Second life is of course not real life. It is a bunch of code running on a box somewhere allowing our avatars to move around in a 3D environment. The technology blows me away. I don’t pretend to understand the inner mechanisms of it. I just want what everyone else wants. I want it to work like a golf cart. I turn the key, step on the pedal. and off i go. I don’t really care how the process of the electric motor and transmission works – I just want to get the next hole. But what if i took 15 morbidly obese people and stuck them in the golf cart with me. Well If the thing moved at all, it would move very very slowly. And no one would have a particularly good time on the golf cart.
Everyone knows what lag is and has experienced it in Second Life. Lag is caused by many factors. There is client side lag which is on the users end and is caused by sub-par internet connections, weak/non-existant video cards and insufficient RAM. Then there is server side lag which can be a multitude of factors. When they experience this slowdown at a crowded party at Ambrosia sometimes an avatar will shout out “LAAAAG omg its so laggy!” Often these are the same people who are wearing 400 scripts and don’t even realize that they themselves are a major contributor to slowing down the server.
I have been following the debate on scripts and lag with great interest. It is a huge problem when a person teleports into the sim wearing hundreds of scripted attachments. I can see the time dilation and sim frames per second (FPS) numbers spike downward on the sim statistics whenever this occurs. The biggest culprits lately are resizer scripts that are built into shoes, hair, belts and hundreds of other items. All of these scripts continue to run when an avatar teleports into a sim. Since the server must recognize these scripts the result is lag. It is very simple to see for yourself the number of scripts that are being introduced with each person teleporting in. Press CTR SHFT 1 to bring up the sim statistics, stand at the teleport point and watch the number of active scripts jump up with each new person that comes in to the club.
But the problem may not even occur on the sim you are currently in. Since there are 4 full estates to a server, excessive scripts running in a sim that others are sharing a server with can bring all four to a crawl. When too many scripts are running in a region the server simulating that region runs out of memory, dramatically increasing the lag experienced in all regions running on the same server.
Babbage Linden has announced that the future of Second Life will see script limitations. And I applaud this. The problem is that anyone can write a script and some of them are written quite badly.  A malicious person can bring a sim to its knees by just coming in wearing a few dozen scripts with infinite loops. Most people are of course not malicious but are uneducated about the facts. Wearing countless huds, resezer scripts, AOs and other scripted items, they go about Second Life slowing down sims wherever they appear. Is the answer more server memory? No, because more will never be enough to answer the demand for more and more scripts.
The only answer is to limit the usage to reasonable levels and allow everyone the tools to see who is going over the limits of usage. As a private Estate Owner the tools are available to me to see all of the individual scripts that running in the sim. This in itself is not fully useful since it does not display script use over time but in a single slice which fluctuates as scripts run.
Individual avatars and estate owners need the ability to see how much script usage each one is using in real time. Perhaps some sort of graphing meter that showed an avatars script usage in real time would allow people to monitor themselves and limit the amount of resources that they are using.
Viewing the statistics at Ambrosia shows that the simulator runs about 4000 scripts when it is totally empty. When a crowd of 50 avatars appears that number jumps to almost 15000. That is an incredible load on the server. At these peak times the usual result is that if any scripts run at all they do so at a molasses rate.
The easy answer in Ambrosia of course would be to disable all scripts for visitors. The end result of that of course would be that people would stay away in droves and complain endlessly that their Dance Chimera does not work or they could not hang out on the dance floor and play a minigame on their HUD. Or they could not resize their heels for the 400th time. So what is the answer? To me its always more horsepower! To the Lindens its always limits. I want scripts to run and i want people to be able to use them. But if the cost of this is that the entire sim is useless and everyone is grey then what good are scripts.
I leave the solution of this up to the Linden Labs gods since the only thing i can do is bitch and moan about it. We need better scripting that is more efficient. We need people to be educated about scripts they wear and we need more memory on the servers. Most importantly we need the tools to assess the scripts that we all create and wear.
Without this knowledge, even the most brilliant SL user cannot know how much resources they are using.
If you made it all the way to the bottom of the article I apologize for the massive amount of text. I just feel that this is an important issue that we need to be aware of in order to do silly things in world and write short pithy articles about.
Recent Comments