after our intoxicating stress test ten days ago we repeated the stress test today with a group of volunteers — thus, real SL clients instead of bots.

the result: 21. :-(

somewhere around the 21 avatar mark we are got stuck and the (single) region standalone system started becoming very laggy: avatars could not move anymore (or erratically at best), chat got relayed occasionally. interestingly enough we still saw new users logging in. looking at OpenSim’s log we saw that OpenSim was busy processing new user requests — a lot of new user requests.

so, the current hypothesis is that new users clog the out-pipe with large amount of texture requests, causing the existing users to starve and the system becoming unresponsive.