Rose Springvale wrote: I suspect the answer is "all of the above"...
The answer is indeed "all of the above", although establishing a direct correlation between any given resource demand and sim performance is extremely difficult. Here are some factors:
1) Scripts. NFS has quite a fair number of scripts, but they are not excessive as to number and load demand on the sim resources. Since its easy for the Estate Managers to monitor these, most of the nasties have been weeded out.
2) Textures. These are a huge problem in NFS. Both the number of separate textures, and the size of those textures, affects the demand on the server. Because NFS was assembled in a hodge podge fashion, we have many different texture sets. I would not be surprised if many of them were quite large. I've made a few buildings in the town, and I know that I often have to restrain myself from uploading building texs that are alrger than our covenant maximum of 1024x1024. In this case, the EM's have no real way to measure compliance with this.
3) Particles. Particles are a client-side phenomenon, meaning that they load down *your* computer, but have no significant impact on the server (except the small load of the script that runs them). We really DO NOT have many particle generators in NFS.
4) Avatars and their attachments. If the sim is laggy when only one or two avies are on it, then this is not the problem. But, when gatherings happen, the presence of avatars are a direct and significant load on the server, a load made much more significant by the objects attached to the avatar. We all know that a sim is limited to 15,000 prims, in order to control the load on the server. But there is no limit to prims attached to an avie, so that in good sized gatherings, this number can multiply a hundredfold. I just think of the hundreds of prims in my hair, and I know why the sim lags when avies visit. It used to be that event invitations often carried requests that women limit their prim attachments (why they singled out women, I have no idea!!) so as to improve the experience for all the participants. A year or more ago, LL made load handling improvements in the code, so this request became less important. But it is still a real factor.
5) Physical moving objects. We have very little load on our sims because of this factor, since we have very few vehicles and other "physical" things ("physical" is a setting in an object, and causes the object to act in a MUCH more complex way than a "non-physical" object).
These are just some of the server load considerations. Sadly, the only two we can monitor are "Scripts" and "Physical objects" (Collisions). Well, we can also restrict the number of avies that enter our sims. All the other factors can be affected only by appeals.
Sudane...........................
... how do i find out what class of servers I have?