Anyone who’s spent even a little time managing a Second Life® sim knows that the more scripts you have running, the more the server must work to provide each script a slice of time to "do it’s thing".
Most also know that the scripts most commonly attributed as being "laggy" are those which listen to chat commands, and among those the ones that listen on channel 0 (or basically all general chat) are the worst.
This is why I couldn’t help but chuckle last night when an administrator for a popular C:SI combat sim asked me to turn off my combat announcements while I was watching her and a friend duel, stating "we try to keep unnecessary scripts to a minimum here". It’s a sound policy, and one that I endorse wholeheartedly.
The humorous part came when, not 10 seconds after I turned off my combat announcements – which is filtered to listen on a secret channel which is devoid of "chat traffic" by anything except the C:SI swords, and spends 99.99% of it’s time idle – both she and her combat partner gave "/hug [otherperson]" commands on general chat. Apparently hug scripts that listen on general chat channels are not part of the "unnecessary scripts" to which she was referring 
In all seriousness, the very worst thing for script "lag" in a combat sim is the fact that nearly every person present is wearing a poorly scripted animation override (AO) that listens on 5 channels (including channel 0) for commands, often include multiple scripts, is inefficient, and is rarely idle. Add to that the large numbers of people with hug scripts (or similar) which listen on channel 0, and you’ve already got at least the same number of active scripts as those used by active combatants at any given time.
2 Comments
That’s a good point. I just now edited the scripts in my multitool so that it doesn’t listen on channel 0, only on channel 1. I will give out the modded multitool to anyone who IMs me (see my website link if you don’t know my in-world name) in the pursuit of a less laggy grid. Later I might try to combine the 15 or so scripts that the multitool uses into one.
Yeah, there’s another one that adds to the script count; so many people have some variation or another of a multitool, whether it be MystiTool or MultiGadget or another. At least most of those make more of an effort to be script-efficient, though, depending on who made them.
And unlike my combat announcer script, the majority of scripts people have running in attachments and the like will not announce themselves. I can’t count the number of people I’ve seen in C:SI sims with EoH or PsiTec or other ‘weapon’ attachments, even though their use is generally forbidden they are quit common.
This just proves how difficult it is for sim admins to keep script counts as low as they reasonably can, and why they should care.