Sim performance dips III

I spent a fair part of yesterday looking for things around SL. As I was looking for specific things, I was persistent; when I crashed out three times in front of a vendor, I just kept coming back. If I had been shopping for myself, I might not have been so persistent … but I might have been. I wasn’t taking a lot of notice of the statistics bar, but I noted the same sorts of drop in sim physics fps that I have been noticing all over the grid.

My sim-owning friend has had a reply to his support ticket, reiterating the view that avatar attachments may have been responsible for the problems, and suggesting that an abuse report might be appropriate in one case where someone made multiple visits. Hmmm …. Just how would that abuse report look? I am reporting X because they may be wearing an attachment which may be crashing my sim, and they came here a few times over the weekend. Oh yes, and they bought something. I don’t know what the attachment is but LL support say it crashed my sim.

Doesn’t seem very promising, does it? And what if it was actually just a persistant customer who really wanted to see the product, and kept crashing out? It often isn’t obvious to an avatar whether they have crashed out alone or the sim has crashed, unless you get dumped on a nearby island because your original location isn’t available, which is a bit of a clue.

The sim rollback was due to crashing only, and not courtesy of the LL support team.

Seems to me, though, that if people are inadvertently crashing sims with their attachments, it might be pretty important to find out what those are, so that sim owners can ban them – the attachments, not the avatars. Banning people because they unknowingly crash sims with something they are wearing doesn’t seem like good business practice myself to me.

I decided to do some more research. I stood on my friend’s sim watching the stats as people tp’d in. The sim physics fps drops when people come in, the more people, the more of a drop. Time dilation figure drops when the sim physics fps gets to a certain level. This used not to happen. It seems to me, though it is anecdotal, that freezing that people are complaining about all over the grid is happening when the sim physics/time dilation gets to a certain point.

I went back to our sim. We don’t have people tping in all the time, and the figures are stable and so is the sim.

I went to another sim, which was the busiest place by the looks of it on the grid. As I arrived, the stats dropped to sim physics fps 33 and time dilation 0.16. Each time someone or a group teleported in, the sim stats took a dive – a BIG dive. I can report that when the time dilation reaches around 0.18 and the sim physics 9.9, that’s when freezing happens. It was recovering for a couple of seconds and then dropping like a stone again.

Now, it is true that there have always been problems when a sim is jam packed full of people. Once you get beyond the recommended 50 limit for avatars, then things start to get a bit treacly, like wading through custard. Odd things happen. But there were only 14 and latterly 21 people in my friend’s sim, and only 27 in the other. Even in SL terms, that isn’t exactly standing room only. And it just doesn’t seem credible that all those people are wearing sim-crashing attachments, unless prim hair, or xcite attachments have suddenly gained new sim-crashing abilities.

It is SO frustrating! Seems to me that the crashing all over the weekend might have been to do with the number of people tping in and out of busy sims, and that the recovery since is to do with the drop in numbers. I can’t prove that, of course. All I can do is to keep digging, and to keep looking for evidence of what is going on.