Eye On The Blog: Updating Script Performance

 
On the official blog yesterday, Linden Lab announced they had "released a change this week" with the aim of improving script performance in the Grid: Uplift.

Uplift has been an ongoing adventure for a number of engineering teams, but the goal of improving the SL experience for all residents has not changed.

Uplift brought in new hardware and the ability to reconfigure it quickly to react to changing circumstances. A few months ago, we quietly changed hardware configurations to provide better performance for the simulators, but our job was not done there.

After this upgrade our engineering teams dug deep into the simulator to modernize it and take better advantage of AWS capabilities. We referred to this as our “Tooling Update,”  which allows LSL scripts to run more efficiently. Regions with heavy script usage will likely see more scripts run and even some spare time returning to the simulator.  The release also includes a modernization of our compiler and supporting runtime.  Newer tools allows for better code generation and awareness of modern CPU designs.

But the Lab admits there have been unforseen problems that residents may experience.They stated, "with more scripts running, other areas of the simulation environment may be driven harder.  Scripts that were already approaching throttles or other limits may find a throttle engaged .... We do see the possibility of revisiting these throttling limits as a result of these improvements. They could see higher request rates as scripts perform more work."

For the blog post in full, Click Here.