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Possibly 10 is too low, but not by far... and 40 is definitely too high. Four openspace sims with 40 avatars each would be like putting 160 avatars in a regular sim. If the limit was 20, that would be like 80 in a regular sim...
Perhaps a max of 20 and a default of 10? Argent, if you are going to multiply the load by four the proper comparision is Mainland, but full private region. Big huge swonking no to this.
Mercia: The mainland limit is 40, the private region limit defaults to 40 with a max of 100. Openspaces are already at a disadvantage even compared to mainland sims because they've got three extra copies of the whole sim software alongside a full load (between the 4 sims) of prims and scripts, so a maximum of 20 is already pushing it because you can't crontrol what else is going on on the server: if the other three sims on your server are running with 20 avatars, you're going to be starting off with a lagged down sim even with no other avatars on it!
You get what you pay for Argent, OpenSpaces have proved very popular and people are aware of their limits. They have contributed to a 44% increase in SL land-mass and killed the Mainland market. To introduce such a limit nnow would be very detrimental to LL's customers.
The problem is that I put this JIRA in after talking to OpenSpace owners who find their OpenSpace sims being lagged down because they're on the same core as one or more OpenSpace sims that have a "full load" of avatars on. To introduce such a limit now would be beneficial to customers who bought OpenSpace sims for "light use" and don't want to share them with people trying to use them as full-on event sims.
You get what you pay for, and when you bought an OpenSpace sim you got 1/4 of a sim. You can't support 4 sims worth of avatars on 1 sim's worth of hardware, and the limits should reflect that. Estate managers ARE able to control the sim's agent limit, if the sim is lagged then the agent limit can be lowered, but there is no need to have a set rule for having only a limit of 10 avatars.
The difference is that because OpenSpace servers are shared among different estates, one estate manager allowing more than 10 avatars on an OpenSpace sim can lag out sims on up to three other estates, and THOSE estate managers can't do anything about it. They can't even tell who is lagging them out.
One alternative would be for an OpenSpace server to be tied to one estate. Another would be for an OpenSpace server to set the limits of the sims running on it to the lowest of the four sims, so if one etstate manager set the server limit to 10 avatars per sim it would effect all sims running on the server. 'Another would be for an OpenSpace server to set the limits of the sims running on it to the lowest of the four sims, so if one etstate manager set the server limit to 10 avatars per sim it would effect all sims running on the server.'
Um, Argent. perhaps I'm misunderstanding, but do you mean the the maximum AVs allowed in the OS sims should match the lowest maximum set on any of the four sims? That would mean if somebody has a bad day and sets the limit in their OS sim to 1 Avatar, all other sims on that server would be screwed without even knowing who causes it. Good point. So perhaps simply setting the maximum to 10 wouldn't be such a bad idea after all.
 I hope the openspace sim owners that prompted the JIRA will speak up for themselves, since Argent is so far the only person commenting (in addition to the three votes at time of commenting).
I own a number of openspace sims, as well as renting one, and would object to having the rules changed from under me. Especially if avatar count is the only step taken. Bad scripts and overdone attachments are far worse. I can monitor script performance on my own sims, but what about the effect of bad scripts on other sims? And how about a cap on prim attachments, if we're going to go after people using more than their "fair share" of CPU time? I would also think that AV count is too blunt a weapon to solve this problem.
Couldn't it be addressed down at the system level, rather than having to fiddle with inworld limits? I don't know exactly how the Open Spaces servers are configured and managed, but even if the various simulator processes are sharing a CPU core in some situations (as I believe that they are), isn't it possible to set hypervisor or OS parameters in such a way that each sim is ensured of its fair share of CPU power (if it needs it), regardless of what the other processes are doing? Linux CKRM, VMware's resource reservations, and AIX's WLM can all do this, I believe. There's probably some Windows thing too. I'm afraid the assertions put forth in this JIRA are false. An openspace region can handle as many as 100 avatars with no drop in framerate whatsoever, and certainly with no effects to other regions. However, Scripts and physical objects can affect an Openspace sim's performance a great deal. However, what happens on one region will not affect other regions on the same core.
I chanced upon a unique situation recently while testing Mono. I had 4 of my openspaces imported to the Beta grid, and did some load testing. Because these are the only mono Openspace sims on the beta grid, they are unique in that all 4 are sharing one core. Something which probably never happens on the main grid. After loading down two of the sims with a substantially overloaded number of scripts, I went to check out the other two regions. They were not skipping a beat. If anyone would like to do their own experiments, contact me in world, The sims are still there and I can provide Estate Manager access if needed. I don't doubt people have performance issues on Openspaces, it's just that they are blaming it on something that has no bearing, that being what is going on in other sims sharing the core. No one region can take more than it's allocated share of resources, period. As an open space owner, I can say I would be extremily upset about having avi limit cut down. Within my community of sims I have not noticed lag issues from their occasional events, nor have they complained about mine with 30+ attendees. I think that there are other things that can be done to reduce lag issues, avi limits will actually only hurt a lot of sim owners 10 avi's you can't even have a gathering.
I am also an open space owner who actively uses her sim for at least two large events per quarter. On average I would say that my events draw from 30-50 avatars at any given moment for about 2-3 hours of usage. Although some of the larger scale events have lasted for more than 8 or 12 hours so that mutliple time zones and multiple programs may be accomodated.
The lag that occurs in my sim is more related to the number of scripts that we have running or the number of physical objects that occupy the sim. Large scale weapons tourneys with many scripts and several attachments of a physical nature, for instance, clearly effect the rates on the sim. I think that if we limit the thinking here to avatar numbers we are surely missing any number of other possible solutions to lag rates in open spaces. We need to look more closely at all the possible issues before jumping to one conclusion and "solution". why not throttle resource usage as a whole instead of focusing on avatar count? wouldn'1 it be better if no matter what is causing th elag, if it is originating inside a sim, it would lag only that sim?
I'll chime in with the rest of open space owners that have hosted events with anywhere between 30 to 50 avatars. To my experience, the amount of load is by no means different than an event held in a full sim. Reducing the maximum amount of avatars within an openspace pretty much robs the openspace of one of the main reasons that is purchased - to accommodate more avatars in a larger amount of space. Within residential communities where all full sims are fully parceled and rented out, it's up to the voids to accommodate larger scale events.
Definate no.
Even on the mainland a person with a 512M2 parcel can hold a RezDay party with 40 people, filling the sim, why shouldn't Open Space owners be able to do the same? Sure there are some rotten eggs who will put a club on an openspace but using the existing scripted tools you can see your neighbors (mostly) and look at their av counts on the map. From there two actions, AR them (I guess the Lindens will see a busy club on an OpenSpace as abuse, they certainly should!) or force a few reboots of the region for force a server change. Generally if I find my openspace sandbox has been lagged by a neighbor I will just do this without even investigating and flip it around to another server. Once you are on a good server with three good neighbors it tends to stick for months and you never see another problem. (I have have been on open spaces for 18 months now) A better solution, rather than a technological one would be for LL to actually monitor average agents over time and send a warning to the estate owner when the openspace is being constantly abused. Doing this would allow anyone to hold the rare major party (rez day, birthday whatever) and ensure that those rotten eggs (cheapskates) who want to run a 100 avatar club will be sanctioned. Since this was brought up (for a second time) on the SLScripters list, Soft Linden has imported this issue, and is talking to the core about it... so hopefully a lot of the questions raised here will get addressed.
BTW: some kind of per-parcel limits for avatars is a good idea, too. This isn't a matter of "open spaces vs mainland" as some people seem to be trying to characterize it. I probably ought to create some kind of Jira for that when I'm not being distracted by hurricanes headed my way. One difference is that if one parcel is filling a sim (and that's inevitably some club full of campers... not a short term party) you can see it... Which point raises a question. I'm not an estate owner, but I was told that there were no tools to see who else was on your server. If that's not the case then they need to get better publicized. What about people simply renting openspaces, can they avail themselves of these scripts? Echoing Darien:
Caledon had some of the first class 5 openspace sims put down, and they came as a package, presumably they were all the same server. We picked one for performance testing and beat the living pulp out of it, trying to make it crash with physics and a good many avatars. The other three didn't even blink. Not even when we had the 100 av party in Caledon Carntaigh. Openspaces are pretty robust! And yes, 30+ avs will make scripts in that particular sim barely operate. It appears from what I've seen to be isolated to that sim. Even in the old days when you bought a 4 pack the four regions were not on the same server. The redundancy and recovery built into the basic design means that you could be anywhere your connected regions can even be on seperate racks, the lab try and keep adjoining regions in the same colo, but I have been told by support it is possible to even request that is changed.
Easy to verify, just look at the sim number in Help > About. When you "performance testing and beat the living pulp out of it" you were probably affecting some other poor resident who was trying like mad to work out what was happening and why he couldn't move. Max Case makes the Sim neighbors device. that is what i use to find out who else shares my server. Upto 16 openspaces per server. It doesn't get them all, but it does a fair job. I would love to see in estate management the ability to see the names of who else was on your server. it would make the ability to AR serial abusers so much easier. @Shibari, Far too late to test that instance now, we tested them within hours of them landing on the grid. I'd be very interested in the sim numbers of the sims Darien was talking about above, do his sim numbers line up?
Darien Caldwell wrote: After loading down two of the sims with a substantially overloaded number of scripts, I went to check out the other two regions. They were not skipping a beat. If anyone would like to do their own experiments, contact me in world, The sims are still there and I can provide Estate Manager access if needed. This would be treating a symptom instead of the problem.
Openspace performance was fine before havok4 was rolled out. They got slow all at once when havok4 rolled out, and they have never reached pre havok4 performance levels. I don't believe the usage patterns are as much of a problem as is commonly thought. There's a very simple way to find out, and I think it's telling that Linden Lab hasn't taken the step yet.... Simply give us 16 openspaces on aditi that are guaranteed to be on the same server, with fast autoreturn set on all of them. That would make it immediately apparent what the baseline performance is for 16 empty openspaces, and also let us gauge which things can lag all of them. I'd much rather live with openspace sims unduly effecting each other for now and push ahead with implementation of fair resource management grid-wide. Memorializing arbitrary limits seems a bad idea. I'm not averse to reasonable limits but they shouldn't be significantly more restrictive than mainland 1/4 sim.
The major performance issue I see with my own openspace sim is a round-the-clock periodic plummet in physics framerate (SVC-2219) - it feels much more like generally poor low-level process scheduling than intersim simulation resource contention. Another way of looking at it is that I would be extremely dissatisfied with current performance if I was using my sim for physics (sailing, open combat, flying), but it is acceptable for light residential (2 houses), building, and basic scripting. Well, we have the Linden's answer to load on OpenSpace sims now. sigh
an addendum and elaboration of this issue is in MISC-1781
While agent limits in a sim can be addressed with either a hard limit set by LL, or by estate owners, it does not address the discrepancies in simulator load between avatars in a sim-- a single avatar can put a really heavy load on a sim when they are wearing too many scripted attachments (shields, fast polling AOs, gesture huds, various sensors). MISC-1781 requests more robust estate and end user tools that would allow better self regulation of simulator loads that occur as a result of avatars taking a bit more than their fair share of the simulator's resources. Although these kinds of tools have been requested many times over the years at many town hall meetings, we're kind of at a critical state and desperately need them-- LL cannot justifiably use simulator overloading as a reason for the tier fee hikes, without making a reasonable effort to provide these kinds of tools to users. Later comments in chat logs posted indicate that the load that the Lindens are talking about is the load from Openspace sims on the grid, not the load on the sims themselves.
Load from scripts is a non-issue at this level. Scripts are throttled aggressively already as a result of previous complaints about script load and do not strongly impact sim or grid load. The biggest load is from avatars themselves, regardless of what they're wearing. In the release of Homesteads, i do believe this was taken care of. Homesteads now support 20 Avatars, and Open Spaces support 10.
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New Feature
Resolved
Normal
Limit Openspace regions to fewer avatars than full regions
There should however be some kind of throtteling, cause some of the openspace sims are close to useless at times.