[Opensim-users] What happens when you forget to check your sims..

[Fleep Tuque]

Hi all,

If any of you were following the long email thread on opensim-users about
intermittent crashing and out of memory exceptions, you may recall I just
figured out how to spread regions across multiple opensim instances.  (If
you missed the thread, see
http://opensim-users.2152040.n2.nabble.com/Intermittent-crashing-System-OutofMemoryException-td7281298.html
.)

So today, the HGAC folks came to visit FleepGrid and things went relatively
well, and after it was over I thought I'd follow Rick's suggestion and load
each sim one at a time to see how much memory they used and general
performance for each region.  Considering FleepGrid is running on an old P4
with 4GB RAM, I've been relatively pleased with its performance with around
11 regions, some of them with lots of content and scripts.  The only major
concern has been the CPU consistently pegging around 75-80% usage after all
the scripts are loaded (it always hits 100% during start up).

Imagine my surprise when I loaded each sim one at a time and was seeing
virtually no CPU load after the scripts finished loading, region after
region, even when I started adding them back cumulatively, CPU load was
hovering around 2%!  What the heck was going on, I wondered, the only
regions I had left to load were my three hypergate regions which are
basically small islands with a few signs and very few scripts or objects.

Lo and behold, I added HGate 1000 and suddenly the CPU load shot back up to
78% after scripts finished loading.  I couldn't imagine what the heck was
going on with that nearly empty region but upon investigation, I discovered
600 spheres set to physical under the waterline, each taking up precious
CPU resources.

The long and short of it is, I hadn't checked those regions in ages because
they're just simple hypergate jump points and I didn't think anything in
particular was going on there, but those darn physical balls have been
chewing up my CPU (and making the $#%^@$ loud fan run all day and night)
for goodness knows how long, PLUS whatever performance hit the whole grid
suffered as a result of my inattentiveness.  Hopefully this will mean a lot
less laggy experience on FleepGrid and a lot less stress on my poor old PC
(which I'm completely surprised was even able to handle 600 physical
objects at once!).

So just a friendly reminder to myself and you to check your sims
periodically for griefer crap.  And curses to user "Jack Marioline"
wherever you are.  :P

- Chris/Fleep
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://opensimulator.org/pipermail/opensim-users/attachments/20120221/1c933843/attachment.html>