Prim Limits

Renting land in Second Life is great. It also has limitations since too many objects will clutter up any space and make the lag unbearable, especially since so many people think that adding in objects with textures at 2560X1600 isn't going to adversely affect performance. That's why lots have prim limits, meaning that once you own a home, you can't junk it up with your collection of anything and everything since you'll just make the sim crash.

When you have a lot, it's your choice between whether you want to have a house with less privacy but more space or a skybox with less space but nobody will bother you. To be fair, people will sometimes try to be voyeurs if they hear music playing on an empty lot and will fly up to see your skybox. That's why tinted windows and the ability to contact your landlord happen to be important.

Regardless, there are ways to save on prims. For one thing, always check to lower the complexity of your prims and meshes. Lower prim counts and less complex meshes will always be a good idea even if it means less detail. This is especially important if physics are added and doubly so if they're clothing items or attachments that use avatar physics.

Also keep in mind that lots are often small and less is sometimes more, particularly if you're trying to invite multiple people over. Furnish your home with only a small handful of objects. While I'm sadly a sucker for bars, stick to the basics and only put in one or two luxury items. Also, don’t be afraid to swap things out. If you want to rearrange things, feel free to do so.

Even if you can pay more money to overload your lot with prims, it's not a good idea since it's not only expensive, but you're paying to cause lag. Especially if you're using large textures, cramped spaces with prims and textures everywhere is both a system hog and really works to ruin your bandwidth. When searching on the marketplace, look at an object's prim count and then compare it to your land's limit. That really expensive $10,000 Linden bed might sound great but it you have to lose most of your posters, it'll just give your home that much less character.

Now when building your own furniture and meshes, keep them as low poly objects with simple textures. Not everything needs to look like something out of Crysis. Usually if people can tell what something is, they'll use it.

Now when it comes to land that has a very high prim limit because the builders had this great vision for how their sim could turn out, they more often than not find that people with weaker computers can't use their sim without crashing. Even now with an Intel Core i7 and an NVIDIA GTX 560 ti, I still have trouble maintaining a good frame rate when maxing out the added effects on third party viewers. User created content is great, just be sure that others are able to use what you make if you choose to sell objects.