it was a dark and stormy night. lightning was ripping the heavens apart, thunder was rolling through the valley. no living soul dared venture outside…1
…and i wasn’t. i sat in front of my screen, mesmerized by the numbers coming up: 20…27…34…38…40…43…48…52… eventually peaking at 81! we were stress testing our opensim server and our in-world build. the numbers represented rather brutal bots, that, as soon as they were in-world started running around, chatting with one another and grabbing all the textures they could find — we’d lovingly nicknamed them “hooligan bots” as they’d successfully managed to demolish a number of our opensim test instances and reduced them to nothing more than a pile of broken bits and bytes.
after fixing another memory gobbling piece of code and some tetchy ODE physics engine part, we’d gone past the 20 mark that had meant the end of our opensim instance in the past couple of trials and the numbers kept on climbing. during the test we had to create more and more test accounts to be able to keep sending in the bots. the system behaved extraordinarily stable: not only were we able to keep moving around and not only did opensim keep chugging along but also our scripts (themselves not exactly shy when it comes to CPU cycles and memory) did!
our test system, a 4 core intel system, running in 32-bit PAE mode with about 8GB of memory, coped rather well on the memory front: with about 5 regions (script heavy) we clocked at about 1.3 — 1.5 GB memory usage — CPU load, however, was a different story: that went up like crazy: up to 390% CPU utilization, load level of about 9–10. still, the only effect was that things became a bit sluggish.2
note, this was a one off! a pleasant and encouraging one off but nevertheless so far just a one off. we need to carry out further testing to corroborate this.
still, 81 avatars in one region!
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always wanted to start a blog like that. and there was a severe thunderstorm going on in our valley while we were doing the test
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to be honest, at one point during the test, the lights did dim quite a bit in my office…but with the test server being located in chicago and my home office being in switzerland, i don’t think it was due to our opensim server but rather due the thunderstorm that was raging outside. ↩
Wow, this is great news! which svn version were you using at this time?
Best, Dirk
comment by Dirk Krause — June 10, 2009 @ 11:30
for the upcoming Sametime 3D release we are based on 9547 with various patches applied. will trunk the physics patch later today.
comment by DrScofield — June 10, 2009 @ 11:35
Where did you get the bot code for chatting and walking around the sim?
comment by jhurliman — June 10, 2009 @ 20:40
Excellent stuff Dr S, pushing the boundaries of the possible once again
comment by Justin Clark-Casey — June 10, 2009 @ 23:09
arthur wrote it using the excellent libomv — and there lies the rub: libomv based bots are much more forgiving than “normal” SL clients with regards to packet latency, for example (as sean pointed out to me yesterday).
comment by DrScofield — June 11, 2009 @ 07:43