I think it’s no secret by now from the obserevations ive done on the 10 sims of babbage and the two sims that make up the Dr Who Experience that Linden Labs are now starting to put more than 4 sims per core.
The way it works is this….
The new servers they have are either dual or quad core with the majority of them nowquad core servers. These servers have 4 processors but the processors all share the same memory and internal north and southbridge bandwidth cause they are on the same motherboard and internal connection to the LAN and then into the internet itself, and thats the problem that Babbage and some other sims are now starting to face.
It used to be the case that on these dual and quad core machines its was sually only 2 or 4 sims that ran off a single core. So you had a dual core fully occupied with 4 sims on a single core, thats 8 sims on the entire machine.
As I said…thats USED to be the case.
I first started noticing it happen on the Dr Who sim and put it down to just the lag the staff was causing with their scripted HUDS and toys, the dr who sim is always busy most days. Then i noticed something strange, especially with the Academy of Industry sim.
Academy right now is one of the most quietest in terms of total scripts on the landed parts of the city. Theres less than 3000 scripts running on the entire sim….but in the Spare Time catagory there was nothing, and the statistics bar was constantly pegged at 21ms script time.
That…was impossible.
Any sim which is using 21ms script time to itself within the actual sim would rubber band and lag to the end of time, but Academy wasnt showing any signs of it. The only signs it was showing was slow teleporting and a tendancy to ghost avatars on log in, log out or teleport. Thats when i checked how many sims Academy was sharing on the CPU….
…it was EIGHT…not 4…EIGHT sims on a single CPU. Two of those sim’s was a club, one of those sims was hosting a massive 40+ avatar event which was sucking up all available timing on the CPU away from the other regions it was hosting on.
It’s now become apparent after restarting Pallisade, Port Babbage, Clockhaven, Academy and Square that the “lag” that some folks complain about in the city…is not the citys fault most of the time, its because some of the city is on an 8sim CPU and is being strangled.
As such, im going to be checking spare timing on the city every few days. Normally when a sim has a double restart (one restart followed immediatley with another when the sim comes up) it forces the region to ‘jump’ to another server. So far this trick has worked, but ive been notcing as days go on that it’s becoming much more harder to land on a 4 sim CPU…now its usually 5 or 6 sims per CPU which is the norm.
These restarts will hapen at stupid o’clock in the morning, usually 1am SLT when the city is quiet and theres not a lot of people about.
Victor Thank YOU !!!
1) what a great explanation !
2) thank you for staying with it for us all in New Babbage !
3) this would also make sense why some of the older sim main lands
((Le’tiger))
have been being restarting every other day or so on some weeks for the past couple months !
((leaves some carrot cake for Thumper :) as I am sure, he helps with these things !))
Bah :( Thanks for keeping on top of this, Victor.
isn´t the usage of more than 1 sim on one core an attribute of the void (or home or whatever they are named now) sims, with less allowed traffic and scripts and prims?
and wouldn´t be the feature of fast “1 sim per core” part of the more expansive full sim contracts?
it sounds like they try to cut costs by selling upscale (full) sims and secretly treat them like homestead ones. no need for hardware shopping. perhaps one of M´s leftover balance sheet polishing measures?
its there a way to get the LAB to reduce the amount of sims you share with? surely if they ad more sims to the cpu they are reducing the quality of service you paid for, could we then request a lower fee for maintenance?
The whole issue of reduced service, maintenance and quality just stinks with Linden Lab.
Well Loki then one just reboots said Sim ,till they jump the jammed server , hence Proof to Restarts always makes a difference !
Folks that say it does not ,are just wrong :( !
Well, as it happens, I tried to attend the Fleet Week opening ceremonies but alas “You cannot enter this sim because the server is full”
@Breezy, do you mean to say that every time the sims restart they could jump to a different CPU with different neighbours? so then the neighbouring SIms and the amount shared on a CPU is a random but also changing configuration?
This is potentially a deal-killer for many. One of the big reasons to get a private sim is to maintain control over this sort of thing. If LL is just going to pull the rug out from under you like this then there’s one more reason out the door.
It’ll take a lot more than lag to make me walk. I’ve dealt with far worse lag when I first joined with a dial-up connection and poor choice of graphics card. Only way anyone will convince me to walk out on SL is if the entire grid is permanently shut down.
Check out grid survey. It will list the other sims found on the same machine among other things. Server class number is what you’re probably most interested in. The class 50x machines hold 4 full sims per machine, the class 70x machines hold 8.
http://www.gridsurvey.com/display.php?id=68171
I think Miss Lubezki has the right idea here.
Presumably, “4 sims per core” means four Full regions. Almost half of the private regions in SL are Homesteads which are permitted only 1/4 of the prims and 1/5 of the avatars allowed in a Full region. So the computing resources consumed by a Full region should support 3 or 4 Homesteads.
I haven’t checked the specific Babbage sims but I would be willing to bet that several of the 8 sims you have seen are Homesteads.
It is certainly true that activity in a region with which your region shares a core can affect performance of your region. But, I would much rather share a core with 7 laid back Homesteads than with 3 busy Fulls!
smiles and Looks up at Mr. Questi whispers for the record ..
New Babbage only has one Homestead Sim .. The Deep
the others are each full Sims Sir :)
and the servers for all second life Steam-lands have been awful this weekend :(
My next question
Are All Full Regions treated equal .. IE are the Main land Full Regions Treated equally as all Private Niche FULL Regions in this said stacking ?