A thought or two on that. When LL first introduced "avatar complexity" as a concept, for some reason there were those of us who didn't trust that figure and wondered if this was just another stunt by the company to blame lag on users instead of where it rightly belonged: badly-written bottleneck code and over-stacking servers. [/quote]
Yes, and it works differently in OS and with more recent viewers. My tests show that unnecessarily dense topology is a bad idea, also improperly set LOD, too many textures - total pixels, too many alpha textures, too many flexies. Off the shelf and freebie wigs are the worst offenders. I keep my graphics set low to gauge viewer load on stuff I make.
Consequences for bad stuff are that the wearer will appear as a jelly for some people. We know from doing theatrical events that we had to make low-poly, low texture avatars for the actors so we could get audience, who come to be seen as well as to see, into the sim, along with a good house manager to deal with the most egregious. In Kitely we have nifty brower based tools to keep track of sim performance, and ya, avatars, avatars and wait for it, avatars are hard on servers as well as viewers.
No perfect tests or solutions. BUT we ain't gonna want to see high avatar complexity numbers on the freebie avatars.