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Typically in a whiny, childish voice. (Or can easily be read in one.)

Honestly, I knew something was up when I could, on various low-end computers (Windows XP, Vista, and Mac OSX) get petter performance than people on allegedly better computers than me. This goes for SL and WoW.

Why is this? I’ve set both programs to run what my computer can HANDLE. If I have lag, I know it is usually my own fault, simply based on the fact my computer isn’t that powerful.

I link this post everywhere. It’s been very helpful and informative, and I just wish people would own up to their mistakes instead of always blaming everyone else. The world, not just the grid, would be a better place.

Can anybody here give me a hint?

You might be right that this article could have started with explaining the difference between client-side lag and server-side lag, like this one on the LSL Wiki does. But it’s a question of style really; I preferred to explain it in the middle and not at the beginning. We can surely discuss what the better approach is, and why one is better than the other.

Your issue seems mostly to be about what time dilation means, and how it is explained. The LSL Wiki explains it like this:

“Time dilation occurs when the sim can’t keep up with the processing of its tasks even after reducing the time allocated to scripts and physics. Avatars will experience this as slowed-down (slow-motion, “bullet-time”) movement.”

Tasks is an obscure definition used by Linden Lab to refer to objects rezzed on a sim (as opposed to objects on the inventory or on the asset server). You don’t need to take my word on it, ask Kelly Linden

Your alternate definition of “Time dilation is a measurement of the difference between the physics frames per second and the sim fps” is mathematically accurate, but doesn’t explain what it means. My choice was to explain what time dilation is, instead of posting a mathematical formula. Your assumption that I don’t understand maths doesn’t take into account that I always prefer to explain what’s behind the maths, not briefly stating a formula and saying, “that’s why we have lag!” — which doesn’t explain anything.

With a more technical twist, I could have said (but avoided to be too technical on Ana’s blog; yes, trust me, I address issues differently for different audiences ) that scripts that move/change/manipulate rezzed objects (“tasks”) or affect avatars will require more processing from the physical engine (Havok 4, in SL’s case). If the burden on the physical engine is too high, it has not enough time slices left to continue to update the scene in real time for all the users — time dilation is thus a measurement of how quickly the sim is able to proces all the information related to tasks in the sim, compared to ‘real time’ (in practice, 45 FPS is almost twice ‘real time’, since we humans process around 20 frames per second — thus, time dilation of 0.7 is bad, but not terrible; everything below 0.5 is really too much).

Now how do scripts fit into this? Obviously, a script that is placing a heavy burden on the physics engine (like, say, a vehicle or a gun shooting a projectile) will increase the time dilation. That’s unavoidable. Scripts rezzing prims or moving them around, specially if they’re set to physical, will increase the burden on the physics engine, and this will increase time dilation if there are too many of those around.

And your extreme case is also correct, but for a different reason. 2 million scripts in a sim will take a huge amount of memory — even if they aren’t doing anything. But that memory is needed for far more things beyond scripts: for instance, all rezzed objects on a sim are on the sim’s memory. If there is no (physical) memory left, this will mean that the sim might require virtual (disk-based) memory instead, and, of course, this is about 100-1000 times slower. So obviously 2 million active scripts (or even ‘only’ 5000) are far worse than just a handful of scripts — even if they’re doing ‘nothing’. (Note: LL is addressing the issue of ‘memory abuse’ on a future server version; it’s being actively implemented as I write this.)

However, the biggest burden placed on the physical engine, for most of the regions in SL, is not scripts updating objects — it’s avatars. Avatars are unavoidable lag bombs since they all require interaction with the physical engine to track their constant movement around a sim

So, to recap — scripts don’t directly affect time dilation unless they are manipulating objects (or avatars). Thousands or tens of thousands of running scripts will affect a sim because all that memory has to come from somewhere — but that’s not related to time dilation itself, just the way any computer works with a finite amount of memory

The problem here is that the usage of the word “lag” is too widespread, when actually it should really just be used for network delays (not covered in my article at all — deliberately so). We tend to employ the word “lag” to say “it’s slow”. Linden Lab prefers to call server-side lag “time dilation”, which is measurable and more accurate. Client-side lag is by far more common than server-side lag, but there are good ways to deal with it, by using clever building techniques.

And you’re right, I do live in bliss, but that’s because I don’t get upset with anyone, even if they insult me in public