Care & Feeding of your Opensim Grid

[Hottie Something]

A Guide to building and managing your Opensim Grid - Brought to you by Segarra Private Grid!

Well I keep saying this over and over again whenever I rent a grid to someone or let a builder have a chunk of our demo grid for free, so I thought it was about time I put it together in a forum post for everyone to have access to. These instructions apply to Segarra Grids so I am not sure how much they will apply to other Grids.

Get a little help from the Phantom!
If you are having problems with collisions building up and causing lag, though with our new Ninja Physics this is a lot less of a problem, then try making as many objects as possible Phantom. Obviously things like buildings and floors can't be phantom but there are a lot of objects, trees & vegetation for example, which are good candidates for being made phantom. Doing so will help improve sim performance.

MegaPrims are now totally do-able
In the past, in other Grids which shall remain anonymous, we have relied on MegaPrim "packs" which contain various premade MegaPrims for the various needs of builders. In those Grids the MegaPrims were notorious for causing lag because in essence they were a hack. In Opensim you can create a MegaPrim naturally without any hacking and thus there is none of the previously associated lag. In fact, this helps sim performance because it means less prims! So, if you are going to use MegaPrims in your Opensim Grid, creating them from scratch is best for your sim performance. This means if you are importing builds into your Opensim Grid from a Grid where MegaPrims are a hack then keep in mind any portion of your build that is a MegaPrim may need replacing to help your sim performance.

Specific Prim Limits of Segarra Grids
Segarra Grids in general come in two types: heavy use and light use. We don't actually limit your prims. You can use as many as you like really. We do make certain recommendations for prim counts which we have found to fit well with the type of Grid you are renting. For the Light Use Grid we recommend no more than 24000 prims Grid wide--for a standard 4 sim layout this means 6000 prims per sim. For the Heavy Use Grid we recommend no more than 48000 prims Grid wide--for the standard 4 sim layout this means 12000 prims per sim. Like I said these are recommended estimates, and conservative estimates at that, so you can feel free to test your limitations as much as you like. When you start to notice a decline in performance, then you know its time to cut back on prims a bit!

Odds and Sods you need to know about your Regions Tools & more
Some of these you will have to discover on your own but at least I can give you fair warning about some of the ones I remember off the top of my head. First don't try to restart a region with in-world tools! My only experiences with this has been a total crash of all regions requiring a restart at the server level. I hear from others that it's a hit and miss, dicey sort of thing. I would just avoid it for now. Next don't turn off public access. This hasn't done anything majorly bad but the last time one of our customers tried it the estate/land owner himself was sometimes blocked access to his own region even though he was on the list of allowed avatars. Avoid making objects physical. I have seen bad results but I hear from some that making an object physical causes the sim performance to decline. Also if you can encourage people to only use proper versions of viewers. I saw the effect of a person using their hacked version of the Emerald viewer on the region console of my server. It was not pretty! Just about every action she did in the Grid caused reels of error messages and by the time I convinced her to please log on with the Hippo viewer like everyone else I needed to restart the Grid. This was a viewer which she uses everyday on SL by the way for any who might be thinking that hacked viewers are a risk only limited to Opensim.

Life is Easier with MegeRegions! Or is it?
MegaRegions are kind of fun and have many benefits but right now there are a few hiccups that you will have to put up with if you want them. MegaRegions are very new and hence will take time to become more mainstream and have most of the kinks out. We have combined a set of four sims so far, but it can be done with any number of regions. When 4 sims are combined, instead of looking and acting like 4 sims, they look like 4 parcels. Life is easier in many ways with a MegaRegion--sim border crossings are non-existent so no more lost hair or glitching scripts (at least from border crossings!). The trouble begins when you try to use region tools. Even though the sims have been patched together into one, the region tools have not been altered to accommodate this--and this begins to make life with MegaRegions a little tougher. Some stumbling blocks you will find with MegaRegions are RAWs and terrain textures. Right now the RAWs have to be uploaded at the server level and cannot be done in world even though that tool still looks available. Terrain textures are also a pain. Right now you may change the textures of the root "region" (the region that isn't really a region anymore but more like a parcel) but not the other 3 "regions." For Segarra Grid customers all you have to do is let us know and we will go in and update it so that the terrain textures of the root spread across the entire MegaRegion. Those who don't have a service such as Segarra Grid will have to hack into your database which is not really recommended for the inexperienced. Hopefully some of these limitations start to be remedied before we have a chance to add to the list of what you can't do with MEgaRegions.

The Metaverse is Everchanging
Time stands still for no avatar! Well technically avatars don't age...but what I mean to say is that Opensim is everchanging. I could say something can or can't be done today and tomorrow my statements could be totally obsolete. Also I never claim to be anything more than a demi-geek. As much as I like to pretend--I don't know everything. Much of my information I get second hand from others. I could be wrong or out of date or any number of things. So I encourage anyone reading this post to reply with corrections or additional information they feel necessary. I love to be educated!

Amanda Hagarty aka Hottie Something
Segarra Grid