Recently, we have been tweaking and experimenting with the maximum number of users in a single region.
You may have noticed our “Avatars Online” count has seemed quite high lately.

By default, Opensim regions are limited to only 40 avatars in a region. This figure can be increased in the config files for the region and/or from the console.
Most viewers have the limit set to only 100.
This can be somewhat confusing as if the grid is still set to the default of only 40 avies in a region, and you use the estate tools in the viewer to try to change this, you can set the value in the viewer to any number you like, but the maximum number of avies in a region will be overridden by the opensim config values.

After some careful tweaking, and some experimenting, we have been able to get 325 “Real” avies in a region. These were not NPC’s.
Making matters worse, the region was a large var (10×10).
These avatars were in a “Ruthed” default state so they did not have mesh clothing, attachments, etc., but the fact we were able to get this many avatars in a region without it crashing is a very cool thing.

Granted, at 325 avatars we experienced some lag, lots of lag, but we were pleased the region did not crash, even after we dropped thousands of physical balls in the region.
The region became usable after we cut the number of avatars down to 175 and cut down on the number of physical balls in the region.

We are using the pcampbot utility and logging in batches of 25 avatars from several different machines.
These avatars are randomly jumping, walking, flying, running, chatting, etc… it is quite busy as you can imagine.

As a test, On the evening of 5/12/2016 we logged in 175 of these bots in a normal sized region and left it run.. so far it has been running for about 19 hours straight with no crashes, negligible chat lag, and other avatars are able to walk, build, fly, etc. with minimal lag.

If you want to see for yourself, visit login.digiworldz.com:8002:rnd1
Be warned, these bots are quite rude!

This test will end later this evening, but we’ll keep testing off and on over the coming weeks as we want to find a combination which will allow a region to have 200-250 avatars on a single region and the region still be usable. That’s our goal, as while having that many avatars in a region is cool, it’s useless unless you can still do things normally there.

Stay tuned!