I was starting to perform some tests on the beta grid with Mono. My current interests are with encryption. Encryption can slow down the execution speed of a script if it is very strong. I am considering using the XTEA encryption algorithm for my current development efforts. It starts running into degredation problems depending on the stregnth of encryption, or the amount of data being encrypted.

I ran over to the beta grid to run some tests against my implementation. Through regular LSL script execution, I was seeing it take roughly 48 seconds to execute. I compiled the script for Mono and saw immediate results running at 2.5 seconds. That's around 20 times the speed of old- school LSL!

Inflated Results

But wait - something was odd. Over on the main grid, it took 21 seconds to execute LSL. This really has me scratching my head. Has their been a slow- down of LSL on the preview grid to inflate the performance increase that Mono offers? I notice that the mono information keeps referring to LSL2. Perhaps LSL is running slower on the beta grids because they are running 2 virtual machines (Mono and LSL). I ran to another sim and found that the LSL script ran in 57 seconds (even slower!).

Script Latency

Another possability could be that there is a lot of script latency. Not quite! On the main grid in Woodbridge, I had 3378 active scripts running with about 36,000 IPS. A regular sim on the preview had only 1 acitive script (mine) and about 7,000 IPS. A mono sim had 371 active scripts and 0 ips. Well, I suppose ips only counts for LSL scripts. Perhaps this "LSL2" virtual machine doesn't broadcast itterations to the region. Perhaps mono can not even record IPS.

I suppose the next question is, when will Mono make it to the main grid? According to the Mono page on the Second Life Wiki, we shoudl see Mono deployed ... yesterday!