Darien Caldwell

I was talking to someone very active in the JIRA, and they alerted me to something LL rolled out on the 'down low' which scripters should be aware of.

Apparently in response to various people trying to lag and crash people by using various scripted and malicious client means, LL has enabled 'spam limits' on the server side. These limits affect scripted attachments, and scripted items in-world.

So why should you care? Because if you unknowingly hit one of these limits, your items and your customers can be affected. When the threshold is hit, the items and their owner, are muted for a time, meaning any communication your trying to do will fail (and any communication the owner is trying to do will fail)

The JIRA that initiated this and has details is here:

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-7504

LL won't admit it exists, but you can readily try it yourself. It's grid wide now. Likely most items would never hit the limit in normal use, but considering it's cumulative, it's possible your item could behave strangely if combined with someone else's, should it get near the limit. It's something to be aware of.

I actually came across this the other day and didn't know it. An acquaintance couldn't chat in their sim but could chat fine everywhere else. Turned out they had a script spamming their debug channel with data while doing some debugging. At the time I thought it odd this would affect their chat, but now I see why...

Also similar limits have been put on dialogs, if you have quickly clicked any dialog driven items in sequence recently you've probably seen this.

FYI

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Kira Zobel

Oh so that's what you were doing.
This is good to know, thank you for sharing this.

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Void

this has actually been in place for quite a while on public debug channels... have they extended it to off channels as well?

TBH if they have, they should be shouting it from the rooftops because it's part of a major exploit.

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Jopsy Pendragon

Sounds quite reasonable to me. 200 messages in under 2 seconds? Frankly sending messages that quickly is likely to over-flow the max-64-queued-messages limit anyway, resulting in dropped messages. Anyone doing something LEGIT that's pumping out data at that speed, could probably be doing it more elegantly in some different fashion.

miranda

No it doesn t overflow the max-64-queued-messages anyway ;
in fact the limit is by owner for all his items .
If i have 3 items speaking in any channel , not only 0; let s guess my items push 45 messages by secondes , and my receivers scripts pop 45 messages per second .So in the stack of messages i have nearly nothing , two at the max .

Neverthelss with 3 items pushing 45 messages per secondes , i am over the 200 messages per 2 seconds .. (3*45*2=270)

Try to imagine when you have 100 prims communicating between themseves regulary .. only 1 message or 2 per second is enough to break scripts .

I hope it impacts only when a prim chat to an avatar , and not a prim to a prim .
If not, it s a disaster

Adeon Writer

This limit is legit.. Anyone who manages to hit this limit is spamming or has script so bad they deserve to be muted.

Adeon Writer

Prim communications wouldn't be using channel 0.

Lance Corrimal

fixed your typo


never discount the possibility of someone being really stupid.

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Evil String

and now I wonder if the voices in my head are using channel 0

Darien Caldwell

Agreed it shouldn't be a problem for most people. But it is cumulative, and although the JIRA says only on chat 0, the debug message incident makes me wonder if it's on other channels. I'll have to do some more testing.

miranda

Even when these scripts are your own scripts ?
I don t think so ..
How to debug , now ?
We have no debbugger , and we can t anymore put some log traces ...

Darien Caldwell

This was my initial concern too. But I just did some more testing this morning, The throttling is only on channel 0 and on the Debug Channel.

So if you use llOwnerSay(), no limits. You can still use the debug window as long as you keep it under the limit.

It's also important to note, the string length isn't factor, just the number of messages per second. So maybe, multiple data on one line, instead of one data on many lines.

Adeon Writer

Debug with llOwnerSay which is unthrottled, no need to spam the public channel.

ERA:
For spam reasons, DEBUG_CHANNEL is often also considered public - anyone who has script errors enabled will see them in chat in red. For this reason, other things like llRegionSay also ban it just like channel 0.

Use llOwnerSay for debugging.

miranda

But llregionsayto( llgetowner(),0 ) shouldn t be capped neither

Adeon Writer

It's not capped, it's banned.

If you need to send yourself a message, that's llOwnerSay. If you need to send all your attachments a message, That's llRegionSayTo(llGetOwner() on anything but channel 0. Channel 0 is for public chat only.

Jopsy Pendragon

I can see this probably further breaking my copy of XyObject (it's already failing anyway). Not that it was useful for anything other than blowing minds from time to time. I suppose holo-deck and auto-building meta-scripts will likely have to be throttled.

Other than those... what reasonable uses require >200 messages every 2 seconds? I can't help but think any region subjected to that is not going to be fun to be in, what with the lag.

ETA: presuming, of course, this capping occurs on anything other than channel 0, which I rather doubt.

Adeon Writer

I'm not familiar with XyObject; what is it and why does it need so many channel 0 messages?

Jopsy Pendragon

Doesn't. (sorry, added an ETA above).

Xylor Basclef (sp?) author of XyText (a notecard to prim-display gadget of some infamy) also created but I don't think ever finished XyObject, which allowed you to create a regular prim (predates ring/tube prims), cut/sheer/twist it to your heart's content... and then scale it up to *massive* size. It would create a prim for each 'face' of the mega-object, often using thousands of prims.... they would fly into position, fit and rotate themselves into place.

Quite impressive to watch in action in an idle region.

miranda

Which importance it s public chat or no ?
I don t spam anybody else because the message is directed to myself and only me can listen my object
i see that llownerSay 10 X slower than llregionsayto ..

Adeon Writer

I'm not sure what you're trying to say.

Channel 0 is the public chat channel. It is meant for avatar chat and objects talking to avatars publicly. Anything else doesn't belong there and you'd be hogging up a channel you weren't meant to use.

Imnotgoing Sideways

I appreciate this product and/or service. (^_^)

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miranda

There are some scripts too who did many lines in output to create a string in binary escaped chars useful to create a sculptie from some prims, or to create a picture to display later in a browser and to save
some other scripts who compute the interpolated positions/rotations in a curve path to record and to save in a notecard to replay
or some other scripts object-to-data who display all the parameters of llgetLinkPrimitiveparams of the object in the goal to be able to recreate this object dynamically later . If you don t have a TPV to export your sim to opensim , it s the only way ...

And more genarally all the scripts who can t save their output in a notecard beacuse the the function savetonotecard doesn t exist and won t never exist. Don t dream about it

You may add the browers text, the scripts who don t wan t to give a whole notecard but a great number of lines from them etc ..

NeoBokrug Elytis

The user should at least be sent a message when they hit the throttle. I feel bad for the pet people who have 128,764 pets in a region -- that is if it's also for non-0 channels

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Adeon Writer

0 and DEBUG_CHANNEL only.

Imnotgoing Sideways

I'd feel bad for those people, chat limits or not. (O.o)