I’d never heard of ARC Nazis before. I guess I’m not fashionable enough. Don’t hang around at shopping malls or wherever these lag-spotters hang out. It’s not to say I don’t fondly remember the times going to an event or club or wherever and being told to turn my AO off to help reduce lag. It’s just not so much part of my daily SL life I guess.

But turning your AO off doesn’t work anymore, at least not according to an incredible post by Gwyneth Llewelyn over on .Ana Lutetia where she explains how lag works (or doesn’t), how to build a store to reduce it, and what common myths are, well, not kosher.

According to Gwyn:

“This is a typical pastime of the Lag & ARC Nazis. When things start to fail, specially in very popular events or highly-crowded areas, it’s far better than to blame everybody else than to deal patiently with the issue. However, you can have fun blaming everybody else, but that won’t fix the problems. Really. Let Linden Lab do their work. Eventually things will get back to normal. Blaming everybody around you for either a super-crowded event or a failing grid will not make it happen faster. You will just get angry and get other people angry. And when we all are furious with each other, we react irrationally, and lose all the fun we have with Second Life® — trust me, that’s the last thing you wish to happen.”

I mean, seriously - I must be missing all the fun. We get laggy at Metanomics, especially when everyone arrives at once, but we don’t seem to have any screaming divas telling people to detach their hair.

And as far as being kosher, Gwyn has a little aside about “silly superstitions”, which is to say that AOs as the cause of lag are the new pork. Or something like that.

But what I love about Gwyn’s post is that it actually explains how this stuff works under the hood, a place I don’t look too often for fear of being swallowed up in code. Go have a read, it’s a stunning post, with great tips for builders.